Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 23 September [2022]

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People (Deaths)

  • 1939 – Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist (b. 1856).

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 06 May 1856 to 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies in the psyche through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938, Freud left Austria to escape Nazi persecution. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud’s redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfilments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis, Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego. Freud postulated the existence of libido, sexualised energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression, and neurotic guilt. In his later works, Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.

Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and across the humanities. It thus continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate concerning its therapeutic efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or hinders the feminist cause. Nonetheless, Freud’s work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. W.H. Auden’s 1940 poetic tribute to Freud describes him as having created “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives”.

On This Day … 22 September [2022]

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People (Deaths)

  • 1988 – Rais Amrohvi, Pakistani psychoanalyst, scholar, and poet (b. 1914).
  • 2012 – Jan Hendrik van den Berg, Dutch psychiatrist and academic (b. 1914).

Rais Amrohvi

Rais Amrohvi (Urdu: رئیس امروہوی), whose real name was Syed Muhammad Mehdi (1914-1988) was a Pakistani scholar, Urdu poet, paranormal investigator, and psychoanalyst and elder brother of Jaun Elia. He was known for his style of qatanigari (quatrain writing). He wrote quatrains for Pakistani newspaper Jang for several decade. He promoted the Urdu language and supported the Urdu-speaking people of Pakistan. His family is regarded as family of poets.

The Sindh Assembly passed The Sind Teaching, Promotion and Use of Sindhi Language Bill, 1972 that created conflict and language violence in the regime of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he wrote his famous poem Urdu ka janaza hai zara dhoom say niklay (It is the funeral of Urdu, carry it out with fanfare). He also intended to translate the Bhagavad Gita into standard Urdu.

Jan Hendrik van den Berg

Jan Hendrik van den Berg (11 June 1914 to 22 September 2012) was a Dutch psychiatrist notable for his work in phenomenological psychotherapy (cf. phenomenology) and metabletics, or “psychology of historical change.” He is the author of numerous articles and books, including A different existence and The changing nature of man.

On This Day … 21 September [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1946 – Mart Siimann, Estonian psychologist and politician, 12th Prime Minister of Estonia.

Mart Siimann

Mart Siimann (born 21 September 1946) was the Prime Minister of Estonia from 1997 to 1999, representing the liberal/centrist Estonian Coalition Party. He was the president of the Estonian Olympic Committee from 2001 to 2012.

Born at Kilingi-Nõmme, Siimann studied at the University of Tartu from 1965 to 1971. In 1971, he graduated as a philologist-psychologist. From 1989 to 1992, he was the director of the Estonian Television and from 1992 to 1995, Managing Director of Advertising Television Co. He was a member of the Estonian Parliament from 1995 to 1997 and from 1999 to 2003, elected as a Coalition Party member (but since 2001 served as the chairman of the centre-left/social democratic association “Mõistuse ja Südamega” (“With Reason and Heart”).

On This Day … 20 September [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1847 – Susanna Rubinstein, Austrian psychologist (d. 1914).

Susanna Rubinstein

Susanna or Susanne Rubinstein (20 September 1847 to 29 March 1914) was an Austrian psychologist and the first woman to earn a doctorate from the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Rubinstein was born in Czernowitz (then part of Austria-Hungary, now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) into the Jewish family of the banker and parliamentarian Isak Rubinstein (c. 1804-1878). Her mother died when she was young.

She and her three siblings were greatly encouraged to pursue their education, even though this was a time when girls were often denied that opportunity. (A high school for girls was eventually opened in Czernowitz in1898 and a girls’ grammar school was established only during the years just before the First World War).

At first, her father arranged for Rubinstein to take private lessons but, when it came time to finish high school, she was unable to take the necessary examinations from tutors, so she did so before an academic committee from a boys’ high school.

Rubinstein went on to study psychology and German literature at the University of Prague, in the spring of 1870, and then at the Leipzig University three years later. After being denied admission to the doctoral program in Basel, Switzerland, she enrolled at the University of Bern and there she gained a Ph.D. in 1874 in psychology and German literature. By doing so, she became the first woman to receive a doctorate in Bern. Her thesis was “Uber die sensoriellen und sensitiven Sinne” (“About the sensory and sensitive senses”).

