ABSTRACT
Albert Ellis, the father of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1913. When Ellis was 4 years old, his family moved to New York, where he subsequently made his home. Ellis was the oldest of three children and struggled with serious kidney problems that continued throughout his life. In addition to his physical ailments, Ellis learned to survive on his own, as his father was a traveling businessman and Ellis perceived his mother to be emotionally absent. To deal with his physical and family issues, young Ellis developed a philosophy of viewing life that he later turned into REBT. A famous example of his early application of REBT ideas is how a teenage Ellis confronted his reluctance to approach girls. He approached 100 girls in a 30-day period to test his fear that rejection would lead to some personal catastrophe. The experiment proved to be a success: He was rejected and the horrible tragedy that he feared never occurred.
