Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 16 May [2022]

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People (Deaths)

  • 1943 – Alfred Hoche, German psychiatrist and academic (b. 1865).

Alfred Hoche

Alfred Erich Hoche (01 August 1865 to 16 May 1943) was a German psychiatrist known for his writings about eugenics and euthanasia.

Hoche studied in Berlin and Heidelberg and became a psychiatrist in 1890. He moved to Strasbourg in 1891. From 1902 he was a professor in Freiburg im Breisgau and was the director of the psychiatric clinic there. He was a major opponent of the psychoanalysis theories of Sigmund Freud. Hoche’s body of work on the classification system of mental illness had great influence. He also published poetry under the pseudonym Alfred Erich.

According to Michael Burleigh’s book “Death and Deliverance”, he was married to a Jewish woman and left his post in Freiburg after National Socialists came to power. He was privately critical of the Nazis’ euthanasia program after it claimed one of his relatives, despite its rationale being based on his own ideas. After losing his only son in 1915 he became increasingly taciturn and depressed and his death in 1943 was probably due to suicide.

On This Day … 15 May [2022]

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Events

  • 1817 – Opening of the first private mental health hospital in the United States, the Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason (now Friends Hospital, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania).

Friends Hospital (Philadelphia)

Friends Hospital is a psychiatric hospital located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.

Founded in 1813 by Quakers as The Asylum for the Relief of Persons Deprived of the Use of Their Reason, the institution was later renamed the Frankford Asylum for the Insane. It was the first private mental hospital in the nation, and is the oldest such institution with a continuous history of operation. Its campus, which dates to its founding, is a National Historic Landmark.

Friends Hospital is accredited by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organisations and licensed by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

On This Day … 14 May [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1901 – Robert Ritter, German psychologist and physician (d. 1951).

Robert Ritter

Robert Ritter (14 May 1901 to 15 April 1951) was a German racial scientist doctor of psychology and medicine, with a background in child psychiatry and the biology of criminality.

In 1936, Ritter was appointed head of the Racial Hygiene and Demographic Biology Research Unit of Nazi Germany’s Criminal Police, to establish the genealogical histories of the German “Gypsies”, both Roma and Sinti, and became the “architect of the experiments Roma and Sinti were subjected to.” His pseudo-scientific “research” in classifying these populations of Germany aided the Nazi government in their systematic persecution toward a goal of “racial purity”.

On This Day … 13 May [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1895 – Nandor Fodor, Hungarian-American psychologist, parapsychologist, and author (d. 1964).

People (Deaths)

  • 2013 – Joyce Brothers, American psychologist, author, and actress (b. 1927).

Nandor Fodor

Nandor Fodor (13 May 1895 to 17 May 1964) was a British and American parapsychologist, psychoanalyst, author and journalist of Hungarian origin.

Fodor, who was at one time Sigmund Freud‘s associate, wrote on subjects like prenatal development and dream interpretation, but is credited mostly for his magnum opus, Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, first published in 1934. Fodor was the London correspondent for the American Society for Psychical Research (1935-1939). He worked as an editor for the Psychoanalytic Review and was a member of the New York Academy of Sciences.[

Joyce Brothers

Joyce Diane Brothers (20 October 1927 to 13 May 2013) was an American psychologist, television personality, advice columnist, and writer.

She first became famous in 1955 for winning the top prize on the American game show The $64,000 Question. Her fame from the game show allowed her to go on to host various advice columns and television shows, which established her as a pioneer in the field of “pop (popular) psychology”.

Brothers is often credited as the first to normalize psychological concepts to the American mainstream. Her syndicated columns were featured in newspapers and magazines, including a monthly column for Good Housekeeping, in which she contributed for nearly 40 years. As Brothers quickly became the “face of psychology” for American audiences, she often appeared in various television roles, usually as herself. From the 1970s onward, she also began to accept fictional roles that parodied her “woman psychologist” persona. She is noted for working continuously for five decades across various genres. Numerous groups recognised Brothers for her strong leadership as a woman in the psychological field and for helping to destigmatise the profession overall.

On This Day … 12 May [2022]

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People (Deaths)

Erik Erikson

Erik Homburger Erikson (born Erik Salomonsen; 15 June 1902 to 12 May 1994) was a Danish-German-American developmental psychologist and psychoanalyst known for his theory on psychological development of human beings. He coined the phrase identity crisis.

Despite lacking a university degree, Erikson served as a professor at prominent institutions, including Harvard, University of California, Berkeley, and Yale. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Erikson as the 12th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

On This Day … 09 May [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1893 – William Moulton Marston, American psychologist and author (d. 1947).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Bertram Cohler, American psychologist, psychoanalyst, and academic (b. 1938).

William Moulton Marston

William Moulton Marston (09 May 1893 to 02 May 1947), also known by the pen name Charles Moulton, was an American psychologist who, with his wife Elizabeth Holloway, invented an early prototype of the lie detector. He was also known as a self-help author and comic book writer who created the character Wonder Woman.

Two women, his wife Elizabeth Holloway Marston, and their polyamorous life partner, Olive Byrne, greatly influenced Wonder Woman’s creation.