With the completion of her doctorate, Rubinstein spent a year in Germany visiting Leipzig, Heidelberg and Munich.

Her 1878 work “Psychologisch-Asthetische Essays” (“Psychological-Aesthetic Essays”) has been described as “a major contribution to the study of human emotions”. It was reprinted in 2012 (Nabu Press, ISBN 978-1277814729).

Susanna Rubinstein died 29 March 1914 in Würzburg, Germany.

On This Day … 19 September [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1913 – Frances Farmer, American actress (d. 1970).
  • 1954 – Adam Phillips, Welsh psychotherapist and author.

Frances Farmer

Frances Elena Farmer (19 September 1913 to 01 August 1970) was an American actress and television hostess. She appeared in over a dozen feature films over the course of her career, though she garnered notoriety for the various sensationalised accounts of her life, especially her involuntary commitment to psychiatric hospitals and subsequent mental health struggles.

A native of Seattle, Washington, Farmer began acting in stage productions while a student at the University of Washington. After graduating, she began performing in stock theatre before signing a film contract with Paramount Pictures on her 22nd birthday in September 1935. She made her film debut in the B film Too Many Parents (1936), followed by another B picture, Border Flight, before being given the lead role opposite Bing Crosby in the musical Western Rhythm on the Range (1936). Unhappy with the opportunities the studio gave her, Farmer returned to stock theatre in 1937 before being cast in the original Broadway production of Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, staged by New York City’s Group Theatre. She followed this with two Broadway productions directed by Elia Kazan in 1939, but a battle with depression and binge drinking caused her to drop out of a subsequent Ernest Hemingway stage adaptation.

Farmer returned to Los Angeles, earning supporting roles in the comedy World Premiere (1941) and the film noir Among the Living (1941). In 1942, publicity of her reportedly erratic behaviour began to surface and, after several arrests and committals to psychiatric institutions, Farmer was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. At the request of her family, particularly her mother, she was committed to an institution in her home state of Washington, where she remained a patient until 1950. Farmer attempted an acting comeback, mainly appearing as a television host in Indianapolis on her own series, Frances Farmer Presents. Her final film role was in the 1958 drama The Party Crashers, after which she spent the majority of the 1960s occasionally performing in local theatre productions staged by Purdue University. In the spring of 1970, she was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer, from which she died on 01 August 1970, aged 56.

Farmer has been the subject of various works, including two feature films and several books, many of which focus on her time spent institutionalised, during which she claimed to have been subject to various systemic abuses. Her posthumously released, ghostwritten, and widely discredited autobiography, Will There Really Be a Morning? (1972), details these claims, but has been exposed as a largely fictional work by a friend of Farmer’s to clear debts. Another discredited 1978 biography of her life, Shadowland, alleged that Farmer underwent a transorbital lobotomy during her institutionalisation, but the author has since stated in court that he fabricated this incident and several other aspects of the book. A 1982 biographical film based on this book depicted these events as true, resulting in renewed interest in her life and career.

Adam Phillips

Adam Phillips (born 19 September 1954) is a British psychoanalytic psychotherapist and essayist.

Since 2003 he has been the general editor of the new Penguin Modern Classics translations of Sigmund Freud. He is also a regular contributor to the London Review of Books.

Joan Acocella, writing in The New Yorker, described Phillips as “Britain’s foremost psychoanalytic writer”,[2] an opinion echoed by historian Élisabeth Roudinesco in Le Monde.

On This Day … 18 September [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1888 – Toni Wolff, Swiss psychologist and author (d. 1953).
  • 1954 – Steven Pinker, Canadian-American psychologist, linguist, and author.

Toni Wolff

Toni Anna Wolff (18 September 1888 to 21 March 1953) was a Swiss Jungian analyst and a close collaborator of Carl Jung. During her analytic career Wolff published relatively little under her own name, but she helped Jung identify, define, and name some of his best-known concepts, including anima, animus, and persona, as well as the theory of the psychological types. Her best-known paper is an essay on four “types” or aspects of the feminine psyche: the Amazon, the Mother, the Hetaira, and the Medial (or mediumistic) Woman.

