The First Sexpert?

Albert Ellis died this week at the age of 93. From the NYT obit:

Dr. Ellis (he had a doctorate but not a medical degree) called his approach rational emotive behavior therapy, or R.E.B.T. Developed in the 1950s, it challenged the deliberate, slow-moving methodology of Sigmund Freud, the prevailing psychotherapeutic treatment at the time.

Where the Freudians maintained that a painstaking exploration of childhood experience was critical to understanding neurosis and curing it, Dr. Ellis believed in short-term therapy that called on patients to focus on what was happening in their lives at the moment and to take immediate action to change their behavior. “Neurosis,” he said, was “just a high-class word for whining.”

Ellis was also an outspoken advocate for sexual liberation; he worked with Kinsey and talked about sex often and freely in his popular workshops. He also wrote about sex, and his 1959 Sex Without Guilt was one of the first sexual self books of its kind, using both an approach and a format that has been copied thousands of times over (the Times cites Ellis as a precursor to the Dr. Phil style of self-help guru).

While Ellis' understanding of human sexuality and human psychology was exponentially more sophisticated than Oprah's pop psychology progeny, his offer of relatively "simple" fixes and his bombastic personality provide an argument for calling him the first sexpert.

I remember reading Ellis as an undergraduate, and while his model always felt a bit more like an annoyed father than a supportive partner, his willingness to take on the old guard was thrilling. And his frankness about sex was revolutionary.

Read more - New York Times: Albert Ellis, 93, Influential Psychotherapist, Dies