Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 05 November

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People (Births)

James Kennedy

James Kennedy (born 05 November 1950) is an American social psychologist, best known as an originator and researcher of particle swarm optimisation. The first papers on the topic, by Kennedy and Russell C. Eberhart, were presented in 1995; since then tens of thousands of papers have been published on particle swarms. The Academic Press / Morgan Kaufmann book, Swarm Intelligence, by Kennedy and Eberhart with Yuhui Shi, was published in 2001.

The particle swarm paradigm draws on social-psychological simulation research in which Kennedy had participated at the University of North Carolina, integrated with evolutionary computation methods that Eberhart had been working with in the 1990s. The result was a problem-solving or optimisation algorithm based on the principles of human social interaction. Individuals begin the programme with random guesses at the problem solution. As the program runs, the “particles” share their successes with their topological neighbours; each particle is both teacher and learner. Over time, the population converges reliably on optimal vectors.

While there has been a trend in the research literature toward a “Gbest” or centralised particle network, Blackwell and Kennedy (2018) demonstrated the importance of a distributed population topology in solving more complex problems.

A recent paper discusses the possible contribution of human female orgasm to the species’ prosociality.

Kennedy has been an active combatant in the controversy over sex education in Montgomery County, Maryland, supporting the public schools’ efforts to develop a comprehensive and inclusive programme. He also worked to support a gender identity non-discrimination law in Montgomery County that came under attack from conservatives, and has maintained an online progressive presence.

He also worked as a professional musician for fifty years and currently plays in a rockabilly band called The Colliders, which released albums in 2011 and 2015. In 2018 Kennedy released a DIY album, The Life of Mischief, and is currently organizing live performance of that material.

Kennedy worked in survey methods for the US government, and has conducted basic and applied research into social effects on cognition and attitude. He served as Director of the Office of Analysis and Research Services at the US International Trade Commission until his retirement in 2017. He has worked with particle swarms since 1994, with research publications in fields related and unrelated to swarms and surveys.

On This Day … 03 November

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People (Deaths)

  • 1957 – Wilhelm Reich, Ukrainian-Austrian psychotherapist and author (b. 1897).

Wilhlem Reich

Wilhelm Reich (24 March 1897 to 03 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, along with being a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud.

The author of several influential books, most notably The Impulsive Character (1925), Character Analysis (1933), and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), he became known as one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.

Reich’s work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour – the expression of the personality in the way the body moves – shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase “the sexual revolution” and according to one historian acted as its midwife. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.

After graduating in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud’s outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. During the 1930s, he was part of a general trend among younger analysts and Frankfurt sociologists that tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. He is credited for establishing the first sexual advisory clinics in Vienna, along with Marie Frischauf. He said he wanted to “attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment”.

He moved to New York in 1939, after having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research. During his five years in Oslo, he had coined the term “orgone energy” – from “orgasm” and “organism”—for the notion of life energy. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients. He claimed that his laboratory cancer mice had had remarkable positive effects from being kept in a Faraday cage, so he built human-size versions, where one could sit inside. This led to newspaper stories about “sex boxes” that cured cancer.

Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper’s in 1947, the US Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, believing they were dealing with a “fraud of the first magnitude”. Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later, days before he was due to apply for parole.

On This Day … 31 October

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People (Births)

  • 1918 – Ian Stevenson, American psychiatrist and academic (d. 2007).

People (Deaths)

  • 1939 – Otto Rank, Austrian psychologist, author, and educator (b. 1884).

Ian Stevenson

Ian Pretyman Stevenson (31 October 1918 to 08 February 2007) was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist.

He worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years, as chair of the department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death.

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (né Rosenfeld; 22 April 1884 to 31 October 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher.

Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud‘s closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud’s publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist.

In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.

On This Day … 29 October

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People (Deaths)

  • 1949 – George Gurdjieff, Armenian-French monk, psychologist, and philosopher (b. 1872).

George Gurdjieff

George Ivanovich Gurdjieff (1866-1877 to 29 October 1949) was a Russian philosopher, mystic, spiritual teacher, and composer of Armenian and Greek descent, born in Alexandropol, Russian Empire (now Gyumri, Armenia).