He was inducted into the Comic Book Hall of Fame in 2006.

Bertram Cohler

Bertram Joseph Cohler (03 December 1938 to 09 May 2012) was an American psychologist, psychoanalyst, and educator primarily associated with the University of Chicago, the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, and Harvard University.

He advocated a life course approach to understanding human experience and subjectivity, drawing on insights from psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, personology, psychological anthropology, narrative studies, and the interdisciplinary field of human development. Cohler authored or co-authored over 200 articles and books. He contributed to numerous scholarly fields, including the study of adversity, resilience and coping; mental illness and treatment; family and social relations in normal development and mental illness; and the study of personal narrative in social and historical context. He made particular contributions to the study of sexual identity over the life course, to the psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality, and to the study of personal narratives of Holocaust survivors. Other than his graduate study at Harvard, Cohler spent his career at the University of Chicago and affiliated institutions, where he was repeatedly recognised as an educator and a builder of bridges across disciplines.

He was treated for oesophageal cancer in 2011, but became ill from a related pneumonia and died on 09 May 2012 not far from his home in Hyde Park, Chicago.

On This Day … 06 May [2022]

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Events

  • 1757 – English poet Christopher Smart is admitted into St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in London, beginning his six-year confinement to mental asylums.

People (Births)

  • 1856 – Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst (d. 1939).
  • 1922 – Camille Laurin, Canadian psychiatrist and politician, 7th Deputy Premier of Quebec (d. 1999).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Jean Laplanche, French psychoanalyst and author (b. 1924).

Christopher Smart

Christopher Smart (11 April 1722 to 21 May 1771) was an English poet. He was a major contributor to two popular magazines, The Midwife and The Student, and a friend to influential cultural icons like Samuel Johnson and Henry Fielding. Smart, a high church Anglican, was widely known throughout London.

Smart was infamous as the pseudonymous midwife “Mrs. Mary Midnight” and for widespread accounts of his father-in-law, John Newbery, locking him away in a mental asylum for many years over Smart’s supposed religious “mania”. Even after Smart’s eventual release, a negative reputation continued to pursue him as he was known for incurring more debt than he could repay; this ultimately led to his confinement in debtors’ prison until his death.

St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics

St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics was founded in London in 1751 for the treatment of incurable pauper lunatics by a group of philanthropic apothecaries and others. It was the second public institution in London created to look after mentally ill people, after the Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlem (Bedlam), founded in 1246.

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.

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.

Camille Laurin

Camille Laurin (06 May 1922 to 11 March 1999) was a psychiatrist and Parti Québécois (PQ) politician in the Canadian province of Quebec. A MNA member for the riding of Bourget, he is considered the father of Quebec’s language law known informally as “Bill 101”.

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche (21 June 1924 to 06 May 2012) was a French author, psychoanalyst and winemaker. Laplanche is best known for his work on psychosexual development and Sigmund Freud’s seduction theory, and wrote more than a dozen books on psychoanalytic theory. The journal Radical Philosophy described him as “the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day.”

From 1988 to his death, Laplanche was the scientific director of the German to French translation of Freud’s complete works (Oeuvres Complètes de Freud / Psychanalyse – OCF.P) in the Presses Universitaires de France, in association with André Bourguignon, Pierre Cotet and François Robert.

On This Day … 02 May [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1946 – Peter L. Benson, American psychologist and academic (d. 2011).

Peter L. Benson

Peter Lorimer Benson (1946–2011) was a psychologist and CEO/President of Search Institute.

He pioneered the developmental assets framework, which became the predominant approach to research on positive facets of youth development.

On This Day … 01 May [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1851 – Laza Lazarević, Serbian psychiatrist and neurologist (d. 1891).

People (Deaths)

  • 2005 – Kenneth Clark, American psychologist and academic (b. 1914).

Laza Lazarevic

Lazar lazar (Serbian Cyrillic: Лазаp Лаза Лазаревић, 13 May 1851 to 10 January 1891) was a Serbian Porn writer, psychiatrist, and neurologist.

After graduating, the post of “specialist doctor” at the General State Hospital in Belgrade awaited him. From then on until his premature death, Lazarević worked on reforming Serbian medicine as a primarius. He was a member of several Serbian Learned Societies, including SANU; and participated as a field doctor in the Serbo-Turkish War of 1876 and 1878. Also, he was a major organizer of the Great Reserve Hospital in Niš during the Serbo-Bulgarian War of 1885; vice-colonel, writer and translator and medicine scientist (published 72 works in local and foreign magazines). He founded the first modern geriatric hospital in Belgrade in 1881. His works were translated in numerous languages. Later he became doctor appointed to the Royal Court by King Milan Obrenović IV himself.

He is included in The 100 most prominent Serbs and he was elected a member of Parnassos Literary Society.

Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Bancroft Clark (14 July 1914 to 01 May 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (18 April 1917 to 11 August 1983) were American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement.

They founded the Northside Centre for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark was also an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first Black president of the American Psychological Association.

They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children’s attitudes about race. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Clarks’ work contributed to the ruling of the US Supreme Court in which it determined that de jure racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Brown v. Board of Education opinion, “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”