Why does the history of psychotherapy matter? And to whom?
These are the questions at the heart of two coordinated special issues dedicated to the history of psychotherapy.
The first special issue, in History of Psychology, (Guest Editor: Rachael Rosner), looks at the history of psychotherapy in the Americas. The second, in History of the Human Sciences (Guest Editor: Sarah Marks), focuses on psychotherapy in Europe.
The editors and guest editors of these two journals have assembled a wide range of scholarship that extends our understanding of the transcultural history of psychotherapy — and the answers to the question of why the history of psychotherapy matters are surprising.
It is now clear that a broad spectrum of psychotherapeutic practices existed in the western world decades before, in addition to being contemporaneous with and/or integrated with, psychoanalysis. This finding holds across the Americas and Europe, extending as far south as Argentina and as far east as the Soviet bloc.
These practices — like Hypnotherapy in Hungary, Mind Cure in the U.S., LSD Therapy in Canada, Kardecian Spiritism in Cuba and Brazil, a "Socialist Psychotherapy" in Yugoslavia and a psychoanalysis for the "social good" in Greece — have existed historically at the junction of religion, politics, psychology and medicine. They filled a crucial void in the care of people's emotional lives that neither governments nor doctors — independent of time and place — could meet on their own.
The robustness of these findings extends even to very recent history, where innovations like John Teasdale's Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy interfaced with Buddhism in the United Kingdom; Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behavior Therapy resolved political exigencies in Sweden; a new breed of psychologist-psychoanalyst helped modulate the volatile political climate in Argentina; and new forms of family therapy fostered the acceptance of gay marriage and gay families in the U.S.
Psychotherapy has always been, and will continue to be, a remedy not only for our personal struggles but also for social challenges that larger entities like governments, the church, and medicine have struggled to meet.
This scholarship underscores the fact that the therapist's own milieu matters just as much as the client's: The very practices that therapists employ, and that scientists study experimentally with such care, are themselves culturally mediated, the products of ongoing negotiations between very specific spiritual, political and medical needs at the local level with broader transcultural and transnational networks of information and practices.
To study psychotherapy without an awareness of this historical-cultural nexus is to miss one of its most important features.
The history of psychotherapy also matters to historians, it turns out.
These two special issues mark a watershed moment in historical scholarship more broadly. For decades, historians have struggled to figure out where psychotherapy fits into the standard categories of "history of medicine," "history of psychology, "history of science," etc.
These special issues represent the coming of age of a new field of "the history of psychotherapy." Surely more exciting discoveries are on the way.
Special Issue
- View the table of contents and abstracts on APA PsycNET
- Purchase the special issue
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Note: This article is in the Core of Psychology topic area. View more articles in the Core of Psychology topic area.