History and the topsy-turvy world of psychotherapy.

Abstract

This special issue talks about the history of psychotherapy. It was inspired by the events of a 3-day conference, "From Moral Treatments to Psychotherapeutics: Histories of Psychotherapy From the York Retreat to the Present Day". The conference was small and the ideas were exciting. It was clear that enthusiasm was high for exploring possibilities in something called "the history of psychotherapy". (PsycINFO Database Record

The “Chicago School of Psychology” and Hypnotic Magazine: Suggestive therapeutics, public psychologies, and new thought pluralism, 1895–1910.

“…Considering both the wide-ranging cultural reach of psychotherapeutic philosophy and the innumerable varieties of its mind cure applications, two leading historians have emphasized that psychotherapy has a plurality of histories and that we should be mindful of this pluralistic past when crafting its histories (Shamdasani, 2004(Shamdasani, , 2005Taylor, 1996Taylor, , 2000. Approaching the histories of psychological healing can be an unwieldy, if not bewildering, undertaking, as psychotherapy encompassed conflicting theories and practices crossing disciplinary boundaries and junctions (Rosner, 2018). Particularly did suggestive therapeutics find itself associated in the public mind with Christian Science, magnetic healing, homeopathy, and osteopathy, an identification that weakened the perception of suggestive therapeutics as a distinct therapeutic method.…”

“…This eclectic approach in treating patients, along with the variety of psychical topics found in the pages of Flower's and Parkyn's monthly magazines, distinguished Chicago's brand of suggestive therapeutics from that found in Boston and 1 In 1990, an eminent historian of psychoanalysis noted, "Unfortunately, we know relatively little about the history of modern psychotherapy and even less within a comparative cultural framework" (Roazen, 1990, p. 4). Today, that is far less true thanks to a resurgence of scholarly interest in psychotherapy studies, as reflected by fresh approaches to the history of psychotherapy found in separate special issues of History of the Human Sciences, History of Psychology, and other recent works offering new perspectives (Green, 2019;Marks, 2017;Rosner, 2018;Shamdasani, 2017Shamdasani, , 2018.…”

Toward a transnational feminist psychology of women’s reproductive experiences.

“…Transnational psychologists have joined with critical scholars to point out U.S. psychology's deep roots in the expressive individualism of middleclass White America (Christopher et al, 2014;Cushman, 1995;Kirschner, 1996;Marecek & Christopher, 2018;Rosner, 2018). This cultural orientation places a high value on liberty, equality, independence, privacy, choice, self-expansion, and untrammeled self-expression.…”

“A backdrop for psychotherapy”: Carl R. Rogers, psychological testing, and the psycho-educational clinic at Columbia University’s Teachers College (1924–1935).

“…Such lack of clarity has been passed on to secondary literature. Marks (2017, p. 4) and Rosner (2018, p. 182) have recently pointed out that, as a topic of historical inquiry, Rogers’ approach to clinical psychology is full of historiographical lacunae. His stay at Teachers College has been completely omitted from most historical reconstructions, whether on the history of clinical psychology (Benjamin, 2005; Reisman, 1991; Routh, 2000), on the history of psychotherapy (Cautin, 2011; Taylor, 2000), on the history of humanistic psychology (Watson et al, 2011) or on the history of the client-centered therapy (Raskin et al, 2011).…”