Customer Reviews

All Out!: An Autobiography

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I first met Albert Ellis in 1986 when I came to see him for personal psychotherapy. At the time I was a Master's level counselor and a practitioner of rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT). My relationship evolved with Ellis through the years. He was my supervisor, then a colleague when we debated in print and at workshops, and I always considered him my friend. Although I moved away from REBT and adopted a solution-focused approach starting in the 1990s after I received by Ph.D., I always had a soft spot for REBT. In fact, I consider myself a recovering REBT therapist because I still have occasional relapses when I sneak in Ellis's techniques. So, I looked forward to reading "All Out," Ellis's long-awaited autobiography.

I strongly recommend "All Out" for experienced REBT therapists, clinicians who are new to the model, and general consumers. Ellis uses his own techniques to shamelessly disclose some of his own immoral behaviors, including teenage frotteurism and fathering three illegitimate children. The book includes many photos from Ellis's life that have never before been published. In addition, readers will gain a unique understanding of the theory and practice of REBT through Ellis's personal narrative.

I must admit that I was surprised to read and learn about some of Ellis's behavior, especially how he fathered three illegitimate children with a married woman while the woman's husband had no clue. I prefer not to explicate the details because they are quite involved and, anyway, I prefer to leave it a mystery for you. After reading the book, I felt more than disappointed in Ellis, who was my first mentor. But I quickly used the REBT on myself to dispute the irrational belief that Ellis should not have done such acts and that he was a bad person for doing them. I also gave up the idea that people, especially people whom I admire and respect, absolutely must live up to my expectations. Too bad! That's not the way the world is. I then felt sorry and disappointed in some of Ellis's behavior, but not him as a total human being. I could almost hear the late, great Albert Ellis say to me, "That's rational!"

I have a habit of giving books away if someone thinks they can benefit by reading them. This is probably what happened to some of my books written by Albert Ellis. Since I am trying to effectively deal with a problem at this time, I thought I would benefit by reading some of his books again. When I started to order some of his books from Amazon, I saw that he wrote an autobiography. I thought it would be an interesting book to read.

I wondered if he practiced Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) himself. In short, did he live a life facilitated by the principles of REBT? After reading this book, I would say he did, albeit imperfectly. Of course, who does anything perfectly at all times? A large part of the book deals with his sex life. To be honest, I found the book a bit long because of the seemingly endless stories about his sex life. Hence, the three star review. In any event, he does analyze them as only a trained psychologist can. He had a high degree of self-awareness, which is not surprising. It is hard to imagine that he left anything out with respect to his sex life. From frotteurism to fathering three children with his ex-wife Karyl, while she was married to a man named Tony, it is all there in highly-analyzed fashion.

The chapter concerning his three "illegitimate" children is an interesting read, simply because he lays it out and then proceeds to analyze his behavior. He asks the tough questions of himself and comes to the conclusion that his low frustration tolerance (LFT) was a significant contributing factor as to why he did what he did. Similarly, he came to the conclusion that he could still practice unconditional self-acceptance (USA).

Another concept in the REBT scheme of things is unconditional other-acceptance (UOA). I often wondered what he thought of Wayne W. Dyer. Dyer's highly successful book, "Your Erroneous Zones", is largely an REBT book. Yet, Dyer only mentions Ellis once in it. I wondered from time to time if Ellis felt resentment toward Dyer. After all, that book launched Dyer on a successful career. Would Ellis resent his success? Would it be enough for Ellis to know that his system was reaching and helping others, even though that system was not properly acknowledged in Dyer's book? Well, I got the answers to those questions. His letter to Dyer, which addresses this failure to credit REBT, is a model in the art of being frank without being hateful. It exhibits UOA.

I was very impressed with how Albert Ellis dealt with all of his physical problems as he grew older. He really was committed to facilitating workshops and group therapy, as well as spreading the Gospel of Saint Albert, as he would say from time to time. His writings in the field of psychotherapy were truly groundbreaking. I have received much help from the insights of REBT and its application in my life. He was truly one of the great psychologists, and one of the great humanists, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. He helped people to think rationally, and thereby have a better quality of life.

