Betty Dodson wrote this letter to me today— grieving Albert Ellis, the revolutionary psychotherapist, who died last week at 93.
We have lost a great man.
David Hersh sent the Times article to me below. I want to share it with all of the sex educators and therapists on my list.
If we could all "Get Over Ourselves," it would be a far more glorious world...
During my difficult years of being scorned or laughed at for promoting masturbation, Albert was always a supporter of mine.He was the only sex therapist who gave my book, Sex for One, a positive statement back in '86. He said, 'Sex for One" proves once again that Betty is a pioneering and outstanding authority on masturbation. Read this remarkably honest and liberating book.'
I thanked Albert at the time, and I thank him again. I'll miss his brazen honesty.
Here's an excerpt from the "Sex, Love and the Scolding Psychotherapist," the NYT story by Mary Jo Murphy that Betty sent me:
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.
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. ...
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 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.
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