Rational emotive therapy-a study of initial therapy sessions of Albert Ellis.

Because psychotherapy is what a therapist does, and not necessarily what he says he does, it is important to observe the activity of leaders in the field during their sessions. Twenty taped initial psychotherapy sessions by Albert Ellis were selected randomly from 70 recently recorded ones. Typescripts of each session were made, and two raters naive to the purposes were trained to place each of Ellis' statements into 1 of 17 categories. Each category consisted of a therapeutic technique. Some of these were ones that Ellis did during the 20 sessions examined was related very closely to what he has claimed to do, but that he did vary considerably from client to client.