Rational Emotive Therapy

My first exposure to Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) was a demonstration given by Dr W Dryden. It so shocked me that I snatched for my rusty nibbed pen and wrote a skit -most of which forms the tail-end of this piece. In any event I was psychologically set for Dryden's performance in that I had come to believe, generally, that people are much too ‘large’ and complicated (and defended) for ‘modern’ psychotherapies to comprehend and this seemed to be at odds with the ambitious claims of some of these groups. Dr Dryden's (simulated) therapeutic session merely confirmed most of my fears.

Clare had written cogently about some of these new therapist groups, their idiosyncracies as well as their suspicious commonalities: such that many stem from a disenchantment with psychoanalytic theory and, especially, practice. A charismatic leader comes quickly to the fore often to describe an ‘awakening’ or ‘discovery’ experience which points to a new and enlightened way: Primal Therapy is especially noteworthy here. An institute will be quickly established (with offshoots) plus a journal and training courses of varying length and depth. But above all, the book will be written and, whatever its complexities, these will be conveniently ignored, or modulated, so as to provide a simplified model whose simplicity is suggestive of Truth; the work of Eric Berne is a good example of this. There is a lack of humility about these ‘secular priests’ (North 1972) with their proud and insular claims to dampen human misery.

These issues of insularity, exclusivity and wild assumptions re-emerged when Dryden (1986) questioned the possession of the title ‘British Journal of Psychotherapy’ by a cartel of psychoanalytic groups, stating that this journal represented a branch or type of therapy only. In my view he was making a fair point. Not only are almost all the articles psychoanalytic in nature and content, but there is also a perceptible drift towards the esoteric and (somewhat) distant in a growing