Development of Ideas

Abstract: Tracing the ideas of William Glasser, creator of Reality Therapy, from 1965 to 2000 it is clear that he has made major clarifications and changes in these concepts since publishing “Reality Therapy” in 1965. He has developed Choice Theory, a psychology based on the idea of internal control and signals external control psychology as the cause of so much human misery. Specifically he targets a breakdown in relationships as the main problem to address in counselling cases. He rejects the current view of “mental illness” and “chemical imbalance” theories. He sees Choice Theory as something to teach to clients in counselling, to students in our schools and to our communities. His publications since 1996 reflect this whole new vision of Therapy and of Psychology. 

Reality TherapyReality Therapy in ActionIn 1965 Dr. O. H. Mowrer called the book “Reality Therapy” a “landmark in psychotherapy”. Thirty-five years later Dr. Albert Ellis described “Reality Therapy in Action” as “one of the most creative books on psychotherapy ever written”. Between these two publications their author, William Glasser MD, had changed many important things and made major clarifications. This article attempts to map these and the journey in between.

1960-1980 REALITY THERAPY

Glasser’s formal education brought together an interesting set of disciplines: chemical engineering, clinical psychology, medicine and psychiatry. In this learning period he benefited from a number of very progressive environments. The Western Reserve University School of Medicine was very learning-centred during his years there. In his psychiatric training in the Veterans Administration Center & UCLA he found a kindred spirit in his tutor, Dr. G.L.Harrington. At this time, according to an interview with Glasser recorded by Wubbolding (2000) Glasser met Hellmuth Kaiser and they shared an office for a time. Glasser added that “he influenced Harrington and Harrington influenced me”. He frequently acknowledges his debt to Dr. Harrington who gave him so much creative space at that time. In the first years of his professional life he worked in the progressive Ventura Girls’ School and here his interest and competence in both therapy and education were able to flower.

By 1960 Glasser had produced his first book “Mental Health or Mental Illness?” and already many of the key ingredients of his later work were in evidence. The book originated in a series of lectures to employees of the California Youth Authority. Glasser himself explains today that it was his involvement in public speaking that gave rise to his strong preference for clear language.

Indeed, the 1960 publication already showed his difficulties with the traditional language of psychotherapy. It did not fit well with his emphasis on the client’s active role in the therapeutic process. The book’s subtitle “Psychiatry for Practical Action” is another major theme in the author’s life-long work. Even at his most theoretical Glasser is always looking to the practical; he is primarily a behavioural technician. By 1962 Glasser was giving public talks about this new approach that he now called “Reality Therapy” and from the very beginning his wife Naomi was an active collaborator in the promotion of his new ideas. These innovations would become the content of his second and most famous book to date.

The 1965 book “Reality Therapy” was an important landmark for Glasser as he moved from offering opinions on psychiatry to the confidence of initiating a new therapy. This volume openly challenged traditional thinking and practice. Already in its pages the main ideas of Glasser’s approach were to be found: the centrality of client responsibility, psychiatric problems re-defined in terms of need frustration rather than “mental illness”, a preference for dealing with the present rather than the past, “involvement” as the environment of counselling, a focus on tangible behaviour rather than on thinking or feeling, a move away from “insight” and the unconscious, attention to the present and a new stress on the therapist’s active role in counselling. The last chapter introduced the application of Reality Therapy to education, a theme that would become one of the main strands of Glasser’s professional work.

“Reality Therapy” sent shock waves through the system and still does. Dr. Glasser had explained his basic concepts, shown how his views differed from conventional therapy and then gave a series of examples of Reality Therapy in practice. The book was a collection of concepts and valuable practical guidelines. The author had begun a process where he would eventually find support for the concepts in a solid theory and greatly enhance the practical strategies of his therapy.

In 1969 Glasser took up the educational theme again in “Schools Without Failure”, a book that would challenge the foundations of educational practices. The first sentence of the book’s introduction still resonates through Glasser’s current thinking on education: “Too many students fail in school today”. Glasser was to find that underlying all his ideas, whether on therapy or on education, there was some common rationale but it would be another decade before he would bring all these pieces together for the first time.

