Rational emotive behavior therapy
Section:
PRACTICE AND APPLICATION
Rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) is one of the main humanistic psychotherapies. It shows how people, in an all-too-human manner, create a large part of their emotional disturbances and also have the ability to uncreate them. It is a theory of personality and of therapy that emphasizes emotional health and self-actualization for individuals and for the social group in which they choose to live. It avoids devotion to any kind of magic and supernaturalism. It especially emphasizes unconditional selfacceptance (USA), antiabsolutism, uncertainty, and human fallibility, and tries to combine scientific flexibility and rigor with an existentialist-humanist approach. This article is adapted from Ellis (1994b), and Ellis (1972a).
In his article “Humanistic Psychology,” in Raymond Corsini’s Encyclopedia of Psychology, M. Brewster Smith (1994) pointed ‘out that secular humanism is “a neglected version of humanistic psychology,” and showed that where Pascal and Kierkegaard defined the religious version of existentialism, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Sartre, and other thinkers “proposed a mundane, Godless humanism, also existentialist in its concern with the responsibility entitled by human selfconsciousness” (p. 158). Smith also contrasted the somewhat irreconcilable perspective of causal and interpretive understanding in psychological science and argued that “for the distinctly human world, interpretation and causal explanation must somehow be joined… Indeed, the only satisfactory science of human experience and action must be one on which the hermeneutic interpretation plays a central part conjoined with causal explanation” (p. 158).
Quite a problem! Secular humanism, which is in many ways opposite to the religious, mystical, and spiritual humanism that seems to have largely prevailed during the last decade in the Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP), as well as in the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association, and, to a certain extent in the Association of Humanistic Education and Development (AHEAD), tries to be quite existential, social, phenomenological, and even postmodernistic. But it also does its best to be rigorously (not rigidly) empirical, naturalistic, relativistic, and scientific (Clark, 1992; Kurtz, 1973, 1985; Stein, 1985). On the other hand, transpersonal psychology, the dominant theme in recent AHP publications, often claims to be scientific because it uses some of the methods of science, but actually is often dogmatic and absolutist (Ellis, 1972b, 1985; Ellis & Yeager, 1989; Kurtz, 1986). I could go on at great length showing what I think are the evils of transpersonal and mystical humanism–including that they are actually antihumanistic. But I have already done this elsewhere (Ellis & Schoenfeld, 1990; Ellis & Yeager, 1989), so let me focus on what secular humanism is and how it specifically applies to rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT).
Secular humanists see men and women as unique individuals who almost always choose to live in a social group. They are individuals in their own personal right but also are–and had better be–social creatures who try to live together peacefully, fairly, and democratically. Even their discrete “personality,” as Sampson (1989) noted, is also a social product. Secular humanists fully acknowledge people to be human–that is, very limited and fallible–and in no way are they either superhuman (more than human) or subhuman (less than human). They all seem to have good and bad behaviors and traits; but, as Korzybski (1933) pointed out, they are not what they do.
The personalities of men and women are an ongoing, ever-changing, constructing and reconstructing process. Once they set up goals and purposes, which as humans they invariably seem to do, their acts and deeds are measurable or ratable but they, themselves, their essence, their being are too complex and changeable to be given any global rating or report card. We consequently have no accurate or meaningful way of deifying or damning them. They are not good or bad, they merely exist. If they choose to continue to exist and to enjoy their existence, then again some of their acts are good because they aid their goals and some of their behaviors are bad because they sabotage these goals. People’s goals and purposes cannot be assessed scientifically or objectively because, as individuals, they can choose from a wide variety of goals, none of which (except by arbitrary definition) can be assessed as unconditionally good or bad. But once they pick a certain goal (e.g., succeeding at work, love, or psychotherapy) it can often be scientifically or empirically determined whether (a) they actually achieve it, and (b) they achieve the results they wanted by achieving it.
Secular humanists, in other words, favor certain values such as human life and well-being, but do not claim that these values are absolutely good or bad. If their goals are viewed as good, it can be scientifically shown that they can or cannot be achieved and whether their achievement actually brings about the results the valuers desired. The meanings or purposes people subscribe to are largely chosen (or adopted from others). But whether their actions to reach these goals (which are largely chosen) will actually lead to their achievement can be scientifically determined by looking for a cause-effect relationship.
