Mike Abrams (psychologist)
Mike Abrams (born July 16, 1953) is an American psychologist and co-author with Albert Ellis of several works on rational emotive behavior therapy (REBT) and cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT). He is best known for extending CBT to include principles of evolutionary psychology and collaborating with the founder of CBT Albert Ellis to develop many new applications to for these clinical modalities. His new clinical method which applies evolutionary psychology and behavioral genetics to CBT is called Informed Cognitive Therapy (ICT). Dr. Abrams is an Adjunct Full Professor in the M.A. Program in Psychology at New York  University where he teaches graduate level courses in modern psychotherapeutic technique, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, and the Psychology of Sexuality. Abrams is also the managing partner of psychology for NJ, LLC a private self-funded clinical research organization. He is a contributor to About.com and is on the editorial board of Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts and several other journals. He actively researches the changing views and expectations of psychotherapy. Prior to his work with Ellis and his more recent contributions to psychotherapy research, Abrams worked with people suffering from life-threatening illnesses and was the first non-gay psychologist to volunteer  to counsel people with AIDS at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York. This work led to a book co-authored with Ellis on Death and Dying. In it, he and Ellis rejected the stage theory of Kubler-Ross and replaced it with a constructivist model of the psychology of confronting mortality. Work With Albert Ellis. Dr. Abrams was instrumental in the formalization of Albert Ellis' model of personality. Prior to the collaboration of Albert Ellis with Mike Abrams the REBT model of personality was limited to the ABCDE model of disturbed thinking and emotions. Their collaboration led  to a more comprehensive explanation of normative and pathological personality by setting forth an iterative model of personality development. This more detailed explanation argued that the universal tendency towards irrational thinking that Ellis stated was universal. The Ellis - Abrams model proposed that people are innately and evolutionarily inclined towards rigid cognitive styles that included demandingness, absolutism, or dichotomous thinking. These irrational thinking styles were said to be exacerbated or attenuated during development by both life adversities and innate temperaments. This and related REBT personality theories were presented in the text Abrams coauthored with Ellis which was Ellis’s only college  textbook Personality Theories: Critical Perspectives. In addition, to his personality studies with Ellis, Abrams' research with Ellis into REBT and CBT led him to propose that all successful psychotherapies were actually performing CBT - irrespective of their stated theoretical orientation. Abrams argued that the equivalence of most psychotherapies found in outcome studies was a result the tendency of competent therapists to gradually progress to REBT/CBT techniques - irrespective of their claimed orientation or approach. Work on Evolutionary Psychology. After Ellis' death, Abrams continued Ellis's work on sexuality by taking an evolutionary psychology perspective to love and intimacy. This work reached  fruition in his book on sexuality titled "Sexuality: Development, Differences, and Disorders." The book is only textbook on human sexuality that takes an exclusively evolutionary perspective. Abrams wrote the book utilizing a journalistic approach interviewing many of the best known evolutionary psychologists such as David Buss, Doug Kenrick, Helen Fisher, and J. Philipe Rushton to provide multiple and often conflicting perspectives. He further extended the work of Ellis by publishing the first article, along with David Buss, to apply evolutionary psychology to CBT. Informed Cognitive Therapy. Recently, Abrams expanded upon the synthesis of CBT and evolutionary psychology with the book  The New CBT: Clinical Evolutionary Psychology. This book which set forth a new variation of CBT called informed cognitive therapy (ICT) took what was implied in much of Ellis' work and made it explicit. Abrams combined evidence from behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology to add to the effectiveness of CBT in a clinical text proposing a new variant of CBT. Abrams argues that most psychological disorders overlie a latent factor common to virtually all pathologies. According to his model this latent factor is heritable and is supported by genome-wide studies of mental pathologies. In addition, he proposed that all  psychopathologies have a heritable component that is often associated with mismatched evolutionary adaptations. Consequently, his ICT therapy requires that clinicians become familiar with behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, and the relationship that these sciences have with psychological problems. Abrams' premise has been supported by evolutionary psychologists like Todd Shackelford, behavioral geneticists like Robert Plomin and cognitive/memory psychologists like Elizabeth Loftus.