The ‘Lenny Bruce of Psychology’ is dead at 93. Ellis was a rallying point for the backlash against Freud and a founder of cognitive-behavioral approaches to talk therapy, and short-term focused work, which have become ascendant in the last few decades. New York Times obituary: “Where the Freudians maintained that a painstaking exploration of childhood experience was critical to understanding neurosis and curing it, Dr. Ellis believed in short-term therapy that called on patients to focus on what was happening in their lives at the moment and to take immediate action to change their behavior. Neurosis, he said, was “just a high-class word for whining.” “The trouble with most therapy is that it helps you feel better,” he told The New York Times in an interview in 2004. “But you don’t get better. You have to back it up with action, action, action.”” One compelling way of approaching people’s difficulties in mental health practice, which I credit largely to Ellis’ influence, is to think of distress as emanating from our tendency toward self-deception and therapy as an attempt to cultivate honesty and authenticity in one’s relationship with oneself. Ellis’ iconoclasm, irreverence and bent for popularizing sophisticated psychological concepts have been very appealing to me.