In memory of Albert Ellis

Journal of Sex Research, Feb, 2008 by Ira L. Reiss

I knew Albert Ellis as a friend for more than 50 years. I will try to afford the reader insight into the Albert Ellis I knew. Al did not do much small talk or attend many cocktail parties--he focused on doing therapy, writing books, and discussing controversial issues. My interaction with Al consisted primarily of our discussions about controversial issues concerning sexuality. I will focus here on the two key periods in our relationship: first, the period during the 1950s and 1960s when Al was founding our organization (the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality [SSSS]) and also establishing his Institute of Rational Living; and, second, the 2000-2003 period when we did a book together and also debated a major assumption of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT). I believe this approach will afford you insight into Al Ellis's thoughts and feelings and make clear some of the crucial roles he played in the advancement of sexual science in our society.

I became familiar with Albert Ellis's work when in the early 1950s I began to teach courses in the sociology of the family area. I wanted to include material on sexuality in that class. The dominant premarital sexual approach in family textbooks at that time was the promotion of abstinence before marriage. Kinsey's research often was ignored and distorted in these textbooks. In addition to using Kinsey's work, I wanted to use authors who had studied our society's cultural perspective on sexual behavior. It was in that search that I came across some of Ellis's early writings. It was obvious that Ellis was no traditionalist--his writings blasted away at the narrow restraints of our sexual customs and highlighted the psychological problems that they produced (Ellis, 1951, 1954). I knew that he would be a good person to get to know better. So, when my first professional article was published, I sent a reprint to Ellis and indicated my interest in his work. That was the beginning of our friendship.

We began discussing our ideas about premarital sexuality in our correspondence, and it soon became apparent that there was a difference in our emphasis on the relative worth of what I called "person centered sexuality" and "body centered sexuality." We were both pluralists concerning premarital sexuality, and so neither of us condemned either of these two types of sexual relationships and we both believed that the affection in person centered sexuality added extra value to a sexual relationship. But we did have differences. I emphasized the greater value placed on person centered sexuality in our culture and its better integration with love based marital sexuality and Al emphasized the attraction many individuals felt for body centered sexuality and the need to avoid making these people feel guilty by stressing only sex with affection. In short, Al thought that I didn't give enough support for sex without affection.

He felt that American society by making sex without affection a guilt ridden experience increased its importance to people. He wanted to treat it simply as a full choice and not "propagandize" in favor of sex with affection. He illustrated part of his thinking in a 1957 letter:

   For the fact remains, and must not be unrealistically ignored, that
   in our culture, at the present time, sex without love is much more
   frequently available than sex with love. Consequently, to ignore
   non-affectional coitus when affectional coitus is not available
   would, it seems to me, be sheer folly. In relation both to
   immediate and greater enjoyment, the individual would be losing
   out. (Reiss & Ellis, 2002, p. 11)

In our debate about the relative worth of person centered and body centered sexuality Al was taking a more psychological-individual perspective and I was taking a more sociocultural value perspective. Al, as a clinical psychologist, stressed the individual and his goals and promoted what he himself called an "anarchistic" perspective of the individual and society. Later in 1957 he wrote to me, saying, "My anarchistic bias, however, is to change the world so that we become less a part of others and much more individualistic" (Reiss & Ellis, 2002, p. 84). I fully endorsed freedom of individual choice, but as a sociologist I was pointing out how the very values and goals that mold our choices are shaped to a considerable extent by our experiences in the basic social institutions such as family, religion, politics, economics, and education. In short, I acknowledged the power of society and culture in our individual lives more than Al did.

By the time we wrote our book containing these early letters (2002), we both had moved more toward the center in our discussion of sex with and without affection. I had moved to increase the value of sex without affection as a choice, and he had moved to accept more the impact of societal attitudes favoring sex with affection. So, although we both still valued sex with affection more than sex without affection, our differences on the comparative rank of sex without affection had been diminished. Of course, the sexual culture in America had changed considerably from 1957 to 2002, and that probably affected both of our new viewpoints. Al and I had a fundamental agreement on a number of basic values, such as the importance of scientific research and theory, sexual pluralism, gender equality, freedom of choice, and the value of human sexual relationships. I believe we were able to be civil in our disagreements because we knew that we had these fundamental agreements on our more basic values.