REVIEW OF "ALL OUT"! AN AUTO-BIOGRAPHY OF Dr Albert Ellis
WITH DEBBIE JOFFE-ELLIS

BY ROBIN W. THORBURN
[...]





Drs Albert Ellis and Debbie Joffe-Ellis


I have the pleasure of reviewing this 668 page book published by Prometheus Books, New York.
Release date 22nd June 2010.


This informative, revealing, wittily and candidly written memoir (a work in progress for many years, to which he was still adding at the age of 92 whilst contending with a range of significant physical problems) is dedicated to Dr Ellis' wife Debbie who he describes as "The Greatest love of my whole life, my whole life".

Given the Albert Ellis PhD detractors, and there have been many in a career that started in June 1943 and which came to prominence in 1955 with the advent of what is now called Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy, it is relevant to note that this book starts with this emotional statement.

He endured barbed comments from Fritz Perls, originator of Gestalt Therapy saying that REBT was "too rational". In fact the book reveals an emotional intensity unrivalled. In the context of love, sex, lust, philosophy, therapy, inner awareness and relationships it makes "Gone with the Wind" look uneventful!

"I give a unique picture of myself that is more multi-sided than memoirs that mainly stress adventure, business, sex or relationships. Not that I'll omit those things, but rather I'll add to them".

Albert Ellis was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA on September the 27th 1913 and achieved great, great things; a fellow of 12 Divisions of The American Psychological Association, author of 80 books, 800 Academic Papers and creator of REBT (a more philosophical form of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy), one of the most popular psychotherapies in the world. Indeed, the Ellis approach, the original and pioneering cognitive approach, came 10 years before that of Aaron Beck's Cognitive Therapy. Towards the end of the book, letters between Dr Albert Ellis and Dr Aaron "Tim" Beck are published, giving the reader a sense of the closeness between the men and their psychotherapeutic differences.

Dr Ellis shares his insights and probabilistic assumptions about people, himself, his parents, his physical ailments, death, important influences, love for music, composing, and the "Bogus Albert Ellis Institute". From the outset Ellis goes `all out' to unconditionally accept himself with his inherent human fallibility and to unconditionally accept others with theirs.

Ellis intertwines his relationship with his early childhood sweetheart Ruthie, his family constellation, and formative years, cogently assessing and enlightening the reader with passionate in-depth observations, whilst disputing and showing the limitations of Freudian Psychoanalysis and Behaviourism. While interned in hospital at age 6, he set out the format for his much later famous shame attacking exercises, which included a workshop attendee choosing to walk down Madison Avenue with a banana on a red lead!

Ellis discusses his use of prayer and religion and conclusions he came to about his use and practice of them. Low frustration tolerance (LFT) is given special mention throughout, with emphasis that it may be biologically part of the human condition. Ellis shows us how to manage it and work against it, even if some humans may be genetically pre-disposed to anxiety, anger and depression.

Stand aside Freudians and Jungians, Ellis really delves into childhood issues-his own! He shows how these two pioneering psychotherapies downplayed "the importance of cognition and ignored its crucial role in the more dramatic and emotional aspects of therapy". The emotional closeness of the words and the author to the reader make the reader feel that he/she is part of Dr Ellis. Like honey to a bee.

He demonstrates his psychotherapeutic interventions with clients, asking them to de-potentiate another troublesome person's impact on themselves "I say to my clients no matter how old they are: never take screwballs seriously".

Controversy is rich throughout; readers will be most surprised, some quite stunned, to read of certain revelations that Dr Ellis never made public before now. Some readers may find some of the sexologist's revelations hard to bear as he goes into frank details and reasoning, conjoining his therapeutic approaches.

He lays bare his thoughts on his colleagues (that he trained) taking over and banning him from teaching in and involvement in running his Institute, describing them "as pirates taking over a ship". Further incisive comments follow about the people who have wronged him, but in true REBT style, he concludes that their actions are "bad, but not horrible".

