ABSTRACT
Having made the case for homologies between Stoicism and Ellis’s REBT, in this chapter we use a more detailed historical analysis in order to tease out other aspects of the legacy, as well as some of the differences between REBT and the more popular CBT founded by Aaron Beck. Some recent commentators have found problems in the scientific status of REBT, which seem not to be present in Beck’s CBT. We argue that this may be partly because they drew differently from the traditions of thought available to them, which appears most clearly in their first published papers. Beck’s were more in the modern medical tradition, whose history forms part of the search for method leading to abstract knowledge and control that has been so powerful a feature of Western culture. Ellis was more discursive in style and drew on the dialogic tradition, in which obstacles to self-awareness and freedom are removed by enlisting the power of reason through question and answer. Socrates and Epictetus are the classical representatives of this tradition, and Ellis’s first paper shows clear signs of being modelled on Epictetus. Later, however, although continuing in this tradition in his personal style and popular self-help books, Ellis also developed
abstract models and methods that belong to the medical tradition. His dual allegiance, his attempt to balance distinct discursive formations or language games, has made him vulnerable to criticism from both sides.
