ABSTRACT
Cognitive therapists are advised to adopt a therapeutic style based on the principles of collaborative empiricism (e.g. Beck, Rush, Shaw, & Emery, 1979). This advocates therapist and client working together as equal partners in pursuit of cognitive accuracy and realism through the identi®cation and examining of unrealistic, biased cognitions. REBT therapists would not take issue with this. How we tend to differ from other cognitivebehaviour therapists is that we are prepared to adopt a broader range of therapeutic styles than they tend to use. For example, in 1981, I spent a six-month sabbatical at the then Center for Cognitive Therapy in Philadelphia learning cognitive therapy. As part of our training we had to present our work with a patient in a case conference setting and demonstrate our work with video excerpts. I presented my work with a patient with whom I had a good rapport and used humour as a way of helping her (in this case) to re-evaluate her faulty cognitions, which in her case was very effective. Virtually the entire case conference was devoted to a discussion of how I could have worked more according to the principles of collaborative empiricism and how I could have used non-humorous interventions to achieve similar ends.
