Good Health And Wellness For Life

Word For Word | Get Over Yourself: Sex, Love and the Scolding Psychotherapist

ALBERT ELLIS, sometimes called the Lenny Bruce of psychotherapy, had a different use for the phallus from Freud’s: action, not analysis. Or, action! he might say, adding his favored punctuation mark and maybe italics, too, lest the emphasis remain undetected. Freud’s methods were simply too glacial for him. Dr. Ellis, who died last week at 93, laid out his prescriptive calls to action in more than 75 books. Mostly the books deal with his pioneering and extremely popular and influential rational emotive behavior therapy, and how it can rid you of your neuroses (stop moping), but among them are a handful of sex manuals. Here’s a sampling from the Ellis oeuvre. MARY JO MURPHY

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From “How to Stubbornly Refuse to Make Yourself Miserable About Anything: Yes, Anything!”:

Not all emotional disturbance stems from arrogant thinking. But most of it does. And when you demand that you must not have failings, you can also demand that you must not be neurotic. ...

Neurosis still comes mainly from you. ... And you can choose to stop your nonsense and to stubbornly refuse to make yourself neurotic about virtually anything. ...

Will insight into your emotional problems help you overcome them? ... Conventional insight will help you very little. For it says that your knowledge of exactly how you got disturbed will make you less neurotic. Drivel! It will often help make you become nuttier!

From “How to Keep People From Pushing Your Buttons”:

The second type of screwball thinking is called absolutist thinking, another 10-dollar term. ... Some of us walk around all day long getting on our own cases: “I’ve got to do this. I’ve got to do that. I should have said this to that person. I need to be more that. I ought to be more organized. I should be more attractive, intelligent, witty, popular and personable. I ought to be more assertive. I need to be less aggressive. I’ve got to speak up more. I really need to keep my mouth shut.” ... Some of us “should on ourselves” all day long!

From “Is Objectivism a Religion?,” in which he takes on Ayn Rand:

Objectivisim ceaselessly talks about the necessity of our accepting the facts of reality — that because A is A and existence exists, we’d better face these facts and live according to empirically observable happenings. In regard to life in general ... and to capitalism in particular, objectivism is just about as unrealistic and antiempirical as it can be. It remains in a world of “rational” fictions and it invents innumerable fantasies about capitalism and refuses to admit its fantasizing.

From “The American Sexual Tragedy”:

The devotee of Rational Emotive [Behavior] Therapy comes to realize that it is not his beloved’s possible rejection of him that is terrible, frightful or ego destroying, but simply his illogical interpretation of that rejection.

Dr. Ellis often introduced personal experiences into his writings, which sometimes ran afoul of American Psychological Association members. From “The Albert Ellis Reader”:

From the age of 16 onward (in 1929), I read many books by Freud and his followers, but I could see that Sigmund was especially obsessed with the sexual “origins” of disturbance, especially with the ubiquitousness of the Oedipus complex. I could also see that he was an overgeneralizer and a dogmatist, and therefore a poor scientist. But psychoanalytic details about sex helped to loosen me up; I came to consider practically all forms of noncoercive sex permissible. In fact, at the age of 15, I had my first and only homosexual episode — with my 13-year-old brother no less!

From “The Art and Science of Love”:

Where one mate has strong prejudices in favor or against certain sex practices, the other partner should try to be unusually understanding and uncritical, even if the practices that are favored or disfavored seem to be outlandish. If the presumably more reasonable mate will at least give the “outlandish” procedures an honest try, he or she may find that they are really not as bad as they seem to be.

Dr. Ellis aimed darts at Freud in much of his work. From “Anger: How to Live With and Without It”:

Changing your life involves your willingness to separate yourself from the childish concept that your parents still can make you act and think today. It also involves your attending to your present and future situations, not to your infantile ones.

From“How to Stubbornly ...”:

Suppose, for example, that your parents insisted that you make a million dollars, else you are a slob. Suppose you have actually made little money and you now “therefore” feel worthless. Your wonderful “insight” about the “origin” of your self-hatred may only push you to loathe your parents. Or to hate yourself more for listening to them!

From “How to Make Yourself Happy and Remarkably Less Disturbable”:

If you are still very upset about being abused as a child, you are now, probably, irrationally thinking, “My early abuse absolutelyshouldnot have occurred!” “Such unfairness is awful and I can’t stand even thinking about it now!” “The people who abused me are completely rotten! I’m going to spend the rest of my life hating them and getting even with them, if it’s the last thing I do!”... These Irrational Beliefs will keep your original upsetness vividly alive — instead of letting it die a natural death, as disturbance gradually does if you don’t dwell on it and reinforce it by continual crooked thinking.