A Comparison of REBT with Other Cognitive Behavior Therapies

Abstract

In a paradigm shifting presentation at the American Psychological Association’s conference in Chicago in 1956, Albert Ellis argued for addressing the important role cognition plays in the creation and maintenance of emotional and behavioral disturbance. This presentation then appeared in a 1958 article in the Journal of General Psychology titled “Rational Therapy”. This marked his official departure from psychoanalysis and earned Ellis the distinction of being the field’s first cognitive behavior therapist. His work welded ancient and modern philosophy, especially Stoicism, with clinical strategies and techniques from behavior therapy. Ellis proposed that attitudes, beliefs, and philosophical ideas, what we now commonly refer to as cognitions, were at the core of emotional and behavioral disturbance. Over the next 60 years, Ellis developed, refined, and disseminated the theory and practice of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT: Ellis, 1962, 1994). Subsequent to and independent of Ellis’s work, Aaron T. Beck published “Thinking and Depression” in the Archives of General Psychiatry in 1963. By this time, he also had come to appreciate the important role thinking played in clinical depression. Due to Ellis’s pioneering work and Beck’s subsequent empirical research, it is fair to consider Ellis and Beck the founding fathers of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT).