[Although he didn't seem shy about promoting his own stuff, the late Albert Ellis, not only gave of his time to help edit our book but wrote a very nice foreword to it. We miss him. —Bruce & Susan Kodish]
"I am delighted to see Susan and Bruce Kodish's Drive Yourself Sane: Using the Uncommon Sense of General Semantics in print because, like Wendell Johnson's People in Quandaries, it applies Alfred Korzybski's brilliant general semantics philosophy to its readers' everyday lives and shows them how to live more sanely in a still highly irrational and partially insane world. As Korzybski showed, and as this book demonstrates again but in much clearer and down-to-earth language than that often used by the founder of general semantics, almost all of us humans easily and naturally identify our self with our behavior, define ourselves as good or bad people, overgeneralize, and speak and think self-defeatingly and world-defeatingly. And, as the authors markedly point out, we can train ourselves to do so considerably less often and less intensely."
"Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT), the pioneering form of cognitive-behavior therapy that I originated in 1955 and that has been quite popular since that time, significantly overlaps with general semantics, as I showed in detail in my Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture in New York in 1991. This is hardly a coincidence, because I read Stuart Chase's The Tyranny of Words (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938) and S. I. Hayakawa's Language in Action (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1943) in the 1940's. In the 1950's, I finally read Korzybski's Science and Sanity (Englewood, NJ: International Non-Aristotelian Publishing Company, 1933, 1958) and his essay, "The Role of Language in the Perceptual Processes" in Robert R. Blake and Glenn V. Ramsey, Perception: An Approach to Personality (New York: Ronald Press, 1951); and I cited him a number of times in my articles on REBT and in my books, A Guide to Rational Living (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: 1961) and Reason and Emotion in Psychotherapy (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1962)."
"I learned about D. David Bourland's advocacy of E-Prime in 1969 and, encouraged by one of our main Rational Emotive Behavior therapists, Dr. Robert Moore, I began writing a number of articles and books in E-Prime, including the first popular books written in this general semantics oriented kind of language, How To Live With A "Neurotic" (North Hollywood, CA: Wilshire, 1975), A New Guide To Rational Living (North Hollywood, CA: Wilshire, 1975), Anger-How To Live With It and Without It (Secaucus, NJ: Citadel, 1977), and Overcoming Procrastination (New York: New American Library, 1977)."
"REBT and general semantics particularly go together because both disclose and actively dispute people's absolutist, one-sided, rigid, musturbatory thinking. As Susan and Bruce Kodish point out, Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy shows people their dogmatic, either/or, inflexible shoulds, oughts, and musts, and also shows them a number of cognitive, emotive and behavioral methods to reduce their self-defeating thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. The useful applications and exercises that the authors include at the end of each chapter overlap with many of the homework assignments that REBT practitioners, including Susan herself, work out in collaboration with their clients to minimize their emotional disturbances and their non-self-actualizing behaviors."
"Readers who carefully read this book and who work at using the valuable aspects of general semantics that Susan and Bruce beautifully explain don't have to drive themselves sane. But they probably will!"
—Albert Ellis, Ph.D.
