Mike Abrams (psychologist)

Mike Abrams (born July 16, 1953) is an American psychologist and co-author with Albert Ellis of several works on rational emotive and cognitive behavioral therapy. He was instrumental in the formalization of Ellis' model of personality while coauthoring Ellis's only college textbook. Abrams' research with Ellis into rational-emotive and cognitive behavior therapies (CBT) led him to propose that all successful psychotherapies were actually performing CBT - irrespective of their stated theoretical orientation. After Ellis' death, Abrams continued Ellis' work on sexuality by taking an evolutionary perspective to love and intimacy. This work reached fruition in his book on sexuality by Sage Publications. It is among a few texts on human sexuality taking an exclusively evolutionary perspective. Abrams wrote the book utilizing a journalistic approach interviewing many of the best known evolutionary psychologists such as David Buss, Doug Kendrick, Helen Fisher, and J. Philipe Rushton to provide multiple and often conflicting perspectives. He further extended the work of Ellis by publishing the first article, along with David Buss, to apply evolutionary psychology to CBT. Abrams expanded upon the synthesis of CBT and evolutionary psychology with the book The New CBT: Clinical Evolutionary Psychology.

Mike Abrams

Prior to his work with Ellis, Abrams worked with people suffering from life-threatening illnesses and was the first non-gay psychologist to volunteer to counsel people with AIDS at the Gay Men's Health Crisis in New York. Abrams currently practices in New Jersey and New York City and is an adjunct Full Professor with the MA program in psychology at New York University, teaching Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, Modern Psychological Treatments, and the Psychology of Sexuality. He is a contributor to About.com and on the editorial board of Counseling and Psychotherapy Transcripts and several other journals. He actively researches the changing views and expectations of psychotherapy.

He is married to long-term collaborator Lidia Abrams.