Ordinary Miseries: Extraordinary Remedies

Joel Kovel (1978) refers to rational emotive therapy as part of a post-analytic group of therapies and, in particular, as part of the modern ‘human potential movement’ that has evolved since the nineteen fifties. In fact, Rational Emotive Therapy (RET) was the brainchild of Albert Ellis, produced as part of a theory of personality and research in clinical psychology. Whilst ostensibly part of the ‘human potential movement’ it is here (parsimoniously) assigned to the more narcissistic elements within that movement but becoming more abrasive as the overall political culture in Britain and America changed from the mid-seventies.

The importance of the cultural setting for this particular approach becomes obvious when one considers the values and assumptions upon which it is based; a rational world of individualism and essentially pragmatic selfhood where outcomes are viewed as a consequence of distorted beliefs and where personal interpretations determine future events and mould the course of our lives. In general, the cultural milieu within which therapies work has been a neglected issue resulting in the emergence of a profession which is largely unexamined - other than by therapists themselves - as well as largely unaccounted for.

Much of the meaning of the work of Sigmund Freud had become lost in translation, for instance, a position recently summarised by the late Bruno Bettelheim. Analysis, according to a German reading of Freud, was a softer and more compassionate therapy than in the hands of the Americans who, more than any others, turned it into a dispassionate (medically dominated) system of abstractions, avoiding personal feelings between therapist and patient preferring instead, ‘A way of looking only at others, from a safe distance’ (Bettelheim 1983, p. 6). Freud had assumed a cultured audience for his books and papers: according to Bettelheim (1983) he thought that Americans lacked the kind of classical learning (stories of the Gods and their nau