One century ago, in the year before Freud and Jung"s
famous visit here, American psychiatry was in crisis. There
had been hope to treatments like hydrotherapy and electric
1
stimulation, along with asylum care, but cure rates had
proved disappointed. Meanwhile, psychologists had a sense
2
that social pressures, including a trend toward later marriage,
3
were causing illness rates to rise. That"s why there
was growing enthusiasm for psychotherapies, especially
those involved the revelation of repressed sexual drives.
4
This cutting-edge treatment—medical, as opposed to already
popular religion-based psychotherapies—was not
well-developed and widely available, but its principles
5
were understood at the leading centers. For fifty years,
psychiatry moved on to this track—the elaboration of
6
Freudian principles. We accept the premise that the active
7
elements in therapy are "general" ones, like the rapport
between patient and doctor, then it is little reason to
8
believe that what we offer today is more effective than
what patients receive in the first half of the last century.
9
Psychoanalysis, in imitation of its founder, became
rigid and authoritarian. In response, variant treatments flourished,
10
including ones that found a room for empathy from
the therapist, rather than emotional withholding. By the
1970"s, researchers counted hundreds of distinct schools of
psychotherapy. I loved those middle years—loved to collect
odd therapies and stitch their methods into my work.