Gurdjieff taught that most humans do not possess a unified consciousness and thus live their lives in a state of hypnotic “waking sleep”, but that it is possible to awaken to a higher state of consciousness and achieve full human potential. Gurdjieff described a method attempting to do so, calling the discipline “The Work” or “the System”. According to his principles and instructions, Gurdjieff’s method for awakening one’s consciousness unites the methods of the fakir, monk and yogi, and thus he referred to it as the “Fourth Way”.

On This Day … 28 October

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People (Births)

  • 1943 – Karalyn Patterson, English psychologist and academic.

Karalyn Patterson

Karalyn Eve Patterson, FRS, FBA, FMedSci is a British psychologist in Department of Clinical Neurosciences, University of Cambridge and MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit. She is a specialist in cognitive neuropsychology and an Emeritus Fellow of Darwin College, Cambridge.

Patterson was born in Chicago and attended South Shore High School, Chicago, from which she graduated in 1961. She completed her Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) at the University of California, San Diego, in 1971.

In 1975, Patterson moved to England to take a position at the Applied Psychology Unit of the Medical Research Council (MRC) in Cambridge.

On This Day … 27 October

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People (Deaths)

  • 2011 – James Hillman, American psychologist and author (b. 1926).

James Hillman

James Hillman (12 April 1926 to 27 October 2011) was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut.

Early Life and Education

Hillman was born in Atlantic City, New Jersey in 1926. He was the third child of four born to Madeleine and Julian Hillman. James was born in Breakers Hotel, one of the hotels his father owned. His maternal grandfather was Joseph Krauskopf, a rabbi in the Reform Judaism movement, who emigrated to the United States from Prussia. After high school, he studied at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service for two years. He served in the US Navy Hospital Corps from 1944 to 1946, after which he attended the University of Paris, studying English Literature, and Trinity College, Dublin, graduating with a degree in mental and moral science in 1950. He began his career as associate editor for the Irish literary review, Envoy. In 1953 he moved to Switzerland where he met Carl Gustav Jung and began to study his work. He also met there and became friends with the maverick young Swiss doctor and psychotherapist, Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig. In 1959, he received his PhD from the University of Zurich, as well as his analyst’s diploma from the C.G. Jung Institute and was then appointed as Director of Studies at the institute, a position he held until 1969.

Career

In 1970, Hillman became editor of Spring Publications, a publishing company devoted to advancing Archetypal Psychology as well as publishing books on mythology, philosophy and art. His magnum opus, Re-visioning Psychology, was written in 1975 and nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Hillman then helped co-found the Dallas Institute for Humanities and Culture in 1978. His 1997 book, The Soul’s Code: In Search of Character and Calling, was on The New York Times Best Seller List that year. His works and ideas about philosophy and psychology have also been popularised by other authors such as the psychotherapist Thomas Moore. His published works, essays, manuscripts, research notes, and correspondence (through 1999) reside at OPUS Archives and Research Centre, located on the campuses of Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, California.

Hillman was married three times, lastly to Margot McLean-Hillman, who survived him. He has four children from his first marriage. He died at his home in Thompson, Connecticut, in 2011, from bone cancer.

On This Day … 26 October

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People (Births)

  • 1909 – Ignace Lepp, French psychologist and author (d. 1966).

Ignace Lepp

Ignace Lepp (born John Robert Lepp; 26 October 1909 to 29 May 1966) was a French writer of Estonian origin.

According to his book Atheism in Our Time, Lepp was an atheist and Marxist for many years and claimed to have occupied important positions in the communist party with whom he later became very disillusioned. He then converted to Roman Catholicism and was ordained a priest in 1941. He wrote many non-fiction books including some about atheism, religion, and later psychiatry, as he was a psychologist and psychoanalyst.

He wrote among other books: The Ways of Friendship, The Psychology of Loving, The Authentic Existence, The Communication of Existences. He also wrote The faith of men; meditations inspired by Teilhard de Chardin (Teilhard et la foi des homme), about the French thinker Pierre Teilhard de Chardin.

