Breakthrough

In Break Through we touch lightly on the history of cognitive therapy, and give credit for its birth to largely to Aaron Beck. After I talked to Dad about it he pointed out that really it was created by both Beck and Albert Ellis, who died last week at the age of 93. The Times today listed some great Ellis quotes which it elegantly laid out like aphorisms from Nietzsche, an obvious influence.

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!

Much of Ellis's insights were taken up wholescale by the self-help movement, and so it's easy to overlook the revolutionary quality of his willful psychology. Ellis insists, demands, that you "take hold of your life," an idea emphasized by Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in the 19th Century, and re-embraced by mid-20th Century existentialists. Like them he writes with a bombast and brevity against dogmatism.

But Ellis gave existentialism a uniquely American populist style, tapping into the American will to power -- one's personal power to alter one's future no matter how horrible one's past had been, and redefining what is "rational" and "irrational" according to whether it advances your health.

He took this to the logical extreme, demanding that those who were victimized as children not accept the identity as victims.

If you are still very upset about being abused as a child, you are now, probably, irrationally thinking, "My early abuse absolutely should not 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.

This passage still has the capacity to shock the ears of those who tend to believe the only proper attitude toward victims is to feel sorry for them. But more and more evidence seems to support this idea that one can reinforce one's feelings of victimization -- and that one can thus also overcome the past through willful intelligence.

Nietzsche seemed to be getting at a similar point in an aphorism in Daybreak when he wrote:

We have to think differently in order to feel differently.

That's a line that seems to sum up cognitive therapy as well as anything else. That Nietzsche said it 80 years before Ellis seems to add to Nietzsche's observation that he was "born posthumously."

If Ellis is passing judgment, he's not moralizing for a single universal rule, but rather for people to become their best, and achieve their individual potential. It is this drive to individualism, perhaps, that most connected existentialism to Americanism -- it's where Nietzsche meets Emerson -- an individualism that seems all but dead among the mass of American progressives, who talk endlessly and nostalgically of the need for "community" and only rarely of the importance of individuality.

In Break Through we also argue against the idea that one could ever get out of having a point of view and see the world from every perspective. Ellis seems to arrive a similar place in his politics. The Times today offered us his critique of Ayn Rand's naive (and not terribly interesting) "objectivism" which "objectives" what has been made by humans, including markets, which market fundamentalists like Rand have long treated as natural. In Break Through we write

Market fundamentalists believe that there is nothing wrong in requiring poor Brazilians to pay back a loan that an illegal government took out more than thirty years ago to destroy the Amazon. They believe that there is a law higher than democracy or freedom or justice: the law of the market. And they think that once something is traded freely in markets, it is holy and good. Once the dictatorship debt is freely traded, it is magically cleansed. What could possibly be immoral about something one can freely buy through Charles Schwab?
And yet, throughout human history, all sorts of terrible things have been freely traded -- from slaves to tropical hardwoods to dictatorship debt. Today, if you want to buy dictatorship debt, you can do so. Most who own dictatorship debt, including Brazilians themselves, do not know of its connection to the hunger of Rio's street children or the destruction of the greatest forest in the world. Market fundamentalism depends on masking the ways in which markets always rely on government and human values.

Ellis writes:

Objectivism 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.

Having given perhaps too much credit to Beck for founding cognitive therapy, in the next edition of Break Through we'll acknowledge Ellis' co-founder role.

Albert Ellis, 1913 - 2007, R.I.P.