In a sense Glasser uses his books to work out his ideas and “Identity Society” (1972) was a good example of such exploration. The book also carried a very clear elaboration of the practical components of Reality Therapy (to become eight “steps” in “What Are You Doing?” and in “Stations of the Mind”) although Glasser would later turn his back on the step approach since many trainees misinterpreted his intentions and used the steps in a mechanistic way.

For any understanding of Glasser’s current thinking it is important to realise that he has actually rejected or at least stopped using some of the concepts from earlier works. The idea of “morality”, for example, introduced in “Reality Therapy” and later used in “Schools without Failure” is not mentioned so much in his present thinking as it was so easily misunderstood. Even the core idea of “responsibility” is one he uses with care nowadays for the same reasons. He would also abandon the focus on “failure” and “failure identity” in favour of a more positive slant.

An interesting stepping-stone from failure to success was the title of his next book, “Positive Addiction” (1976). This did not prove to be a core text in the development of his ideas but the opening line, “Very few of us realise how much we choose the misery in our lives”, made an important step towards a new central role for choice in his thought. The notion of personal responsibility had always implied choice but it had not been stated so clearly nor so strongly as this. The seventies came to an end with another exploration, this time the area of management in “Both Win Management” (1980), co-authored by C.L.Karrass.

Meanwhile many people had been learning Glasser’s ideas through his “Institute for Reality Therapy” founded in 1967. With a heightened need for more examples of this therapy Glasser’s wife Naomi edited a book of case studies in 1980. She used a typical Reality Therapy question as its title, “What Are You Doing?”, and this served the training needs of the Institute very well fleshing out the ideas of Reality Therapy with real examples. Periodically Glasser himself would make video recordings using role-plays to illustrate his therapy.

A special characteristic of Glasser has always been his ability to teach very well what he does so well as a therapist and educator. As the seventies drew to a close many people had learned about his approach but there was one important unanswered question: “How and why does Reality Therapy work?” Glasser needed a theoretical explanation for his ideas and he was about to find one.

1980-1990 CONTROL THEORY

Glasser’s search for a theoretical base for Reality Therapy took a huge step forward in the eighties when Sam Buchholtz, a friend of Dr. Glasser’s, encouraged him to read William Powers’ book ” Behavior: The Control Of Perception ” (1973) and, as he himself said, he found the key to much of what he had been looking for. Here were ideas that originated in engineering and were developed by a physics graduate to explain the links between perception and behaviour.

There was much in Powers’ Control Theory that resonated with Glasser’s thinking: Internal control; people’s reliance on perceptual phenomena rather than any absolute reality; the role of feedback loops in explaining human behaviour. The thermostat-like functioning of the brain to behave in order to reduce “perceptual discrepancy” would explain how people behaved in order to meet their needs. Glasser was very impressed, consulted with Powers and then put together his own understanding of Control Theory in “Stations of the Mind” (1981). Although Powers acknowledged that Glasser’s book did present his own ideas accurately, Glasser adapted these ideas to his own specialism and eventually would produce “Choice Theory” almost two decades later.

“Stations of the Mind” is Glasser’s most technical work but he now believes that the human brain does not work in such a complex way. Analysis of many different levels of perception, for example, was useful to the research-oriented Powers but Glasser no longer uses these in his work.

By 1984 he was ready to produce his own version of Powers’ ideas adapted to explain Reality Therapy. Although the book was called “Control Theory” it was already moving away from Powers’ original concepts and this book was to become a very important milestone in the development of Choice Theory. Rather than trying to explain someone else’s ideas, Glasser made them his own and then set about explaining his own new version.

The use of active forms of verbs (e.g., “to depress” rather than “to be depressed”) to emphasise the chosen nature of human behaviour was something briefly introduced in Chapter 10 of “Stations of the Mind”. From “Control Theory” onwards it was to become Glasser’s preferred style. The Basic Needs, identified as the need “to love and be loved” and “to feel that we are worthwhile” in the original “Reality Therapy”, had become five needs in “Stations of the Mind” and these are clearly identified in “Control Theory” as the need to survive and reproduce, the need to belong, the need for power, the need for freedom and the need for fun. They play a key role in Glasser’s Control Theory and represent a move away from Powers’ model. Perceptions were to become “pictures”, a word that was deliberately chosen simply because it was “easier to understand” than “perceptions”.

