Tag: Manfred Sakel

On This Day … 06 June [2022]

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

People (Births)

  • 1900 – Manfred Sakel, Ukrainian-American psychiatrist and physician (d. 1957).

People (Deaths)

  • 1961 – Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (b. 1875).
  • 2014 – Lorna Wing, English psychiatrist and physician; pioneered studies of autism (b. 1928).

Manfred Sakel

Manfred Joshua Sakel (06 June 1900 to 02 December 1957) was an Austrian-Jewish (later Austrian-American) neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, credited with developing insulin shock therapy in 1927.

Sakel was born on 06 June 1900, in Nadvirna (Nadwórna), in the former Austria-Hungary Empire (now Ukraine), which was part of Poland between the world wars. Sakel studied Medicine at the University of Vienna from 1919 to 1925, specialising in neurology and neuropsychiatry. From 1927 until 1933 Sakel worked in hospitals in Berlin. In 1933 he became a researcher at the University of Vienna’s Neuropsychiatric Clinic. In 1936, after receiving an invitation from Frederick Parsons, the state commissioner of mental hygiene, he chose to emigrate from Austria to the United States of America. In the US, he became an attending physician and researcher at the Harlem Valley State Hospital.

Dr. Sakel was the developer of insulin shock therapy from 1927 while a young doctor in Vienna, starting to practice it in 1933. It would become widely used on individuals with schizophrenia and other mental patients. He noted that insulin-induced coma and convulsions, due to the low level of glucose attained in the blood (hypoglycaemic crisis), had a short-term appearance of changing the mental state of drug addicts and psychotics, sometimes dramatically so. He reported that up to 88% of his patients improved with insulin shock therapy, but most other people reported more mixed results and it was eventually shown that patient selection had been biased and that it didn’t really have any specific benefits and had many risks, adverse effects and fatalities. However, his method became widely applied for many years in mental institutions worldwide. In the US and other countries it was gradually dropped after the introduction of the electroconvulsive therapy in the 1940s and the first neuroleptics in the 1950s.

Dr. Sakel died from a heart attack on 02 December 1957, in New York City, NY, US.

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (26 July 1875 to 06 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his “new science” of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as president of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague’s doctrine and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation – the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, builder and a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.

Lorna Wing

Lorna Gladys Wing OBE FRCPsych (07 October 1928 to 06 June 2014) was an English psychiatrist. She was a pioneer in the field of childhood developmental disorders, who advanced understanding of autism worldwide, introduced the term Asperger syndrome in 1976 and was involved in founding the National Autistic Society (NAS) in the UK.

Although Wing trained as a medical doctor, specialising in psychiatry, her focus narrowed to childhood developmental disorders in 1959. At that time autism was thought to affect around 5 in 10,000 children, but its prevalence in the 2010s was considered to be around 1 in 100 following the awareness raised by Wing and her followers. Her research, particularly with her collaborator Judith Gould, now underpins thinking in the field of autism. They initiated the Camberwell Case Register to record all patients using psychiatric services in this area of London. The data accumulated by this innovative approach gave Wing the basis for her influential insight that autism formed a spectrum, rather than clearly differentiated disorders. They also set up the Centre for Social and Communication Disorders, the first integrated diagnostic and advice service for these conditions in the UK.

Wing was the author of many books and academic papers, including Asperger Syndrome: a Clinical Account, a February 1981 academic paper that popularised the research of Hans Asperger. Although ground-breaking and influential, Wing herself cautioned in her 1981 paper that “It must be pointed out that the people described by the present author all had problems of adjustment or superimposed psychiatric illnesses severe enough to necessitate referral to a psychiatric clinic … (and) the series described here is probably biased towards those with more severe handicaps.”

Along with some parents of autistic children, she founded the organisation now known as the National Autistic Society in the UK in 1962. She was a consultant to NAS Lorna Wing Centre for Autism until she died. She was also President of Autism Sussex.

In the 1995 New Year Honours list Wing was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for ‘services to the National Autistic Society’.

On This Day … 02 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1957 – Manfred Sakel, Ukrainian-American neurophysiologist and psychiatrist (b. 1902).
  • 1986 – John Curtis Gowan, American psychologist and academic (b. 1912).

Manfred Sakel

Manfred Joshua Sakel (06 June 1900 to 02 December 1957) was an Austrian-Jewish (later Austrian-American) neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, credited with developing insulin shock therapy in 1927.

Sakel was born on 06 June 1900, in Nadvirna (Nadwórna), in the former Austria-Hungary Empire (now Ukraine), which was part of Poland between the world wars. Sakel studied Medicine at the University of Vienna from 1919 to 1925, specialising in neurology and neuropsychiatry. From 1927 until 1933 Sakel worked in hospitals in Berlin. In 1933 he became a researcher at the University of Vienna’s Neuropsychiatric Clinic. In 1936, after receiving an invitation from Frederick Parsons, the state commissioner of mental hygiene, he chose to emigrate from Austria to the United States of America. In the USA, he became an attending physician and researcher at the Harlem Valley State Hospital.

Dr. Sakel was the developer of insulin shock therapy from 1927 while a young doctor in Vienna, starting to practice it in 1933. It would become widely used on individuals with schizophrenia and other mental patients. He noted that insulin-induced coma and convulsions, due to the low level of glucose attained in the blood (hypoglycaemic crisis), had a short-term appearance of changing the mental state of drug addicts and psychotics, sometimes dramatically so. He reported that up to 88% of his patients improved with insulin shock therapy, but most other people reported more mixed results and it was eventually shown that patient selection had been biased and that it didn’t really have any specific benefits and had many risks, adverse effects and fatalities. However, his method became widely applied for many years in mental institutions worldwide. In the USA and other countries it was gradually dropped after the introduction of the electroconvulsive therapy in the 1940s and the first neuroleptics in the 1950s.

