a clash of mindsets (Ellis contra Branden)

From: Scott Chase (ecphoric@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat 03 Jul 2004 - 15:14:19 GMT

  • Next message: Keith Henson: "Postmortem on L5 (part 1)"

    I just finished Albert Ellis's book _Is Objectivism a Religion?_. His final chapter was intriguing as he summarizes the debate beween former Objectivist guru Nathaniel Branden and him that may have spawned his book. One also wonders if Ellis was trying to win converts to his psychological theory of rational-emotive therapy. In the debate between Ellis and Branden we witness a clash of mindsets between Objectivism and RET. Taking a step back from both mindsets it might be fruitful to look at each mindset indepedently and then see how they clash. I don't have time for delving into Ellis's approach quite yet having other fish to fry. I was exposed to Ellis very superficially, I remember vaguely, in some psych courses. I have his book _Humanistic Psychotherapy: the Rational-Emotive Approach_ but it's presently collecting dust. Rand and Branden are featured in the index, but turning to the appropriate pages I can't say their presence is significant in this book.

    There are some webpages that discuss the clash between Ellis and Branden and Ellis's subsequent book.

    This one by Richard Lawrence talks about Ellis's putative motivation for writing the book:

    http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/books/other/religion.html

    Lawrence links to this old review by Roy Halliday where Ellis's book is a sort of "declaration of war":

    http://royhalliday.home.mindspring.com/ellis.htm
      If you google the newsgroup humanities.philosophy.objectivism you can find some discussion of Ellis's book.

    Enjoy.

    =============================================================== This was distributed via the memetics list associated with the Journal of Memetics - Evolutionary Models of Information Transmission For information about the journal and the list (e.g. unsubscribing) see: http://www.cpm.mmu.ac.uk/jom-emit



    This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat 03 Jul 2004 - 15:21:12 GMT