Chapter six of this book was also to introduce an important new concept, that of “total behaviour”. By seeing human behaviour as an inseparable unity of acting, thinking, feeling and physiology, Glasser now had a way to explain how we are responsible for all four components and how we can change all four. This had remarkable implications for our way of dealing with “depressing” and other human behaviours. One of the most striking features of “Control Theory” was the predominance of counsellor themes: depression, values, craziness, psychosomatic illness, drugs, and conflict. The new theoretical structures of Control Theory helped Glasser explain “crazy behaviour” in terms that were radically different from the “mental illness” theorists. This book represented something Glasser had been seeking, a theoretical explanation of his therapy but it was more than that. It was an explanation of human behaviour; it was a psychology.

Five years after the appearance of Glasser’s “Control Theory” Naomi Glasser edited another book of case studies, “Control Theory in the Practice of Reality Therapy” (1989). In his own public presentations and courses Glasser himself has always used role-plays of cases to illustrate and teach his ideas. However, in most of his books after the original “Reality Therapy” he tended to use short anecdotal examples rather than full case studies. The fact that Naomi was editing case studies probably reduced the need for extensive case study examples in William Glasser’s own books.

1990-1996 QUALITY SCHOOLS

Meanwhile he had set about applying his new theoretical discoveries to education producing “Control Theory in the Classroom” in 1986. It was seventeen years since “Schools Without Failure” and, just as in the case of his therapy, he was providing a theory to support much of what he had already published. In chapter seven of “Control Theory in the Classroom” Glasser spoke of the teacher as a manager and his new analysis of management found an existing source of similar ideas in the work of W. Edwards Deming, the American statistician who contributed to much of Japan’s post-war economic success. Relying heavily on Deming’s ideas on quality management and his own modified version of Control Theory, Glasser published “The Quality School” in 1990. The “Quality School Consortium” came into being and now has its own annual conferences.

Even before “The Quality School” was published there were a number of bulletins in which Glasser elaborated on and expanded the contents of the book. Eventually they were incorporated into a new edition of “The Quality School” in 1992. Further ideas became yet another book, “The Quality School Teacher” (1993). In his introduction to “Stations of the Mind” William Powers had noted that Glasser learned by writing and Glasser’s books read very much like the diary of a discoverer.

“The Quality School” was sub-titled “Managing Students Without Coercion” and this reflected an important new theme in Glasser’s thought, coercion being the opposite of everything he taught. His Reality Therapy had always recognised the individual’s own responsibility for his or her life. In “Stations of the Mind” and “Control Theory” he elaborated on the full meaning of internal control. In “Control Theory” (chapter sixteen) he spoke of an alternative explanation of human behaviour, one he now sums up as “external control psychology”. In his lectures during the eighties, even more so than in his written works, Glasser would compare these two psychologies over and over again. He would become increasingly aware of the vast distance that separated these two points of view and the implications for everyday living of choosing one or the other to run one’s life. Increasingly he would underline the fact that Internal Control and External Control were poles apart.

It was around this time that personal tragedy overtook William Glasser and his family. After a short illness his wife Naomi died in December 1992. She had contributed greatly to his success as a therapist, lecturer and writer and had edited the two case studies books that illustrated his approach. Apart from the enormous personal loss, the passing of such a significant companion and collaborator in his life would inevitably offer a new life perspective for him.

The first book after Naomi’s death was “The Control Theory Manager” (1994) and to some extent it was a natural progression from “Control Theory” and the Deming ideas on management. With a chapter about how we relate to each other and sub-headings such as “Who you are” and “What you stand for” it is easy to guess that these themes had a personal significance for Glasser at this time.

In July 1995 Dr Glasser married Carleen Floyd who, as a faculty member of his institute, was well versed in his ideas and had published works of her own. It was the beginning of a very powerful relationship that merged personal and professional life extremely well. Up to now Glasser’s books had fallen into three groups: therapy, education and management. His next manuscript “Staying Together” (1995) represented a new direction exploring Control Theory implications for relationships and personality. In a sense it reflected the current experiences of his life but it also represented a closing chapter in Control Theory and a stepping stone to a new phase in his thinking.

