Albert Ellis was a psychoanalyst in New York and grew dissatisfied with his own profession. Patients came for years to talk about their childhoods, gained insight into where their fears came from, and did not change.
He went looking for something that did work, and found it in a philosopher from the first century. Epictetus had written that people are disturbed not by things, but by their judgments about things.
If that were true, Ellis thought, then the road was shorter than psychoanalysis assumed. You do not have to go back to the origin of a belief in order to change it; you can address it now, out loud, in the conversation itself. He began having patients state their own reasoning and then disputing it.
He presented the method in 1955 under the name rational therapy, later rational emotive therapy. The psychoanalytic world reacted with hostility; for years he was treated as a heretic.
Aaron Beck independently developed a related approach in the nineteen sixties, out of research on depression. From both lines grew what is now called cognitive behavioural therapy: the most researched psychotherapy in the world, and in many countries the first-line treatment for anxiety and depression.
Ellis quoted the sentence from Epictetus verbatim in his major book of 1962 and referred to it throughout his life. He called the Stoics the first cognitive therapists.
You have trained in a profession that does not do what it promises. You can stay inside it, or try something your colleagues find ridiculous.
The tempting sorting is that this is a story about the Stoa being proved right. What happened along the way is more interesting.
His colleagues' reaction, his reputation and whether the method would catch on lay outside Ellis. He could not compel anyone to listen, and for years nobody did. What did lie with him was whether he would publish what he believed to be true.
The content of his method is the same sorting, applied to the patient. What happened is fixed; what the patient thinks about it is not. The whole therapy consists of pulling those two apart, and that is exactly the exercise on this site.
And there is a force of proof in it that the classical texts lack. In Epictetus the dichotomy is an assertion; in Ellis and Beck it has been tested thousands of times against a control group. That does not make the teaching true, but it makes this part of it demonstrably effective.
There is a limit Ellis himself did not always guard. Not all suffering comes from a wrong judgment. Whoever is poor, ill or being mistreated has not a thinking error but a problem, and a therapy that puts everything in the thinking can turn into the accusation that you produce your own misery.
Cognitive behavioural therapy has grown more careful about that in the decades since. And it is the same objection that strikes the Stoa: the teaching is at its strongest where circumstances are fixed, and at its weakest where they could have been changed.
Which tool do you still use because it is expected, while you notice it is not working? And where could you go looking for the answer?
Yours, Not Yours · A Stoic practice ground · All cases · Questions or suggestions