Albert Ellis

The journey to my current professional position has taken me down many exciting and challenging intellectual pathways. I had always wanted to be a physician but became unusually fascinated by human psychology while still in high school. My first exposure to the field was a summer project at Western Michigan University studying the precepts and experiments of B.F. Skinner—a behaviorist whose philosophy was diametrically opposed to the florid and mysterious inner world conjured up by Jung and Freud.

Then came four years of specialized studies at Yale covering, among other topics, abnormal psychology, physiological psychology, dream research, and orthomolecular psychiatry. I attended numerous national and international conferences, read scholarly articles prolifically, and even conducted research on nutritional treatments for hyperactive children. There were many psychological superstars at the time, brilliant pioneers whose take on human thought and behavior was insightful and dazzling—but one stood out above the rest: Albert Ellis.

Albert Ellis felt, as most psychologists do, that thought influences and shapes behavior. But to Ellis, there were no murky subterranean levels of human consciousness such as those proposed by Sigmund Freud: the ego, the id, and the superego—primitive controlling forces inaccessible to our conscious minds. For Ellis, explanation of our daily actions lays quite close to the surface, making introspection and therefore change much easier. What interested me most about him was the pragmatic approach that he advocated, one that involved isolating philosophical errors, repatterning behavior, and subsequently arriving at a different worldly attitude.

He called the philosophical errors “crooked thinking”, a concept best explained by the master himself in an outburst I witnessed at one of his free-wheeling seminars. The moment an audience member said “I feel sad when…” he rejoindered with “I make myself sad when…” This is quite a distinction: the latter allows for the possibility that we can gently reprogram our thinking patterns in more positive and productive ways.

The current term “personal mythology” owes much to these revolutionary ideas. It defines an individual’s unique system of values, some productive, others counterproductive, and yet others delusional. As a physician I have seen many patients whose health care hangs tenuously in the balance but “don’t need to get a check-up because I feel okay.” The rules they are following are self-made, and their rationalization is always self-validating: this is beautifully rendered in French as honi soit qui mal y pense. The road to ill-health and nutritional self-destruction is often paved with these philosophical errors, and it was Albert Ellis who showed me that “crooked thinking” can have both psychological and physical repercussions.

I add another layer of meaning to his philosophy, namely that how we look (our weight, our bodily physique, our hair, clothing, and skin) and how we behave (our self-confidence and our interpersonal skills) are also amenable to change—not just how we think. External characteristics, rather than merely being superficial window-dressing, can influence our emotions—and therefore we need to affect change in two directions: inside-out and outside-in. This is an expansion of the approach Dr. Ellis mastered, and I am honored to have been profoundly influenced by this unique genius.