E-Prime - Influence of E-prime in Psychotherapy

Influence of E-prime in Psychotherapy

While teaching at the University of Florida, Alfred Korzybski counseled his students to

eliminate the infinitive and verb forms of "to be" from their vocabulary, whereas a second group continued to use "I am," "You are," "They are" statements as usual. For example, instead of saying, "I am depressed," a student was asked to eliminate that emotionally primed verb and to say something else, such as, "I feel depressed when . . .," or "I tend to make myself depressed about . . ."

Korzybski showed measurable improvement "of one full letter grade" in the grades of students in the first group. Although this took place before the invention of E-Prime, it does show the application of general semantics to psychotherapy.

Albert Ellis advocated the use of E-prime, especially in writing, as a way to avoid muddled and blame-based thinking that makes psychotherapy patients distressed. According to Ellis,

REBT has favored E-Prime more than any other form of psychotherapy and I think it is still the only form of therapy that has some of its main books written in E-Prime.

E-prime is used in neuro-linguistic programming as a technique, and the theoretical basis of NLP relies heavily on Korzybski and Bourland's work.