1996-2000 CHOICE THEORY AND RELATIONSHIPS

One early hint of this change came when Dr Glasser spoke at the National Convention of the Institute for Reality Therapy in Ireland in October 1995. In questions following his lecture in Waterford, John Murphy, a member of the Irish Institute asked him about the name “Control Theory” and expressed a difficulty in using the term. Glasser shared the sentiment and said that maybe he would change the name. The word “control” seemed to suggest control of others, something diametrically opposite to Glasser’s intended meaning. In any case Glasser has never liked to use a word that requires extensive explanation.

The following April the Glassers travelled to Australia and other countries as part of an extended lecture tour. Throughout this journey the issue of discipline in schools emerged often in his meetings with people. In fact, at that time, Internet searches for “Glasser” or “Reality Therapy” tended to produce a very high proportion of references to discipline. In his books on education Glasser had certainly discussed the topic as a natural part of talking about schools in general. He had even promoted a ten-step approach to discipline himself. Some of his most senior instructors had created very popular and effective courses in school discipline. But in Australia where the discipline theme seemed to be dominating his tour Glasser became very uncomfortable with the concept.

Setting up a Quality School following his guidelines would lead to a collaborative and friendly learning environment where “discipline” in the traditional sense would not be an issue. On the other hand, time spent on managing a discipline programme would delay the creation of a Quality School. It could also cloak an agenda to control the students, something Glasser does not see as a primary aim of education. He struggled with the matter for a time and then in the Summer 1996 newsletter message to Institute members he wrote, “I object to discipline programs because they focus on fixing the student” whereas the intensive training weeks of his Institute “focus on changing the system”. Glasser’s opposition to the idea of external control had clarified as never before during this Australian tour.

George Kelly, the Construct Theorist, had pointed to the usefulness of thinking of constructs as bipolar. What a person means by “tall” only really becomes clear when we know what that person means by “short”. One way of interpreting Glasser’s Australian experience was that he came face-to-face with the opposite of his own underlying belief system and this helped him understand his own stance with greater clarity.

It also became dramatically clear to him that he was aiming to change the system itself and not simply manage the undesirable consequences of an ineffective system. At his institute’s next annual convention (July 1996 in Albuquerque, New Mexico) he would explain that a focus on discipline could not be part of a focus on the Quality School. Eventually he decided that he could no longer accept the teaching of discipline programmes as part of his own work or that of his faculty. As far back as the early eighties Glasser had said “I do not want to be remembered as the person who brought discipline to the classroom. I want to be remembered as the person who helped the classroom become a place where you do not need discipline.” To engage in fixing disciplinary problems was the antithesis of Glasser’s key ideas and this had become very clear to him.

This was a painful time for Glasser and his associates of many years, some of whom left his institute at this time. The core issue went beyond discipline. It was about a clearer definition of the centrality of internal control in his ideas and its total incompatibility with external control. It was about the need to eliminate external control from all systems and replace it with a new psychology of internal control. It was about working to create an internal control system rather than struggling to make an external control system more humane.

His Institute for Reality Therapy had gone through a brief period called the “Institute for Control Theory, Reality Therapy and Quality Management” and he now decided to call it the “William Glasser Institute” to protect the integrity of his ideas. Finally, he took another important step by acting on that Waterford suggestion and eliminated the term “Control Theory” from his vocabulary, replacing it with “Choice Theory”. This move helped give a new focus and freedom to his own theorising and represented a distinctive new phase in his thinking.

In Australia he had also reached another conclusion, that the human condition had not improved over the centuries. Technology had made rapid advances and in areas such as civil rights humanity had made some progress. At a personal level however the same old problems of marital conflict, drugs and violence continued. He attributed this to the world’s reliance on external control psychology.

From this point onward Glasser would see the promotion of “Choice Theory”, an internal control psychology, as an important and necessary attempt to change the biggest system of all, humanity. Choice Theory was the alternative to destructive external control psychology. Not only would the theory be applied to therapy and education but clients and students would be taught it as a way to manage their lives. In his message in the Spring Newsletter of 1997 and still reflecting on his Australian experience he wrote, “the goal of what I am trying to do is effect a world-wide change in psychological beliefs”. Already he had begun to write what is undoubtedly his most important book of all, “Choice Theory” and was entering his most productive period of writing and recording ever. The Australian tour of 1996 had been a very important watershed and Glasser’s writing after that date represented a complete overhaul of his ideas.

