Psychotherapy in Europe

Abstract

Psychotherapy was an invention of European modernity, but as the 20th century unfolded, and we trace how it crossed national and continental borders, its goals and the particular techniques by which it operated become harder to pin down. This introduction briefly draws together the historical literature on psychotherapy in Europe, asking comparative questions about the role of location and culture, and networks of transmission and transformation. It introduces the six articles in this special issue on Greece, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Russia, Britain and Sweden as well as its parallel special issue of History of Psychology on ‘Psychotherapy in the Americas’. It traces what these articles tell us about how therapeutic developments were entangled with the dramatic, and often traumatic, political events across the continent: in the wake of the Second World War, the emergence of Communist and authoritarian regimes, the establishment of welfare states and the advance of neoliberalism.

The crying boss: Activating “human resources” through sensitivity training in 1970s Sweden

“…This book is highly important to the study, not only because its explicit aim is to present "consumer information" about sensitivity training to a general audience but also because it demonstrates how sensitivity trainers from the PA-council, such as the social psychologist and consultant Jonas Kjellin, and journalists like Ramsby, collaborated in launching the new method (Kjellin & Ramsby, 1972, p. 63). 4 As I will demonstrate in the following, the case of sensitivity training in Sweden offers important new insights into the field of cultural research concerned with "therapeutic culture," "therapeutic discourse," or the "therapeutization" of Western societies in the second half of the 20th century (Amouroux et al, 2021;Eitler & Elberfeld, 2015;Marks, 2018;Maasen et al, 2011;Rose, 1996, pp. 156-168;Rosner, 2018;Tändler & Jensen, 2012;Wright, 2008).…”

“…As I will demonstrate in the following, the case of sensitivity training in Sweden offers important new insights into the field of cultural research concerned with “therapeutic culture,” “therapeutic discourse,” or the “therapeutization” of Western societies in the second half of the 20th century (Amouroux et al, 2021; Eitler & Elberfeld, 2015; Marks, 2018; Maasen et al, 2011; Rose, 1996, pp. 156–168; Rosner, 2018; Tändler & Jensen, 2012; Wright, 2008).…”

Putting psychotherapy in its place: The regionalization of behavior therapy in France, Switzerland, and Belgium, 1960s–1990s

“…In contrast to this perspective favored in practitioner's histories, Sarah Marks ( 2017 , 2018 ), Rachel Rosner ( 2018 ), and Sonu Shamdasani ( 2018 ) have recently called for a cultural and social history of psychotherapies. In this approach, emphasis is placed on the cultural, social, and political formations that have shaped the emergence and development of psychotherapies in specific locales and time periods, as well as on the networks involved in their dissemination.…”

Histories of sexology today: Reimagining the boundaries of scientia sexualis

“…Indeed, balancing sexology’s global dimensions with its regional specificities has become a central preoccupation, as scholars unearth both sexology’s transnational exchanges and its unique and uneven development in locales around the world. Recent years have seen a rapid increase in scholarship on Eastern European sexological histories, including in the pages of this journal (Lišková, 2016; Marks, 2018; Savelli, 2018) and at international meetings such as the European Social Science History conference; such work has also been popularized by works such as Kristen Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism (2018). These and other scholars are charting an increasingly nuanced account of the many region-specific factors at play across different socialist contexts such as Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, and East Germany, highlighting the ways in which ‘scientific’ knowledge about sexuality in the 20th century was always caught up in broader sociopolitical ideologies and structures, including gender politics.…”