i want to find out the usefullness and limitations to albert ellis personality theory

Hello Sue,

I just did a Google search and that unsurprisingly yields many sites with relevant information.
Use http://www.google.com/search?client=opera&...=utf-8&oe=utf-8

I have not read up his viewpoints so can't comment.
Good luck with your hunting!

I recommend this one:

http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/ellis.html

There are some great ideas there. Now I am reading Marcus Aurelius, who influenced Albert Ellis.

Yes, the Stoics.

Very good philosophy indeed.

The philosphical origin of REBT (rational emotive behaviour therapy) goes back to the Stoic philosophers Marcus Aurelius and Epictetus.

Challenges self-defeating absolutist beliefs, not religious beliefs.

Thinking not only entails brain activity (such as remembering, learning, and problem solving), it also entails perception, emotion, and movement.

Human beings largely create their own emotional consequences.

Adopts a more universalistic position.

Stoicism

Originated in Athens at the end of the 4th century BC. It sharpley focused on the individual and provided its adherents with a set of percepts by which they could order and direct their lives.

It was a rational attempt to solve the problems of man's relationship with his environment.

A Greek philosopher named Zeno of Citium (336-264 BC), the founder, arrived in Athens in 313 BC and there came under the strong influence of the Cynics, who were followers of Socrates.

Based its ethical system on the precept that one could achieve tranquility through control of emotions.

The good life was one in which the mind is in control, enabling the individual to feel as little emotion as possible and thereby immunizing oneself against suffering. Even pleasure and desire were to be avoided, since they render us vulnerable.

The Stoic doctrine was that happiness is attainable only by living agreeably to nature and reason, and that God is the soul of the world.

Men should strive to be free from passion, unmoved by joy or grief, and submitwithout complaint to the unavoidable necessity by which all things are governed, regarding virtue as the highest good. They repressed feelings and maintained indifference to pleasure or pain.

In Stoic circles philosophy was compared to the fruitful field surrounded by a fence of logic. The fence was designed to ward off the attacks of the Sceptics by showing that knowledge of reality is possible. The soil of the field stood for physics, a subject that the philosopher was expected to cultivate in order to gain understanding of the nature of the world. The crop was the type of conduct expected from the Stoic wise man in which reason ruled and emotion was supressed.

Stoicism was a dogmatic system: logic, physics and ethics.

Logic - the term was a Stoic coinage. Provide an empirical justification of knowledge by grounding it in valid perceptions and then tracing the psychological stages by which such perceptions are transformed into assured knowledge.

In his public lectures Zeno used to illustrate the various stages from perception up to irrefutible knowledge by a series of gestures. He would 1st hold out one arm with the fingers of the hand open and parted. This symbolized the 1st tentative contact with the external world. Then he would begin to curl his fingers together to signify a growing assent until finally fingers and thumb came together to make a fist. This signified the moment of comprehension. Finally, he would bring over his other hand and clasp the fist in it to symbolize the function of philosophic reasoning in strengthening and securing knowledge to the point where it cannot be expunged from the mind.

Marcus Aurelius 121-180 AD

Emperor of Rome, and a man of great intellectual power. The 1st philosopher king. He had a mind with exceptional clarity and originality. he was a political leader as well as a military leader.

Meditations:

Everyman, I wil go with thee, and be thy guide, in thy most need to go by thy side.

To work against one another is to oppose nature.

Of man's life, his time is a point, his existence a flux, his sensation clouded, his body's entire composition corruptible, his vital spirit an eddy of breadth, his fortune hard to predict, his fame uncertain.

No evil is according to nature.

Cling not to the opinion of all men, but only of men who live in accord with nature.

Be neither a busy talker or a busbody.

People are not disturbed by things, but by the view which they take them (this is key to Ellis' REBT theory).