“Choice Theory” was published in 1998 and although at first glance it looked somewhat like the earlier “Control Theory” it had very different emphases. It was presented as a vital new psychology to replace the external control approach that was doing so much damage. There was a new importance attached to relationships. As an example of internal control psychology in action Glasser pointed to friendship. External control in contrast distanced people. In fact, before publishing “Choice Theory” Glasser had considered calling his new approach “the psychology of us” contrasting it with external control psychology, the “destructive psychology of Me”. In his new version of Reality Therapy he recommended seeking out the relationship issue that he believes is at the heart of the problems people bring to counselling.

In 1996 he had participated in a fascinating series of videotaped role-plays, “Five Approaches to Linda”, made at Lehigh University, Pennsylvania. This series sponsored by a major drug company set out to compare the approaches of different psychotherapists. These recordings had helped Glasser realise just how different his own approach was from other therapies and confirmed his confidence in the direction he was leading his therapy ideas. He became more aware of the efficiency of his approach and elaborated on this in the sixth chapter of the new book. Glasser also went back to a theme from the original “Reality Therapy”, mental illness. He reaffirmed his belief that these are chosen behaviours and claimed that the use of drugs would not solve the underlying problems.

He also wrote about the Basic Needs in the context of relationships and presented his new ideas of “solving circles” and structured marriage counselling. He wrote about families and about the Reality Therapy approach to child abuse cases. In a chapter on the Quality School he presented his new idea of Total Learning Competency. There was a chapter on lead management. At the end of the book he wrote about a project that was only just beginning and has since developed very successfully, the Choice Community Project in Corning, New York. Led by Mary Hayes-O’Brien and given research backing by Syracuse University, this project sets out to build better relationships between people from all walks of life who live or work within Steuben County, New York. They hope that this new approach will reduce crime, drugs and even illness in their community while improving education and general respect for different values. It is a long way from the one-to-one therapy relationship where Glasser had first established his reputation.

Not long after the release of “Choice Theory” the Glassers published a small book, “The Language of Choice Theory” (1998), a comparison of external and internal control language in a variety of contexts showing how the move to a choice theory life-style would reflect in the way we speak to other people. For example, a parent might say to her child, “If you don’t stop fighting over the TV, Dad and I are going to shut it off for a week.” The “Language of Choice Theory” offers this as an alternative approach: “How about this? When we get the TV guide on Sunday we go through it together. We all get a choice and we’ll rotate who goes first to keep it fair. This way the worst that can happen is we’ll only have to fight over the TV once a week.” Instead of controlling, threatening and criticizing, the parent works on collaboration, giving the relationship more importance than the TV issue. The book gives some indication of the extensive impact a Choice Theory approach will have on a person’s life and language.

Once “Choice Theory” had gone to press, Glasser almost immediately began to write a book of case studies. The original “Reality Therapy” (1965) had been a combination of practical ideas and case study examples. Now “Choice Theory” (1998) would present his new theory and the new book, “Reality Therapy in Action” (2000), would carry the bulk of case study examples. The cases he had included in “Choice Theory” had been well received and he followed the same model in “Reality Therapy in Action”. The type of case and the way the details were presented and explained aimed to maximise their teaching purpose. The book presents twelve case studies, some narrated across several sessions. They deal with issues such as relationships, compulsions, depression, school problems, panic attacks, gender identity, hallucinations, teenage sex and addictions. True to the style of Reality Therapy, Glasser explores each case on its unique human merits and not as static diagnoses.

The author’s commentaries give a unique insight into the mind of a master therapist. In a brief second chapter Glasser explains the link to Choice Theory. It is full of confidence and clarity as he situates unsatisfying relationships centre-stage in counselling, as he explains why Reality Therapy can be so efficient and as he discounts the “mental illness” and “chemical imbalance” theories. One thing that makes Reality Therapy different from other therapies, he explains, is that its practitioners teach Choice Theory to clients as part of the therapy.

