A pretty good overview of the recent history and developments of the disciplines dealing with our minds and happiness. Useful for people who don’t know the difference between psychotherapy and psychoanalysis, or can’t tell the difference between psychologists and psychiatrists. Especially important for those who still think Freudianism is the state of the art.
Freudianism sits alongside Marxism and Darwinism in the pantheon of modern theories held to be so revelatory that they not only gained the adherence of Western intelligentsia but shaped the broader culture. During the first half of the twentieth century, an air of intrigue and mystery hovered around Freud’s newly anointed practitioners. Psychotherapists occupied a strange universe, speaking in a language so incomprehensible but seemingly authoritative that it alternately awed and scared the average man on the street.
The popular rise of psychotherapy was intertwined with the popular rise of psychoanalysis. Freudian ideas had been popular with intellectuals and artists in the 1920s, but it was not until the 1950s, with the crisis in mental health, that they widely penetrated the public consciousness. Although few clinical psychologists of this era practiced Freudian psychoanalysis, they distilled Freud’s ideas into buzzwords, which appeared frequently in their conversations, writings, and speeches, thereby tapping into the public consciousness and identifying with people’s concerns.
Since Freud’s day, psychotherapy had generally been a slow, ongoing process of self-reflection and transformation, often requiring many sessions over years. Experiments with short-term therapy first began during the exigencies of World War II, when government needed to return battled-scarred soldiers to the front as soon as possible. But the real boom in short-term psychotherapy came with the growth of those community mental health centers in the 1960s. It represented an ad hoc response to the public’s urgent needs rather than an expert-driven application of abstruse theory — indeed, it grew out of a defiance of the experts.
Much as they had engaged in a broader philosophical struggle with psychiatry during the 1950s, therapists in the 1970s sought to counter the increasingly predominant view within primary care that unhappiness was biochemical in nature, and the best treatment for it pharmaceutical. Clinical psychologists, counselors, and social workers who performed therapy worked together to promote a rival view, changing their image to that of the caring professional. They began to present themselves less as disinterested scientists and more as “caregivers” eager to talk to patients about their everyday problems — unlike doctors, who just wanted to drug them.
The popularization of self-esteem, stress, and related ideas was not simply the work of the clinical psychologists who employed the terms professionally. It represented an ideological shift in American society. Whether the words an ideology uses are esoteric or common, the content must express the interests and aspirations of the people to which it is directed. The new “caring” ideology did just this.
It was only natural that [managed-care executives and laymen] should see in the innumerable obscure distinctions of psychoanalysis a manifestation of the inherent falsehood of Freudian doctrine.
Gone are the days when therapists were dedicated to the doctrines of Freud and Jung, when the field was suffused with an air of priestly sanctity, heavy with the odors of tradition and authority.
Once a consecrated priesthood, therapists today walk along the smooth road of ordinary duty. They help people with their everyday problems. They speak in a casual manner and even crack jokes. They are friendly. They smile. They differ neither outwardly nor inwardly from the clients they serve, for whom therapy has become a useful organization, a convenient and respectable appendage to existence, a sometimes necessary form of artificial friendship.
