Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis (born September 27, 1913, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; died July 24, 2007, in New York City) was an American clinical psychologist who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), the first of the cognitive-behavioral therapies and a direct ancestor of the broader CBT movement.

He earned his MA and PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia University and trained as a psychoanalyst, but by 1953 had broken with psychoanalysis, finding it slow, passive, and unscientific. In 1955 he began formulating a more active, directive approach, which he first called rational therapy and later renamed to capture its focus on the interplay of thought, emotion, and behavior.

The core of REBT is explicitly traced by Ellis to the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, who held that “people are disturbed not by things, but by the views they take of them.” Ellis formalized this in his ABC model: an Activating event (A) does not directly cause emotional Consequences (C); rather, the Beliefs (B) held about the event do.

Distress, he argued, springs largely from rigid, absolutist “irrational beliefs” — chains of musts, shoulds, and catastrophizing — which can be identified, disputed, and replaced with more flexible rational alternatives.

Often blunt and combative in style, Ellis was a tireless popularizer; Psychology Today once judged that no individual, “not even Freud himself,” had a greater impact on modern psychotherapy.