Albert Ellis

Albert Ellis was an American psychologist who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy in 1955, one of the first systematic forms of cognitive-behavioral therapy and a decisive influence on the cognitive turn in mid-twentieth-century psychotherapy. A 1982 professional survey ranked him the second most-influential psychotherapist in history, ahead of Sigmund Freud.

He was born on September 27, 1913, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and raised in the Bronx, the eldest of three children of a frequently absent traveling salesman and a self-absorbed mother. Chronic kidney problems and forced hospital stays in childhood shaped his lifelong interest in coping with adversity. He earned a business degree from City College of New York in 1934 and a PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia in 1947.

After initial training in psychoanalysis he grew skeptical of its efficacy, and in 1955 announced a new approach he initially called Rational Therapy, later renamed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. Its premise — that emotional disturbance arises chiefly from irrational beliefs about events rather than from events themselves — anticipated and shaped Aaron Beck's parallel work on cognitive therapy.

He founded the Institute for Rational Living in 1959 in New York, which became the Albert Ellis Institute. Author or co-author of more than eighty books, including A Guide to Rational Living (1961) and How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything (1988), he continued to lecture and lead his weekly Friday Night Workshops nearly until his death on July 24, 2007, at age 93.

The given name Albert is of Germanic origin, from adal ("noble") and beraht ("bright"), meaning "noble and bright." It is a masculine name, and he bore it.