On This Day … 25 October

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People (Births)

  • 1918 – David Ausubel, American psychologist (d. 2008).
  • 1927 – Lawrence Kohlberg, American psychologist and author (d. 1987).
  • 1977 – Birgit Prinz, German footballer and psychologist.

People (Deaths)

  • 1826 – Philippe Pinel, French physician and psychiatrist (b. 1745).

David Ausubel

David Paul Ausubel (25 October 1918 to 09 July 2008) was an American psychologist. His most significant contribution to the fields of educational psychology, cognitive science, and science education learning was on the development and research on “advance organizers” since 1960.

He studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with honors in 1939, receiving a bachelor’s degree majoring in psychology. Ausubel later graduated from medical school in 1943 at Middlesex University where he went on to complete a rotating internship at Gouverneur Hospital, located in the lower east side of Manhattan, New York. Following his military service with the US Public Health Service, Ausubel earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Columbia University in 1950. He continued to hold a series of professorships at several schools of education.

In 1973, Ausubel retired from academic life and devoted himself to his psychiatric practice. During his psychiatric practice, Ausubel published many books as well as articles in psychiatric and psychological journals. In 1976, he received the Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association for “Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education”.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg (25 October 1927 to 09 January 1987) was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development.

He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget’s account of children’s moral development from twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg’s work reflected and extended not only Piaget’s findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin. At the same time he was creating a new field within psychology: “moral development”.

In an empirical study using six criteria, such as citations and recognition, Kohlberg was found to be the 30th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Birgit Prinz

Birgit Prinz (born 25 October 1977) is a German retired footballer, two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup champion and three-time FIFA World Player of the Year.

In addition to the German national team, Prinz played for 1. FFC Frankfurt in the Frauen-Bundesliga as well as the Carolina Courage in the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA), the first professional women’s league in the United States. Prinz remains one of the game’s most prolific strikers and is the second FIFA Women’s World Cup all-time leading scorer with 14 goals (second only to Marta from Brazil). On 12 August 2011, she announced the end of her active career.

She currently works as a sport psychologist for the men’s and women’s teams of 1. Bundesliga club TSG 1899 Hoffenheim.

Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel (20 April 1745 to 25 October 1826) was a French physician, precursor of psychiatry and incidentally a zoologist. He was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy. He worked for the abolition of the shackling of mental patients by chains and, more generally, for the humanisation of their treatment. He also made notable contributions to the classification of mental disorders and has been described by some as “the father of modern psychiatry”.

After the French Revolution, Dr. Pinel changed the way we look at the crazy (or “aliénés”, “alienated” in English) by claiming that they can be understood and cured. An 1809 description of a case that Pinel recorded in the second edition of his textbook on insanity is regarded by some as the earliest evidence for the existence of the form of mental disorder later known as dementia praecox or schizophrenia, although Emil Kraepelin is generally accredited with its first conceptualisation.

“Father of modern psychiatry”, he was credited with the first classification of mental illnesses. He had a great influence on psychiatry and the treatment of the alienated in Europe and the United States.

On This Day … 24 October

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People (Births)

  • 1959 – Ruth Perednik, English-Israeli psychologist and academic.

Ruth Perednik

Ruth Perednik (née Kestenbaum, Hebrew: רות פרדניק‎; born in London, 24 October 1959) is an English-born Israeli psychologist, pioneer in the field of selective mutism.

Biography

Ruth Perednik graduated from University College London (1983) and the Institute of Education, University of London (1984) and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (Educational Psychology, 2002). Her thesis in England was on The Relation Between Mothers’ Attentiveness to Toddlers and Child’s Attachment to Mother and in Israel she completed her thesis on Selective Mutism in Immigrant Families, under the supervision of Professor Yoel Elizur, with a grant from the Martin and Vivian Levin Centre for the Development of the Child and Adolescent. Ruth Perednik taught at the Lincoln School, and at the Yehuda Halevi Teacher’s Training College, Argentina (1986-1987), where she lectured on Educational Psychology. She resides in the outskirts of Jerusalem with her husband, Gustavo Perednik; they have five children.

