Rational-emotive therapy

I MUST confess to being here today somewhat under false pretenses: since I am technically no longer in private practice. The ,Institute for Advanced Study in Rational Psychotherapy, vchich I direct, has recently organized a fullfledged psychological service center; and consequently I now see all my clients, for beth individual and group therapy, under the sponsorship of this center. However, although no longer a strictly private practitioner, my heart is still very much with the private practice of psychotherapy. For one thing, I see all my present clients on an outpatient basis; and although I have associates who occasionally take over my groups when I am out of town, I am largely an independent practitioner who takes full responsibility for all the people I see and who has a unique relationship with each of them. So I have as yet discovered no essential difference between the way I have operated at the center for the last year and the way I operated as a pure private practitioner for more than two decades before that ~ne. Rational-emotive therapy, moreover, is one of the many kinds of psychological treatment tha0t was devised in the course of a busy private practice. In fact, one of the main reasons for my developing it was the faot that I was beseiged with more clients than I could possibly care for when I practiced classical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically-oriented psychotherapy, and I was virtually forced to look for more efficient and less time-consuming methods of seeing them. Moreover, even the most modem kind of analytic methods, as everyone knows, tend to be longer and more expensive than most middle-class clients and practically all less economically favored clients can afford; and I discovered many years ago that ff I were to engage in the private practice of psychotherapy with secretaries, students, clerical workers, bus drivers,