All Out!: An Autobiography (Psychology)

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.

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.

The honesty of this autobiography was staggering. It has quite an unusual structure.He gives a chronological account of his childhood and relates episodes where he thinks that he used ideas and techniques that became part of REBT. He then critiques it and checks to see how accurate his memories are.There are also chapters that go into considerable details about his early romantic life. Again he reviews these as well and relates just how well he used the principles of REBT to help him. In later chapters he details the legal battles that he had with the board members of the institute that he founded.All of this was very interesting and informative. I would have liked to have seen a bit more on how his career developed but I think that this might have been recounted in other places.Throughout the book he is extremely honest and shows that even he struggled with low frustration tolerance on occasions.It was well written and I learned a lot from it.

Albert Ellis' experience is a continuous challenge. His honesty and enthusiasm is inspirational. Thank you Ellis, you will continue living beyond this life.

Disgusting to read his perverted nature. So did not read the book completely. It's very boring also.