Dr. Sakel died from a heart attack on 02 December 1957, in New York City, NY, USA.

John Curtis Gowan

John Curtis Gowan (21 May 1912 to 02 December 1986) was a psychologist who studied, along with E. Paul Torrance, the development of creative capabilities in children and gifted populations.

John Curtis Gowan was born 21 May 1912 in Boston, Massachusetts. Graduating from Thayer Academy, Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1929, John Gowan was only 17 when he entered Harvard University, earning his undergraduate degree four years later. A master’s degree in mathematics followed; he then moved to Culver, Indiana, where he was employed as a counsellor and mathematics teacher at Culver Military Academy from 1941 to 1952. Earning a doctorate from UCLA, he became a member of the founding faculty at the California State University at Northridge, where he taught as a professor of Educational Psychology from 1953 until 1975, when he retired with emeritus status.

Dr. Gowan became interested in gifted children after the Russians gained superiority in space with the 1957 launch of Sputnik. He formed the National Association for Gifted Children the following year. He was the group’s executive director and president from 1975 to 1979 and over the years wrote more than 100 articles and fourteen books on gifted children, teacher evaluation, child development, and creativity.

While at Northridge, he developed a programme to train campus counsellors, was nominated in 1973 as outstanding professor, and had been a counsellor, researcher, Fulbright lecturer, and visiting professor at various schools including the University of Singapore, the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, the University of Hawaii, and Connecticut State College. He was a fellow of the American Psychological Association and was also a colleague of the Creative Education Foundation.

Besides his work in Educational Psychology as specifically related to gifted children, he also had an interest in psychic (or psychedelic) phenomena as it relates to human creativity. His work in this area was inspired by the writings of Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung. Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, Dr. Gowan developed a model of mental development that derived from the work of Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, but also included adult development beyond the ordinary adult successes of career and family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness. He described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He also devised a test for self-actualisation, (as defined by Abraham Maslow), called the Northridge Developmental Scale.

Dr. Gowan died on 02 December 1986. He was survived by his adult twin children from his first marriage, John Gowan Jr. of Albany, NY and Ann Gowan Curry, of Anchorage, Alaska as well as seven grandchildren and his second wife Jane Thompson Gowan. His godson, Cameron Scott Matheson sang at his memorial service which was attended by friends and colleagues.

On This Day … 06 June

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Births)

  • 1900 – Manfred Sakel, Ukrainian-American psychiatrist and physician (d. 1957).

People (Deaths)

  • 1961 – Carl Gustav Jung, Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist (b. 1875).

Manfred Sakel

Manfred Joshua Sakel (06 June 1900 to 02 December 1957) was an Austrian-Jewish (later Austrian-American) neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, credited with developing insulin shock therapy in 1927.

Sakel was born in Nadvirna (Nadwórna), in the former Austria-Hungary Empire (now Ukraine), which was part of Poland between the world wars. Sakel studied Medicine at the University of Vienna from 1919 to 1925, specializing in neurology and neuropsychiatry. From 1927 until 1933 Sakel worked in hospitals in Berlin. In 1933 he became a researcher at the University of Vienna’s Neuropsychiatric Clinic. In 1936, after receiving an invitation from Frederick Parsons, the state commissioner of mental hygiene, he chose to emigrate from Austria to the United States of America. In the US, he became an attending physician and researcher at the Harlem Valley State Hospital.

Dr. Sakel was the developer of insulin shock therapy from 1927 while a young doctor in Vienna, starting to practice it in 1933. It would become widely used on individuals with schizophrenia and other mental patients. He noted that insulin-induced coma and convulsions, due to the low level of glucose attained in the blood (hypoglycaemic crisis), had a short-term appearance of changing the mental state of drug addicts and psychotics, sometimes dramatically so. He reported that up to 88% of his patients improved with insulin shock therapy, but most other people reported more mixed results and it was eventually shown that patient selection had been biased and that it didn’t really have any specific benefits and had many risks, adverse effects and fatalities. However, his method became widely applied for many years in mental institutions worldwide. In the USA and other countries it was gradually dropped after the introduction of the electroconvulsive therapy in the 1940s and the first neuroleptics in the 1950s.

Dr. Sakel died from a heart attack on 02 December 1957, in New York City, NY, USA.

Carl Jung

Carl Gustav Jung (born Karl Gustav Jung, 26 July 1875 to 06 June 1961), was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who founded analytical psychology. Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology and religious studies. Jung worked as a research scientist at the famous Burghölzli hospital, under Eugen Bleuler. During this time, he came to the attention of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. The two men conducted a lengthy correspondence and collaborated, for a while, on a joint vision of human psychology.

Freud saw the younger Jung as the heir he had been seeking to take forward his “new science” of psychoanalysis and to this end secured his appointment as President of his newly founded International Psychoanalytical Association. Jung’s research and personal vision, however, made it impossible for him to follow his older colleague’s doctrine and a schism became inevitable. This division was personally painful for Jung and resulted in the establishment of Jung’s analytical psychology as a comprehensive system separate from psychoanalysis.

Among the central concepts of analytical psychology is individuation – the lifelong psychological process of differentiation of the self out of each individual’s conscious and unconscious elements. Jung considered it to be the main task of human development. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including synchronicity, archetypal phenomena, the collective unconscious, the psychological complex and extraversion and introversion.

Jung was also an artist, craftsman, builder and a prolific writer. Many of his works were not published until after his death and some are still awaiting publication.