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I am writing to you in response to the publication of Liam Clarke's Personal View on ‘Rational-Emotive Therapy’ in the Journal (Vol. 7(1), ). From a recent telephone call to you, I understand that the piece was not sent out for informed editorial review and that the Personal View section of the Journal provides authors with an opportunity ‘to let off steam’.
May I suggest, however, that in future you do send such pieces out for review. I am all for personal views based on accurate information and reasoned argument but Clarke's article is riddled with inaccuracies and prejudice. Anybody familiar with RET would find the first half of his ‘skit’ to be representative of very poor RET and the second half sarcastic and unrepresentative of anything resembling this approach to therapy. Would you have published a similar piece if it seriously misrepresented the Kleinian approach? Also by his own admission Clarke's prior readers found his piece ‘confusing … too long … cumbersome and tiring’ (p. 87). I sympathise with them.
A well-argued, fair-minded and reasoned Personal View can enhance a journal. Clarke's ‘bark’ only serves to detract from yours.
I am writing to record my dismay that this reputable Journal should publish the article ‘Rational-Emotive Therapy’ by Liam Clarke.
Fortunately, the article is incoherent and largely incomprehensible, else its schoolboy humour would be the more distasteful.
Although I come from a different tradition within psychotherapy I am pleased and rewarded to have had first-hand experience of the work of Dryden and Ellis, neither of whom is recognisable in Clarke's article.
By all means let the Journal encourage constructive criticism but surely not of this standard of incompetence.
In the Personal View section of Volume 7(1) of this Journal Liam Clarke has a parody ‘Rational-Emotive Therapy’, that is quite funny in pa