Expertise

Ruth Perednik has been specialising in the treatment of children with Selective Mutism and other anxiety disorders over the past 20 years. She has developed a treatment method for Selective Mutism based on cognitive behavioural techniques, in the framework of her work in the Jerusalem Psychological Services in the Jerusalem Municipality. Perednik heads a treatment clinic for children with Selective Mutism. She lectures and trains parents and therapists in Europe, the Americas and Asia. She has developed a Selective Mutism treatment manual which has been published in English and Chinese. She also published a Hebrew language treatment manual together with Professor Yoel Elitzur, of the Hebrew University.

The innovative element of Perednik’s treatment method is treating the child or teen in his natural environment (home and school sessions), and not in a clinic setting, since this is where the symptoms of the selective mutism hit hard and must be alleviated. This was considered iconoclastic when Perednik first published her treatment method, yet it has become generally accepted, and is the treatment of choice in several international selective mutism treatment centres. Perednik advocates for accountability of therapists when treating children, so that evidence-based interventions are the treatments of choice, facilitating effective therapy.

On This Day … 22 October

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People (Births)

  • 1920 – Timothy Leary, American psychologist and author (d. 1996).

People (Deaths)

  • 1952 – Ernst Rüdin, Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist, and eugenicist (b. 1874).
  • 1979 – Mieko Kamiya, Japanese psychiatrist and author (b. 1914).

Timothy Leary

Timothy Francis Leary (22 October 1920 to 31 May 1996) was an American psychologist and writer known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarised, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. He was “a hero of American consciousness”, according to Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Robbins called him a “brave neuronaut.”

As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary worked on the Harvard Psilocybin Project from 1960 to 1962. He tested the therapeutic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, which were still legal in the United States at the time, in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. The scientific legitimacy and ethics of his research were questioned by other Harvard faculty because he took psychedelics along with research subjects and pressured students to join in. However, the claims that Leary pressured unwilling students are refuted by at least one of Leary’s students, Robert Thurman. Leary and his colleague, Richard Alpert (who later became known as Ram Dass), were fired from Harvard University in May 1963. Many people of the time only came to know of psychedelics after the Harvard scandal.

Leary believed that LSD showed potential for therapeutic use in psychiatry. He used LSD himself and developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD. After leaving Harvard, he continued to publicly promote the use of psychedelic drugs and became a well-known figure of the counterculture of the 1960s. He popularized catchphrases that promoted his philosophy, such as “turn on, tune in, drop out”, “set and setting”, and “think for yourself and question authority”. He also wrote and spoke frequently about transhumanist concepts of space migration, intelligence increase, and life extension (SMI²LE). Leary developed the eight-circuit model of consciousness in his book Exo-Psychology (1977) and gave lectures, occasionally billing himself as a “performing philosopher.”

During the 1960s and 1970s, he was arrested 36 times worldwide. President Richard Nixon once described Leary as “the most dangerous man in America”.

Ernst Rudin

Ernst Rüdin (19 April 1874 to 22 October 1952) was a Swiss-born German psychiatrist, geneticist, eugenicist and Nazi. Rising to prominence under Emil Kraepelin and assuming his directorship at what is now called the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. While he has been credited as a pioneer of psychiatric inheritance studies, he also argued for, designed, justified and funded the mass sterilisation and clinical killing of adults and children.

Mieko Kamiya

Mieko Kamiya (神谷 美恵子, Kamiya Mieko, 12 January 1914 to 22 October 1979) was a Japanese psychiatrist who treated leprosy patients at Nagashima Aiseien Sanatorium.

She was known for translating books on philosophy. She worked as a medical doctor in the Department of Psychiatry at Tokyo University following World War II. She was said to have greatly helped the Ministry of Education and the General Headquarters, where the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers stayed, in her role as an English-speaking secretary, and served as an adviser to Empress Michiko. She wrote many books as a highly educated, multi-lingual person; one of her books, titled On the Meaning of Life (Ikigai Ni Tsuite in Japanese), based on her experiences with leprosy patients, attracted many readers.