Claudia Hammond presents the history of psychology series which examines the work of the people who have changed our understanding of the human mind. This week she explores Carl Rogers’ revolutionary approach to psychotherapy, led by the client and not the therapist. His influence can be seen throughout the field today.
Claudia meets Rogers’ daughter, Natalie Rogers, who has followed in her father’s footsteps and developed Expressive Arts Person-Centred Therapy, and hears more about the man from Maureen O’Hara of the National University at La Jolla, who worked with him. Richard McNally of Harvard University and Shirley Reynolds of Surrey University explain how far Rogers’ influence extends today, and Claudia sees this for herself in a consulting room in downtown San Francisco, where she meets Person-Centred psychotherapist, Nina Utigaard.
A call for papers has been issued for a special issue of History of Psychology on the history of psychotherapy in North and South America. Guest edited by Rachael Rosner, the issue will be released in parallel with a special issue of History of the Human Sciences on the history psychotherapy in Europe (guest edited by Sarah Marks). The deadline for submissions is January 1st, 2016. The full call for papers follows below.
The history of psychotherapy is a topic that cuts across disciplines and cultures. In North America, psychotherapy pre-dates Freud in the faith healing and liberal protestant movements of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century, even as Freud took the limelight, the practice passed through many professions including neuropathology, psychiatry, social work, the ministry and clinical psychology, as well as marriage and family counseling, nursing, and a host of others. Psychotherapy also became the darling of cinema and literature. And yet, psychotherapy has never been a licensed profession. Anyone can hang out a shingle as a “psychotherapist.” Psychotherapy has thus been both a staple of, and a lens onto, medicine, science and culture for nearly 125 years.
How can we make sense of this ubiquitous and yet historically elusive practice? This special issue of HOP opens up the conversation to historians from a broad spectrum of specialties. We welcome contributions on any aspect of the subject in North or South America, but ask contributors to keep within the time-frame of late 19th century (when the term “psychotherapy” originated) to the present. Continue reading CfP: Special Issue of HoP on History of Psychotherapy in North and South America→
On Tuesday, March 17 at 6:30 pm in the Wilkins Gustave Tuck Lecture Theatre at University College London, Sonu Shamdasani will deliver a lecture entitled “Why Study the History of Psychotherapy?”
Shamdasani is the Philemon Professor of Jung History and directs the UCL Centre for the History of Psychological Disciplines. Previously he was the acting director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine. Find the full abstract for the talk here.
“Efficacy and Enlightenment: LSD Psychotherapy and the Drug Amendments of 1962,” by Matthew Oram. The abstract reads,
The decline in therapeutic research with lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in the United States over the course of the 1960s has commonly been attributed to the growing controversy surrounding its recreational use. However, research difficulties played an equal role in LSD psychotherapy’s demise, as they frustrated researchers’ efforts to clearly establish the efficacy of treatment. Once the Kefauver Harris Drug Amendments of 1962 introduced the requirement that proof of efficacy be established through controlled clinical trials before a drug could be approved to market, the value of clinical research became increasingly dependent on the scientific rigor of the trial’s design. LSD psychotherapy’s complex method of utilizing drug effects to catalyze a psychological treatment clashed with the controlled trial methodology on both theoretical and practical levels, making proof of efficacy difficult to obtain. Through a close examination of clinical trials performed after 1962, this article explores how the new emphasis on controlled clinical trials frustrated the progress of LSD psychotherapy research by focusing researchers’ attention on trial design to the detriment of their therapeutic method. This analysis provides a new perspective on the death of LSD psychotherapy and explores the implications of the Drug Amendments of 1962.
“Neuro Psychiatry 1943: The Role of Documentary Film in the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge and Promotion of the U.K. Psychiatric Profession,” by Edgar Jones. The abstract reads,
In 1943, Basil Wright produced a documentary film about the treatment of servicemen and civilians with psychological disorders at Mill Hill Emergency Medical Service Hospital. Funded by the Ministry of Information, Neuro Psychiatry was shot to convince influential clinicians and policy makers in North America that the British had developed expertise in the management of psychiatric casualties. By emphasizing novel and apparently effective interventions and excluding severe or intractable cases from the film, Wright encouraged an optimistic sense of achievement. Filmed at a time when victory was considered an eventual outcome, the picture presented a health service to which all had access without charge. Children and unemployed women, two groups excluded under the 1911 National Insurance Act, had been required to pay for healthcare in the prewar period and were shown receiving free treatment from the Emergency Medical Service. However, the therapeutic optimism presented in the film proved premature. Most U.K. battle casualties arose in the latter half of the conflict and follow-up studies failed to confirm the positive outcome statistics reported in the film. Aubrey Lewis, clinical director of the hospital, criticized research projects conducted at Mill Hill for a lack of rigor. The cinematographic skills of Wright and director Michael Hankinson, together with their reformist agenda, created a clinical presentation that emphasized achievements without acknowledging the limitations not only of the therapies offered by doctors but also the resources available to a nation at war.