Steven Pinker

Steven Arthur Pinker (born 18 September 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

On This Day … 16 September [2022]

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People (Deaths)

  • 1980 – Jean Piaget, Swiss psychologist and philosopher (b. 1896).

Jean Piaget

Jean William Fritz Piaget (09 August 1896 to 16 September 1980) was a Swiss psychologist known for his work on child development. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called “genetic epistemology”.

Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that “only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual”. His theory of child development is studied in pre-service education programs. Educators continue to incorporate constructivist-based strategies.

Piaget created the International Centre for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 while on the faculty of the University of Geneva, and directed the centre until his death in 1980. The number of collaborations that its founding made possible, and their impact, ultimately led to the Centre being referred to in the scholarly literature as “Piaget’s factory”.

According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Piaget was “the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing”. However, his ideas did not become widely popularised until the 1960s. This then led to the emergence of the study of development as a major sub-discipline in psychology. By the end of the 20th century, Piaget was second only to B.F. Skinner as the most-cited psychologist of that era.

On This Day … 15 September [2022]

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People (Deaths)

Jurg Schubiger

Jürg Schubiger (14 October 1936 to 15 September 2014) was a Swiss psychotherapist and writer of children’s books. He won the Deutscher Jugendliteraturpreis (German Youth Literature Award) in 1996 for Als die Welt noch jung war.

For his “lasting contribution” as a children’s writer Schubiger received the biennial Hans Christian Andersen Medal in 2008. The award conferred by the International Board on Books for Young People is the highest recognition available to a writer or illustrator of children’s books.

On This Day … 13 September [2022]

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People (Deaths)

  • 1999 – Benjamin Bloom, American psychologist and academic (b. 1913).

Benjamin Bloom

Benjamin Samuel Bloom (21 February 1913 to 13 September 13, 1999) was an American educational psychologist who made contributions to the classification of educational objectives and to the theory of mastery learning.

He is particularly noted for leading educational psychologists to develop the comprehensive system of describing and assessing educational outcomes in the mid-1950s. He has influenced the practices and philosophies of educators around the world from the latter part of the twentieth century.

On This Day … 12 September [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1914 – Rais Amrohvi, Pakistani psychoanalyst, poet, and scholar (d. 1988).
  • 1922 – Mark Rosenzweig, American psychologist and academic (d. 2009).

People (Deaths)

  • 1986 – Charlotte Wolff, German-English psychotherapist and physician (b. 1897).

Rais Amrohvi

Rais Amrohvi (Urdu: رئیس امروہوی), whose real name was Syed Muhammad Mehdi (1914-1988) was a Pakistani scholar, Urdu poet, paranormal investigator, and psychoanalyst and elder brother of Jaun Elia. He was known for his style of qatanigari (quatrain writing). He wrote quatrains for Pakistani newspaper Jang for several decade. He promoted the Urdu language and supported the Urdu-speaking people of Pakistan. His family is regarded as family of poets.

The Sindh Assembly passed The Sind Teaching, Promotion and Use of Sindhi Language Bill, 1972 that created conflict and language violence in the regime of Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, he wrote his famous poem Urdu ka janaza hai zara dhoom say niklay (It is the funeral of Urdu, carry it out with fanfare). He also intended to translate the Bhagavad Gita into standard Urdu.

Mark Rosenzweig

Mark Richard Rosenzweig (12 September 1922 to 20 July 2009) was an American research psychologist whose research on neuroplasticity in animals indicated that the adult brain remains capable of anatomical remodelling and reorganisation based on life experiences, overturning the conventional wisdom that the brain reached full maturity in childhood.

Charlotte Wolff

Charlotte Wolff (30 September 1897 to 12 September 1986) was a German-British physician who worked as a psychotherapist and wrote on sexology and hand analysis. Her writings on lesbianism and bisexuality were influential early works in the field.