His wife Debbie contributes a chapter describing the care her husband received whilst in hospital and his resilience to dealing with adversities, whilst overlooking her own selfless contribution to him. It becomes even clearer than ever before, the true love, admiration and incredible compatibility the two of them shared. "Debbie has had the most profound and positive influence on my life"

Towards the end of the book Debbie describes the last few moments of her husbands life. The words she writes are laced with love, strength and sadness, re-creating the most moving scene imaginable!


Dr Albert Ellis passed away on July the 24th 2007 with an important wish:
"...my wife and partner, Debbie Joffe Ellis and our supporters can preserve the original and modified theory of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, to see that its philosophy is practiced by its teaching professionals and students and that its integrity as a theory is backed by empirically orientated research".

Throughout the book, this pioneering and brave psychotherapist invokes within me laughter, empathy, and intrigue, astonishment, joy and deep sadness but effervescing through and emerging from these powerful emotions is a burning sense of hope and much greater clarity on how to achieve peace with self and others.
Dr Ellis conveys a rich tapestry of therapeutic presentation, then refreshingly crystallizes them with relevant up to date poignancy.



Anyone with an interest in people should read this book; it is passionately written with immense knowledge, therefore making it a potent combination.
I predict it will become one of the best sellers of all time and will end up on the silver screen. In short it is a startling, revealing insight of a man who successfully re-designed psychotherapy in an essentially brilliant, profound and truly effective manner then ultimately achieved recognition from prominent figures and leaders including the Dalai Lama, The Mayor of the City of New York, Presidents Clinton and Bush.

I had the pleasure to meet Albert Ellis in the 80ies when he was still active as a therapist, counselor and lecturer in New York at his Manhattan office. Numerous visits to his office gave me great insight into my own psychological hangups (and how to overcome them) as well as great inspiration to live life to the fullest, with great humor and and adventurous attitude. Eventually I became a therapist myself and Ellis was one of my mentors.

Ellis describes his incredible life in great detail, does not spare us funny and sexually explicit details.
In all a great inspiring book from someone who did indeed live life to the fullest at a time when this was a lot more difficult than today.
You will laugh a lot and cry a lot when you read this book.
Wonderful reading!

I trained extensively with Dr. Ellis in the 1980s, back when his approach was called Rational-Emotive Therapy. I took several workshops with him in Chicago and New York, and I received an advanced certificate in RET. Later I began to move away from RET to a more integrated approach and I lost touch with the people I knew at the Institute, but Ellis' ideas still remained an important component of the work I did. I was saddened and outraged a few years ago to read of the conflict he was having with the Board of Directors at the Institute, and I was subsequently saddened at his death. So it was with considerable interest that I learned that a posthumous autobiography was available, and I ordered and read it with great anticipation. Having said this, I am sorry to say that the book is something of a disappointment.

First, the positive. The book is written with remarkable candor, which should not be a surprise to anyone who has ever met Ellis. He holds nothing back when it comes to the intimate details of his life, and we learn a lot about his three wives and many lovers. He evens gives us graphic physical details about sexual acts with his various partners. However, I thought he focused rather bizarrely on many childhood and teenage infatuations in which at least this reader took no interest whatsoever. These could not by any stretch of the imagination be considered love affairs, but infatuations as I said, and I found it amazing that Ellis found it necessary to devote so much space to them after so many decades.

Ellis adopts a strange and ultimately boring format for Part 1 of his book. He divides this part into five chapters, each written in chronological order, the divides each chapter into four parts, A, B, C, and D. Part A of each chapter narrates the principle events of his life during that period. Part B tells us how he coped with his emotional problems during that period of his life. Part C discusses his "sex and love life" during the period under discussion, and Part D is a critique of parts A, B, and C! Is it any surprise that all of this becomes quite boring and repetitious after a while? I think the various Part Bs would be difficult reading for anyone not already familiar with Ellis' clinical work. Even I, who can claim a long-standing and intimate familiarity with Ellis' work, found my eyes glazing over and my mind wandering while reading this stuff. I thought the various Part Ds were totally unnecessary and needlessly rehashed what we had read earlier. The Part Cs are especially ludicrous, because, as I stated above, they deal largely with childhood infatuations until the last chapter in Part 1. To make matters worse, Ellis skips all over the place throughout Part 1, sometimes skipping ahead to discuss events that didn't occur until decades later. So Part 1, which is more than half the book, is a barely readable mishmash. And all of this takes us only to when Ellis was about twenty years old!