“The Cost of War—Then and Now: Commentary on ‘Neuro Psychiatry 1943’,” by Heiner Fangerau. The abstract reads,
In his essay “Neuro Psychiatry 1943: The Role of Documentary Film in the Dissemination of Medical Knowledge and Promotion of the U.K. Psychiatric Profession” Edgar Jones provides a detailed case study of a single movie that was made under unusual wartime conditions. From this case, he builds a general analysis of the interpretation and portrayal of scientific expertise that shaped the production, distribution, and reception of this genre of documentary. The paper provides a fresh perspective for the historical analysis of film documentaries, while remaining highly topical and germane to present-day issues in medicine and health care.
The film that Jones studied was produced in a British hospital where war victims (mostly soldiers) were treated for war neuroses. The filmmakers documented the therapies employed and the apparently successful posttreatment reintroduction of patients into military service and civilian work. They hoped to convince informed audiences, especially those outside Britain in the United States and Canada, about the effectiveness of the British Health Care Service in …
Currently streaming on BBC Radio4 for the next 6 days is a program exploring the influence of psychiatric ideas on literature and vice versa. In Writing Madness, literary works by Virginia Woolf (above), F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Charles Dickens are discussed in terms of the development of psychoanalysis and the rise of psychotherapy. As described on the program’s website,
Vivienne Parry takes her diagnoses of literary heroines into the 20th century and the age of Freud, the Great War and the explosion of the ‘sciences of the mind’ focusing on three great works of fiction, mixing contemporary psychiatric and literary insight.
How did modern literary and psychiatric ideas meet and how did each shape the other? Do these heroines show literature of the period to be a critical – and even emancipating – force…or is fiction really medicine’s stooge? Novels on the couch include Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway….interestingly with both novels there’s a tendency to base the heroines on real people – Nicole Diver is based on the case history of Fitzgerald’s own wife Zelda, whereas Woolf’s Mrs.Dalloway comes very close in literary terms to what Freud calls ‘self-analysis’ – one difference is that Woolf sometimes believed ‘madness’ was necessary to be creative, while Scott Fitzgerald depicted it as disastrous drain on creativity (ie. his). And both novels have the dynamic and lucrative new industry of psychotherapy in their sights. Vivienne compares fiction in the age of Freud to literary ideas of mental health in the Victorian age and in Dickens specifically, using Great Expectations’ Miss Havisham as a case study.
Contributors include psychotherapist and essayist Adam Philips, leading psychiatrist Simon Wessely, cultural historian Lisa Appignanesi and Chris Thompson, psychiatrist and medical director of The Priory
The February 2011 issue of History of the Human Sciences has been released online. Included in this issue are six all new articles, a review symposium, and a book review of Roderick Buchanan’s new book, Playing with Fire: The Controversial Career of Hans J. Eysenck. Among the topics addressed in these articles are the placebo effect in psychotherapy, the use of ‘deprivation’ in American psychiatric discourse, and the role of case studies in psychoanalysis. Full titles, authors, and abstracts follow below.