Comparing “Reality Therapy in Action” with the original “Reality Therapy”, it is apparent that Dr. Glasser is now much more aware of the differences between a life based on Choice Theory principles and one relying on External Control Psychology. Obviously the therapist will not use any form of external control with the client. Relationships are now central to his approach to therapy and it is more important to work at helping the client fix this than to talk at length about the symptomatic aspects of the problem.

Glasser is also very conscious of how much progress a client can make even in a first session with Reality Therapy. He sees therapy as always moving towards change, always asking the client what he or she is going to do to improve their lives. Rather than seeing the outcome of therapy as fixing some specific area of the client’s life, Glasser sees it as offering a whole new perspective, a new way for the client to live his or her life. Another major change since “Reality Therapy” in 1965 is his use of Total Behaviour, a concept that clarifies the responsibility a person has for feelings and physiology as much as for actions and thoughts.

In his final comments in “Reality Therapy in Action” Glasser states that the differences between Reality Therapy and conventional therapy are as true today as when he first described them in 1965. But, he elaborates, what is a more serious obstacle to therapy than traditional psychotherapy is the abandonment of psychotherapy altogether in favour of a “mental illness” diagnosis and treatment with drugs to sort out the supposed chemical imbalance in the client’s brain. Glasser’s (2000) alternative view is that “what is labeled mental illness, regardless of the causation, are the hundreds of ways people choose to behave when they are unable to satisfy basic genetic needs, such as love and power, to the extent they want.”

In May 2000 at The Evolution of Psychotherapy Conference (Anaheim, California) Dr Glasser spoke on the topic of “Reality Therapy in the Year 2000”. Addressing this specialist audience he chose to return to the “mental illness” and “chemical imbalance” issues. Two months later at the William Glasser Institute International Convention in Ottawa, Canada in July 2000, Dr Peter Breggin, author of “Toxic Psychiatry” (1991), was the keynote speaker. Breggin has carried out extensive reviews of the research reports on psychiatric medications and has found them seriously flawed. They tend to mislead people in two ways: they give the impression that the drugs are effective in what they propose to do and they hide or disguise the evidence of the dangers associated with these drugs.

Breggin along with Harrington, Szasz, Rowe, Laing, Glasser and others rejects the biological explanations of people with so-called “psychiatric problems”. Glasser is obviously putting the issue centre stage again in the year 2000 and it is clear that his rejection of the “mental illness” concept in favour of the belief in chosen behaviour is in fact a core component of his ideas.

Since the release of “Reality Therapy in Action”, Glasser has published two other short books developing the theme of relationships. “What is this thing called Love?” (2000) is a fly-on-the-wall report of a series of discussions on love. “Getting Together and Staying Together” (2000) is a complete revamp of “Staying Together” (1995).

CONCLUSION

In spite of the revolutionary content of William Glasser’s ideas, they continue to attract new followers around the globe. His institute is active in Australia, Canada, Colombia, Croatia, England, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, Norway, Scotland, Singapore, Slovenia, Spain, United States and Wales. There are also members in Argentina, Austria, Brazil, Dominican Republic, Germany, Indonesia, Mexico, Neth. Antilles, Sweden and Switzerland. Many of his books have been translated into Korean, Japanese, Croatian, Spanish and French. The Institute he founded in 1967 has had its own “International Journal of Reality Therapy” since September 1981 and has its own web-site (www.wglasser.com).

An interesting recent development is the gradual formation of linkages between the advocates of internal control psychology. People like William Glasser, Albert Ellis, Alfie Kohn, Peter Breggin and others are increasingly sharing conference platforms and exchanging ideas (for example, the 1999 National conference on Internal Control Psychology, Burlington, Massachusetts, USA). Ellis, the founder of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy, gave Glasser many suggestions and very positive encouragement for “Reality Therapy in Action”. Peter Breggin wrote the foreword. The degree of professional isolation that followed Glasser’s 1965 challenge to traditional psychiatry has transformed into a new alliance of like-minded thinkers.

