Robert A. Harper

Robert A. Harper was an American clinical psychologist, marriage counselor and writer whose career helped popularize cognitive and rational approaches to psychotherapy in the United States. He spent most of his professional life in Washington, D.C., where he ran a private practice in marriage and family therapy and wrote and lectured on the new directions emerging in clinical psychology after World War II. Harper is best known as the long-time collaborator of Albert Ellis, the psychologist who founded Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) — the direct ancestor of modern Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. Their joint book "A Guide to Rational Living," first published in 1961 and reissued in multiple revised editions, became one of the most widely read self-help books in American psychology and introduced general readers to the idea that emotional distress can be traced to irrational beliefs that can be identified, disputed and replaced. The book sold more than a million copies and remained in print for decades. His survey "The New Psychotherapies," published in 1975, is a clear-language overview of the dozens of new therapy schools that proliferated in the 1960s and early 1970s, from gestalt and transactional analysis to primal therapy and the early cognitive approaches. The book is still used as a reference for understanding how the therapeutic landscape shifted away from mid-century psychoanalysis. Harper was a former president of the American Academy of Psychotherapists and a fellow of the American Psychological Association. His writing is notable for treating therapy as a practical craft rather than a mystery — emphasizing that effective treatment can be taught, measured and explained to the people receiving it. That stance is one of the throughlines of the cognitive revolution in clinical psychology, and Harper's work alongside Ellis remains a useful starting point for readers who want to understand where today's CBT-based treatments came from.