“From medicine to psychotherapy: The placebo effect,” by Stewart Justman. The abstract reads,
If placebos have been squeezed out of medicine to the point where their official place is in clinical trials designed to identify their own confounding effect, the placebo effect nevertheless thrives in psychotherapy. Not only does psychotherapy dispose of placebo effects that are less available to medicine as it becomes increasingly technological and preoccupied with body parts, but factors of the sort inhibiting the use of placebos in medicine have no equivalent in psychology. Medicine today is disturbed by the placebo effect in a way psychotherapy is not. Psychotherapy does not have to grapple with such a disconcerting paradox as successful sham surgery, and unlike those physicians who once pretended to treat the patient’s body while actually attempting to treat the mind, the psychotherapist can treat the mind in all frankness. Perhaps it is because psychotherapy is less burdened by doubts about the placebo effect that it was able to come to its aid when it was orphaned by medicine. It is vain to expect something with so long a history as the placebo effect to disappear from the practices of healing. Continue reading New Issue: History of the Human Sciences→
This month’s article in the Time Capsule section of the American Psychological Association‘s Monitor on Psychology describes the emergence of psychotherapy in the United States at the end of the nineteenth century. Authored by historian of psychology Ben Harris (left) and his student Courtney Stevens, the article, “From Rest Cure to Work Cure,” provides an overview of the state of psychotherapy in America prior to Freud’s famed 1909 visit. According to the article,
For most of the 19th century, neurologists and psychiatrists rejected highly psychological treatments and theories. These physicians attributed mental suffering to brain pathology; they excluded emotions, beliefs and ideas as possible contributors to one’s mental health.
But by the 1890s, physicians began to reconsider their hostility to psychological concepts. As Harvard neurologist James Jackson Putnam put it in 1899:
“It is a matter for congratulations that this wave is being reinforced by another, which is sweeping us toward a better knowledge of the secrets of the mental life in health and disease.”
He was referring to psychotherapy, the newly coined term and increasingly popular therapy for somatic and psychological suffering. By 1909 — the year Sigmund Freud visited America — psychotherapy had won the allegiance of psychologists, clergy and diverse medical specialties.
Today’s New York Times has an article by the psychoanalyst Leon Hoffman about Sigmund Freud’s only visit to the United States, which started a century ago today. As is well known, Freud was invited by Granville Stanley Hall to give a series of lectures at the celebrations for the 20th anniversary of Clark University in Worcester, MA, of which Hall was President. Freud’s lectures, given in German, were translated and became the book The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis, which has been in print ever since. Hoffman, however, focuses on Freud’s relationship with the Boston neurologist, James Jackson Putnam, who invited Freud to his retreat in the Adirondacks, where Putnam became a convert to the Austrian’s system of psychotherapy. Two years later Putnam would become the first president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Knowing that all was not well with Hoffman’s fawning treatment of the encounter, I forwarded the article to the email lists of the Society for the History of Psychology (APA, Div 26) and of Cheiron to see what their reactions might be. Historian of psychology Ben Harris (U. New Hampshire) wrote back in short order. I think his words are better than any summary I might provide.
The errors in Leon Hoffman’s account of psychotherapy in America before Freud provide a mini tutorial in how one’s professional affiliations can bias one’s historical views. Continue reading Freud’s Visit to New England→
For over 150 years, a variety of would-be do-gooders have told people (usually charging them a fee along the way) that the only way to improve their lives is to think positively about themselves. Frenchman Emile Coue told his 19th-century readers to repeat to themselves “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” Englishman Samuel Smiles admonished his Victorian readers readers that “Heaven helps them who help themselves.” American Norman Vincent Peale also extolled the virtue of “positive thinking.”
This astonishingly simple idea has worked its way into all manner of psychotherapy, educational theory, and everyday life. And like most astonishingly simple ideas, it turns out to be false. Indeed, it turns out to be harmful. Continue reading Self-Help Hurts→
In the most recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 program, “Great Lives,” American comedian Ruby Wax and analyst Andrew Samuels (U. Essex) are interviewed by Matthew Parris about the theories of the famed Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The discussion initially aims at promoting the Jungian approach and at entertainment. But it eventually arrives at some interesting historical matters and it is sprinkled with clips of Jung himself being interviewed by John Freeman in 1959.
The most recent episode of BBC Radio 4’s Mind Changers programme explores “Carl Rogers and the Person-Centred Approach.” As described on the BBC site,.svg/550px-Americas_(orthographic_projection).svg.png)
Currently streaming on 
This month’s article in the Time Capsule section of the 
Today’s New York Times has an 
For over 150 years, a variety of would-be do-gooders have told people (usually charging them a fee along the way) that the only way to improve their lives is to think positively about themselves. Frenchman Emile Coue told his 19th-century readers to repeat to themselves “Every day in every way, I am getting better and better.” Englishman Samuel Smiles admonished his Victorian readers readers that “Heaven helps them who help themselves.” American Norman Vincent Peale also extolled the virtue of “positive thinking.”
In the most recent