A new millennium somehow invites stocktaking and Wubbolding’s “Reality Therapy for the 21st Century” (2000) containing a review of research into Reality Therapy and Choice Theory is an example of this, as is this article. However, looking back at the development of Glasser’s thought it is evident that after his experience in Australia in 1996 he chose a very definite overhaul of his ideas since that time and the published results of this have happily coincided with the start of the new century. In the latter half of the year 2000 he has just written one more component of that overhaul. The book called “Every Student Can Succeed” aims to detail the practical day-to-day running of a Glasser Quality School. This new book together with “Choice Theory” and “Reality Therapy in Action” will be Glasser’s key texts, redefining the ideas he initiated in the sixties, ideas he continues to develop with ever-increasing enthusiasm to this day.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his gratitude to WGI Faculty member Al Katz for very valuable suggestions and to Dr. Glasser for an interview that helped clarify some of the data for this article.

REFERENCES

Breggin, Peter R. (1991). Toxic Psychiatry. New York: Harper-Collins.
Dattilio, Frank (Producer) (1996). Five Approaches to Linda (VIDEOS). Lehigh University: Pennsylvania.
Ellis, Albert (1999). Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy As An Internal Control Psychology. International Journal of Reality Therapy (Vol.19,No.1,pp. 4-11).
Glasser, Naomi (Ed.) (1980). What Are You Doing?. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, Naomi (Ed.) (1989). Control Theory in the Practice of Reality Therapy. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1960). Mental Health or Mental Illness?. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1965). Reality Therapy. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1969). Schools Without Failure. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1972). The Identity Society. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1976). Positive Addiction. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1981). Stations of the Mind. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1984). Control Theory. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1986). Control Theory in the Classroom. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1990,1992). The Quality School. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1992). The Quality School Teacher. Los Angeles: WGI.
Glasser, William (1994). The Control Theory Manager. New York: Harper Business.
Glasser, William (1995). Staying Together. New York: Harper & Row.
Glasser, William (1998). Choice Theory. New York: Harper Collins.
Glasser, William (1999). Creating the Competence Based Classroom. Los Angeles: William Glasser Inc.
Glasser, William (2000). Reality Therapy in Action. New York: Harper Collins.
Glasser, William (2000). Every Student Can Succeed. Chulavista, Ca.: Blackforest Press.
Glasser, William & Glasser, Carleen (1998). Choice: The Flip Side of Control – The Language of Choice Theory. Los Angeles: William Glasser Inc.
Glasser, William & Glasser, Carleen (2000a). What is this thing called Love? Los Angeles: William Glasser Institute.
Glasser, William & Glasser, Carleen (2000b). Getting Together and Staying Together. New York: Harper-Collins.
Karass, C.L. & Glasser, W. (1980). Both Win Management. Los Angeles: WGI.
Kelly, George A. (1955). The Psychology of Personal Constructs. New York: W.W.Norton & Co. Inc.
Kohn, Alfie (1996). Beyond Discipline: From Compliance to Community. Alexandria, Virginia: ASCD.
Laing, R.D. (1967). The Politics of Experience. New York: Pantheon.
Powers, William T. (1973). Behavior: The Control of Perception. Chicago: Aldine.
Powers, William T. (1999). PCT, HPCT, and Internal Control Psychology. International Journal of Reality Therapy (Vol.19,No.1,pp. 12-16).
Rowe, Dorothy. (1991). Breaking the Bonds. London: Fontana.
Szasz, Thomas. (1976). Schizophrenia: Sacred Symbol of Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books.
Wubbolding, Robert E. (2000). Reality Therapy for the 21st Century. Philadelphia: Taylor and Francis.

INTERNET SITES

William Glasser International www.wglasserinternational.org
Albert Ellis www.rebt.org
Peter Breggin www.breggin.com
William Powers  www.iapct.org
Alfie Kohn www.AlfieKohn.org

Originally published in the Fall 2000 issue of “The International Journal of Reality Therapy” (Vol.20,No.1,pp. 41-46) and reprinted here by kind permission of the editor.

The author, Brian Lennon,  is a Psychologist and Guidance Counsellor who worked in St. Oliver’s Community College, Drogheda, Ireland. He was Director of the William Glasser Institute Ireland 1987-1997 and a senior faculty member of the William Glasser Institute since 1995.

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