structural:reformatting
Private practice

The psychologist who would become most important for Beck was Albert Ellis, whose own faith in psychoanalysis had crumbled by the 1950s. He had begun presenting his "rational therapy" by the mid-1950s. Beck recalled that Ellis contacted him in the mid-1960s after his two articles in the Archives of General Psychiatry, and therefore he discovered Ellis had developed a rich theory and pragmatic therapy that he was able to use to some extent as a framework blended with his own, though he disliked Ellis's technique of telling patients what he thought was going on rather than helping the client to learn for themselves empirically. Psychoanalyst Gerald E. Kochansky remarked in 1975 in a review of one of Beck's books that he could no longer tell if Beck was a psychoanalyst or a devotee of Ellis. Beck highlighted the classical philosophical Socratic method as an inspiration, while Ellis highlighted disputation which he stated was not anti-empirical and taught people how to dispute internally. Both Beck and Ellis cited aspects of the ancient philosophical system of Stoicism as a forerunner of their ideas. Beck cited Epictetus as an influence from Stoicism.