The book picks up in Part 2 and becomes much more readable. In fact, I would advise any reader who is primarily interested in Ellis' adult life, his development as a therapist, and his ultimate creation of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy to skip Part 1 entirely and proceed directly to Part 2. He dispenses with the annoying ABCD format, something for which any reader can be grateful. In Part 2 we learn many interesting things about Ellis. In Part 1 he told us that as a teenager he had been a frotteurist, someone who receives sexual gratification by rubbing against women in crowded places like subways. In Part 2 he reaches sexual maturity and finally loses his virginity at age twenty-four. He subsequently becomes a sexual libertine and spends much of the rest of his life maximizing his sexual experiences. He considers himself a sexual "varietist," a word I have never heard before. He tries to earn a living during the Great Depression in a number of ways, the most interesting being running a "pants matching" business with his brother. Finally at about age thirty he decides to become a psychologist and receives his PhD from Columbia at age 34. Even as a graduate student he begins to experience the censorship problems he was to experience throughout much of his professional life. His original dissertation topic, which he was forced to abandon, was to have been on the sexual fantasies of college women. However, this offended some prudish professors, so he was forced to change his topic to something more standard. Many of Ellis' works on sex had trouble getting published, and when they were published, many publications, such as the New York Times, would not accept advertising for them. Ellis goes on to describe his beginnings as a practitioner of psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy, how he became dissatisfied with this, and moved on to develop his cognitively based therapeutic approach between 1953 and 1955. The rest is history; Ellis' approach went on to become the second most widely practiced type of therapy in America after that of Carl Rodgers. The royalties from Ellis' books came to millions of dollars, nearly all of which he turned over to what later became the Albert Ellis Institute.

The sailing was smooth until 2004, when Ellis was ousted by the Board of the institute he had created and was even prohibited from giving workshops or seeing patients there. If Ellis wanted to see patients, they had to come to his apartment on the top floor of the Institute. There is no doubt that Ellis was unfairly and even cruelly treated by the Board, which incidentally consisted of many people he had helped and personally trained. However, I was disappointed by Ellis' surprising lack of candor in discussing these incidents. We never learn exactly why the Board ousted him, what their exact issues were with him, and why they treated him so cruelly. I would like to have a chance to hear the other side. In any event, it was a sad ending to an illustrious career.

The last parts of the book are devoted to Ellis' deteriorating health and finally his death. The last chapter is written by his wife, Debbie Joffe Ellis, and is a moving tribute to him. This is a very specialized book which is likely to be of interest only to those interested in Ellis, his life, and his therapeutic approach, but for this group it should be of intense interest. So to Albertophiles, of whom I consider myself one, I can recommend this book most highly in spite of its many flaws.

Y'all,
This is not only a review of his book, but of his life. The poor SOB did not do himself a favor in writing this book in the style he did. When I had him as a therapist in 1966-67 he was witty and not so self-absorbed.
It is a hard read. To me the fact that he left out Janet Wolfe as his help-mate and support...as far as I have read his book is an example of "there is no fool as an old fool".
He was a giant of thought and theory...his autobiography deals with--maybe what drove him--but not all the way how each of us construct our reality. He influenced my understanding of my reality. First and foremost, he taught me not to down mysel--to accept myself when I screwed up. Repeat, he told me, "Gunars, you and I are Forever, Fricked-Up, Fallible Human Beings (FFFHB's)."
Have I read the whole book? God--which neither he or I believed in--NO!! But of and on I open up a page or two...Reminds me that each of us have our reality and history...And if we are desparately unhappy, nobody but to blame ourselves.
Rest easy buddy,
Gunars