What was the matter with Albert Ellis?
I kept having this question as I recently read some of his works and his autobiography, All Out, published just after his death at age 93. He was a founder of the CBT movement; he claims priority in fact, having published the basic concepts in the 1940s, a few years before Aaron Beck, who typically gets credit. Beck and Ellis were friendly though and in the 1950s and 1960s as CBT originated and grew, they both were highly active. Ellis called his approach “Rational-Emotive Therapy” and refused to use the phrase CBT or the word “cognitive.” Like Beck and almost all psychiatrists (Beck was a MD) and psychologists (Ellis was a PhD), Ellis was trained in psychoanalysis and initially practiced it. But he quickly felt that it wasn’t effective enough, and he began to challenge his patients’ views directly, with the rational “disputation” as he called it about their negative cognitions. These ideas are well-known now. At the time, they were radical. One feature that is interesting about Ellis is that he directly ascribes his rational approach to philosophy, specifically the Stoic philosophers of ancient Rome, who taught that it was our thoughts about things, and not the things themselves, that affected us for good or ill.
Ellis was a native of New York and lived in Manhattan all his life. He was loud, brash, hyper, and liked to curse. I heard him curse repeatedly in a public lecture; he did that all the time. He cursed with his patients in sessions. People attributed his cursing to being a New Yorker. I have another idea.
He was highly hypersexual. In his autobiography, he gives vignettes of 53 affairs he had with women. He describes having sex with visiting married women on his office couch. He describes having sex with former patients. He had a 30 year long unmarried relationship with someone, who supposedly accepted an open sexual setup, and she left him suddenly; he never understood why but he thought it was good in a way, as all things are in RET, because it freed him up for more simple sexual encounters with others. He was still having sex on his office couch into his late 80s, despite medical problems including need for an ileostomy. He married once at the end of his life, to an employee in her 40s, who was fired by the board of directors of Ellis’ Institute. This led to a huge public conflict where the board forced Ellis to cede control of the institute. His autobiography repeatedly attacks the board on this conflict, without describing the details that aren’t favorable to Ellis, and Ellis directly wishes “death, death, death” on the board president, a former colleague/friend whom Ellis himself had appointed.
Of course by then in his early 90s, Ellis may have had some cognitive decline, even early dementia. But he had something else.
He famously worked 16 hours per day. He was extremely high in energy, walked miles per day, talked rapidly, and was an incredible workaholic. He published over 60 books. He couldn’t maintain concentration for scientific research, however, saying he would leave those details to others. (That’s one reason Beck got more credit; he actually did the research to prove CBT; Ellis didn’t). He was highly obsessed with sex. Not just having sex, but thinking about it and talking about it and writing about it. Ellis was a “sexologist.” He did some research on that topic in the 1950s, around the same time as Masters and Johnson. He was a proponent of sexual freedom in an era of sexual liberation. This was highly convenient for him personally.
Put it all together: very high libido, low need for sleep and high energy, very high goal-directed activities (work in particular), rapid speech, distractibility. And we can add impulsivity, which we might relate to his frequent cursing in public settings and in patient care. These are all manic symptoms.
Now people will say he doesn’t have “bipolar disorder” because he wasn’t always like this. He was always manic. So much the worse for “bipolar disorder” and the DSM system which falsely invented it. Manic-depressive illness, a much broader and more scientifically proven concept, includes mood temperaments, which include people with mania to a mild degree all the time as part of their personality. This is called hyperthymic temperament. Mild mania enhances creativity and resilience. Such persons often are writers and artists and entrepreneurs and leaders of many stripes.
Albert Ellis was manic all the time. He had hyperthymic temperament. It made him highly productive and energetic and creative. It also made him difficult and impulsive personally.
He knew he was driven by something he couldn’t control. He wrote about how all our problems are biologically based, not environmentally as in the Freudian tradition. He told people to stop blaming their parents. And to stop blaming themselves. “We’re born crazy,” he would say, which certainly was true for him. But not crazy solely in a bad way, and that’s another feature he understood, though for the wrong reasons. He knew that his craziness served him well in many ways, which is why the term “crazy”, which implies harm, isn’t the right term. He was hyperthymic, for better and for worse.
