Psychotherapy in historical perspective

Marks, Sarah

doi:10.1177/0952695117703243

Cited by 37 publications

(28 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…The Stoic philosopher Seneca’s therapeutic recommendation to exist in the present moment (Crocq, 2015) is one of the key objectives in techniques such as mindfulness which is central to modern therapies, including Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; Crocq, 2015; Hayes et al, 1999; Marks, 2017). ACT, which is frequently hailed as the third wave of CBT (Hayes, 2004), is centered around the development of cognitive flexibility through the acceptance of uncomfortable thoughts and feelings that are unable to be controlled (Eifert et al, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Feel Abused by My Own Mind”: Themes of Control in Men’s Online Accounts of Living With Anxiety

et al. 2020

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Men’s experiences with anxiety are under-researched and poorly understood. Existing research gives little indication of how men talk about anxiety in situ, and little is known about how men describe their experiences of anxiety. Online discussion forums provide an opportunity to conduct naturalistic observations of how men describe their experiences with anxiety without the influence of a researcher. Thematic analysis, informed by principles of discursive psychology, was used to examine 130 opening posts to an online anxiety discussion forum. One superordinate theme, where anxiety is constructed as a loss of control, was identified. Analysis of this overarching theme generated three themes relating to how posters described a loss of control: (a) anxiety as an immobilizing force, (b) anxiety as an independent entity, and (c) anxiety as a dualist construction of the self. Our analysis has clear implications for developing and improving interventions for men experiencing anxiety.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“I Feel Abused by My Own Mind”: Themes of Control in Men’s Online Accounts of Living With Anxiety

et al. 2020

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“…The concept of psychotherapy has historical origins that go back to the Greco-Roman world, during a period extending roughly from the 5th century BCE up to the 2nd century AD (Depreeuw et al, 2017;Marks, 2017). The extent and diversity of the relevant textual evidence makes it possible to draw reliable conclusions about the various ancient practices related to what is generally called the "cure of the soul" (therapeia t es psuch es).…”

Section: Psychotherapy In the Ancient Worldmentioning

confidence: 99%

“Other psychotherapies”: Healing interactions across time, geography, and culture

White

McGeachan

Miller

et al. 2020

Transcult Psychiatry

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This article introduces the special issue of Transcultural Psychiatry entitled “Other Psychotherapies”: Healing Interactions across Time, Geographies, and Cultures. This special issue is intended to highlight that, rather than being exclusively a modern phenomenon, variants of psychotherapeutic practice have existed for millennia in diverse sociocultural contexts. This article explores the historical development of Western psychotherapy and points to the important contribution that Greco-Roman scholars from antiquity made to contemporary understandings of mental states and emotional wellbeing. The ways in which healing interactions have been localized to reflect the local cultural and geographic contexts are also highlighted through a discussion of recent work in psychotherapeutic geographies. This allows us to identify commonalities and differences between various forms of psychotherapy. We also consider how particular subcultures may influence the future development of psychotherapy. This article serves to foreshadow the themes that are explored in more detail in the collection of articles that make up the “Other Psychotherapies” special issue. The various articles that contribute to the special issue are introduced, and the key issues explored by these articles briefly highlighted. The intention of the special issue is to facilitate an opportunity to appreciate the ways in which psychotherapies are a product of the epoch, setting, and institutions that shape people’s lives.

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“…This employment of visual imagery and interest in the meaning of material artefacts is methodologically original for both medical history and medical humanities more generally. Furthermore, this work fits into the ongoing historiographic project of tracing the development of psychotherapy in different contexts (Marks, 2017). It recovers the different values that have accrued around reclining posture historically and geographically, and that have led to the apparently automatic acceptance of the couch among clinicians.…”

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confidence: 92%

Book Review: Nathan Kravis, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud

Phelan

2019

Hist Psychiatry

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On the Couch by Nathan Kravis takes a social historical route to unravelling the enigma of the psychoanalytic couch and the reclining analysand. Underexplored and 'undertheorized' until now, due to constraints such as case sensitivity, this work searches well beyond Freud's justification for the analysand's supine state: his declared aversion to constantly meeting the patient's gaze (p. 1). Here, through a remarkably varied melange of sources, Kravis, a practising psychoanalyst and historian of psychiatry, sustains a cogent narrative of psychoanalysis's distinct 'choreography', that is, 'the "repressed" history of the analytic couch' (p. xi). As Kravis highlights in Chapter One, alongside this want of a substantial rationale for the use of the couch is its striking visibility in both the psychoanalytic community and widespread culture. Kravis's methodological approach, set out here, is thus to contextualize this exemplary status through undertaking a 'social history of recumbent posture' (p. 8). The first chapters unearth the different meanings Europeans have inscribed onto the act of lying supine, starting with the Classical Age. Diverse contexts of reclining are recovered in the chapters that follow. Chapter Two resurrects the 'ceremonial' importance of 'recumbence' (p. 28, original emphasis). Spotlighting the tradition of 'reclining dining', expressive of social standing and amusement (p. 11), at celebratory occasions such as the Greek 'symposion' and the Roman 'convivium' (p. 12, original emphasis), it then traces the adoption of supine states into sacred art (p. 28). Chapter Three views developments in 'furniture fashion' as an aperture onto changing models of home life and aesthetics (p. 43), exploring, for example, connections between the growing popularity of 'reclining chairs' suited to repose and dialogue, and the less solemn rule of Louis XV (p. 39). Chapter Four addresses how the theme of recumbent posture recurred in changing forms across 'portraiture' (p. 47), dwelling on mid-eighteenth-century representations of women, defiant and cerebral, in the act of reading (pp. 78-82). Chapter Five moves the discussion on reclining posture into therapeutic contexts, addressing the increasing prevalence of mobile seating such as the 'adjustable chaise-longue' and 'the Schlafsofa (sleep sofa or recliner couch)' (p. 99, original emphasis) for the unwell and wealthy coastal vacationers, from the start of the nineteenth century (p. 97). The particular nineteenth-century psychiatric culture in which Sigmund Freud was embedded is revived in Chapter Six: physiological and psychological therapeutics such as 'hypnosis, hydrotherapy, cutaneous and electrotherapy, phototherapy, diet and rest cures' necessitated lying down, thus entangling 'recumbence and cure' in medical and lay mindsets (p. 115). Unravelling its 'romantic' and 'asylum' derivations (p. 127), Chapter Seven locates Freud's therapeutic employment of the couch in his late-nineteenth-century use of 885055H PY0010.

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Psychotherapy in historical perspective

Cited by 37 publications

References 31 publications

“I Feel Abused by My Own Mind”: Themes of Control in Men’s Online Accounts of Living With Anxiety

“I Feel Abused by My Own Mind”: Themes of Control in Men’s Online Accounts of Living With Anxiety

“Other psychotherapies”: Healing interactions across time, geography, and culture

Book Review: Nathan Kravis, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud

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