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The main theoretical and practical applications of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) and Cognitive Therapy (CT) are examined and found to be similar to each other in most respects, but REBT bases its concepts of improved treatment of neurotic disorders and of severe personality dysfunctioning largely on philosophical, existential, and humanistic bases, while CT tends to align them with empirical results of outcome studies. Both REBT and CT, however, use philosophic and empirical outcome studies to construct and validate their theories.
Keywords: rational emotive behavior therapy; REBT; cognitive therapy; Beck, Aaron; Ellis, Albert
Ioriginally wrote this article in March 2002 and tried to compare Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) to Aaron Beck's Cognitive Therapy (CT) and to general Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT). CBT is advocated by a number of leading therapists, such as Arnold Lazarus (1997), Donald Meichenbaum (1992), Michael Mahoney (1991), David Barlow and Michelle Craske (1994), Marvin Goldfried and Gerald Davison (1994), Larry Beutler (1983), and Stephen Hayes (Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson, 1999).
After I had written my original version of this article and received some comments on it from several long-practicing therapists, I decided to forget about comparing REBT and CT with CBT, for the good reason that it is almost impossible to describe CBT accurately. Although it was originally, in the 1970s, close to both REBT and CT in theory and practice, it has now become much more eclectic and integrative, so that it includes a wide variety of cognitive and behavioral techniques-as it always did- but also often includes more experiential, interpersonal relationship, existential, humanistic, and other methods than it did previously. In fact, it tends to be so integrative today that it almost belies its original name, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT).
Consequently, I shall limit myself, in this revised version of my article, to comparing the theory and practice of REBT and CT. Even that comparison, as I show, has its problems, because the original differences between the two therapies, which I described in an article in Cognitive Therapy and Research in 1980, have been somewhat ironed out since that time. Both REBT and CT have changed in the last two decades and are more similar to each other today than they previously were. Some significant differences...