Psychoanalysis
The method of treatment created by Sigmund Freud, which looks for the causes of symptoms in what the patient says, together with the theory built on it.
In a lecture of 1909 Freud himself said that the first to apply the method to a patient was not he but Josef Breuer[1]. Freud modified Breuer's procedure, and in 1896 announced that in all eighteen patients he had analysed the memories led back to sexual abuse in early childhood. He later withdrew that theory[2].
Psychoanalysis came to dominate American psychiatry in the 1940s, and by the mid-1950s nearly every department chairman of psychiatry in the United States was an advocate of it[3].
Its effect was examined in 1952, when Hans Eysenck gathered published reports and compared them. The share of neurotic patients recovered or improved was 44 percent for psychoanalysis (about 66 percent of those who finished treatment) and 72 percent for patients without specialist psychotherapy. Eysenck concluded that the figures fail to prove that psychotherapy helps recovery[4].
Related terms
- Talking cureA treatment that tries to relieve symptoms by having the patient talk. The name was given in English in the early 1880s by Josef Breuer's patient known as Anna O.
- HysteriaIn nineteenth-century medicine, the name for an illness in which symptoms such as paralysis or fits appear although no injury or lesion can be found to explain them.
- NeurosisA diagnostic grouping used until the mid-twentieth century for states of anxiety, compulsion, hysteria and the like.
Sources
- S. Freud, “The Origin and Development of Psychoanalysis,” American Journal of Psychology 21, 181–218 (1910).
- S. Freud, “Zur Ätiologie der Hysterie,” Wiener klinische Rundschau 10(22–26); English translation in the Standard Edition, vol. 3, 191–221 (1896).
- K. S. Kendler, R. A. Muñoz, G. Murphy, “The Development of the Feighner Criteria: A Historical Perspective,” American Journal of Psychiatry 167(2), 134–142 (2010).
- H. J. Eysenck, “The Effects of Psychotherapy: An Evaluation,” Journal of Consulting Psychology 16, 319–324 (1952).