Secular humanists acknowledge that humans have the human ability to imagine, fantasize, and strongly believe in all kinds of superhuman entities and powers such as gods, angels, spirits, and fairies, and that, in fact, they often create meaning and explanations for anything they do not fully understand. Therefore, they impatiently and cavalierly invent such supernatural entities and forces. But, along with Popper (1985), humanists contend that unless these spirits and forces are in some way empirically falsifiable, any imaginative person can invent an infinite number of them. Moreover, many of these fantasized creations are contradictory to other supernatural fantasies. The existence of any and all of them is never impossible but is highly improbable. Belief in such spirits may of course help some people to overcome some of their emotional problems (such as anxiety) or behavioral problems (such as addiction to alcohol). But devout belief in improbable gods and spirits often creates its own difficulties, such as dependency, dogma, bigotry, pollyannaism, and wars with nonbelievers.
Secular humanists are, almost by definition, relativists, skeptics, and nondogmatists (Clark, 1992). Though many of them, such as Ayer (1936), used to be logical positivists, they now mostly realize that logical positivism in some respects is itself not falsifiable, so they have revised it (Bartley, 1984; Popper, 1985). Although they do not tend to be radical or devout deconstructionists, they do tend to favor the more moderate kind of postmodernism espoused by Levin (1991). As Levin noted, this kind of postmodernism has given up modemism’s near-sacred “assumptions about certainty in knowledge, faith in absolute systems, totalities and unities.” And, he stated, “postmodernism recognizes ambiguities, indeterminacies, undertones and overtones, complexities, uncertainties, tensions, interactions, exchanges, equivocations” (pp. 251-252). This kind of thinking is favored by today’s secular humanism.
What is called “humanistic psychotherapy” and counseling tends to consist of (a) existential encounters between therapists and their clients (Frankl, 1959; May, 1969; Rogers, 1961; Yalom, 1990), (b) experiential and body-oriented exercises (Perls, 1969), and (c) transpersonal therapy (Grof, 1984; Tart, 1975; Walsh & Vaughan, 1980). The first two of these methods have often proven useful and even the third one has shown, at times, that it helps some people, though I still think that on the whole it does more harm than good (Ellis, 1994a, 1996; Ellis & Abrams, 1994; Ellis & Yeager, 1989).
The one form of therapy that has been most neglected by many humanist therapists is cognitive-behavioral therapy, perhaps because its main proponents have largely been secular humanists. Thus, Alfred Adler (1926, 1927) was a pioneering cognitive therapist as was George Kelly (1955), both of whom were secular humanists. I started to do rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT), the first of the popular cognitive-behavior therapies, in 1955 (when I had read Adler but not Kelly) and I followed a secular humanist model, which I largely derived from several philosophers, including Epictetus, Epicurus, John Dewey, George Santayana, Bertrand Russell, and Alfred Korzybski (Ellis, 1957, 1962, 1985, 1988; Yankura & Dryden, 1994).
Today’s cognitive-behavior therapy was originally derived from REBT but also went its own way and followed, to some extent, the computer-oriented aspects of the cognitive revolution in psychology. Consequently, it sometimes became sensationalist, mechanistic, and rationalist, instead of, as REBT has always tried to be, existentialist and philosophic. Thus, some of the cognitive-behavioral therapies, such as those of Beck (1976), Maultsby (1984) and Meichenbaum (1977), used empirical disputing of irrational beliefs and added to them positive affirmations, as originally proposed by Coue (1923). But they included little of the philosophical flavor of REBT.
REBT, as noted above, is quite humanistic, but abjures spiritual, religious, and mystical overtones and implications. Its secular humanistic origins lead to some of the following theories and practices.
CONSTRUCTIVlSM
Like Kelly’s theory of personal constructs, and in some ways more so, REBT is highly constructivist. It holds that although humans largely learn their goals, standards, and values from their family and their culture, they construct, yes, create, most of their emotional disturbances. For, unlike rats and guinea pigs, they take their strong desires and preferences, and they raise and propel…
