Psychotherapist – Mental Health Matters

Who was Steve de Shazer (1940-2005)?

Published on 03/12/202403/12/2024 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Steve de Shazer (25 June 1940 to 11 September 2005) was a psychotherapist, author, and developer and pioneer of solution focused brief therapy. In 1978, he founded the Brief Family Therapy Centre (BFTC) in Milwaukee, Wisconsin with his wife Insoo Kim Berg.

De Shazer was originally trained as a classical musician and worked as a jazz saxophonist. He received a Bachelor in Fine Arts and an MSSW in Social Work from the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. He never studied at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, even though some rumours have it he did. De Shazer wrote six books and was translated into 14 languages. He was a lifelong friend of John Weakland , whom he saw as his mentor.

De Shazer died in Vienna while traveling on a training and consulting tour in Europe. De Shazer has a nephew, Tony de Shazer whose wife is Marie Laure de Shazer, educator and author, and two great nieces Elodie and Amelie de Shazer.

Solution-Focused Heritage

Solution-Focused Brief Therapy

In 1978, de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg co-founded the Brief Family Therapy Centre (BFTC) in Milwaukee. With this move, the couple are recognised as the primary developers of solution-focused brief therapy, which emerged from research they conducted at the BFTC in the 1980s, building upon studies conducted at the Mental Research Institute.

BFTC served as a research centre to study, develop, and test techniques of psychotherapy to find those that are most efficient and effective with clients. The team at BFTC was very diverse, with practitioners with various backgrounds, educations, and academic disciplines. Besides mental health professionals, the team included educators, sociologists, linguists, and even engineers and philosophers. Steve de Shazer, the director of BFTC, referred to this group as a “therapeutic think tank”. Over time people began to request training, so BFTC became a research and training centre.

Solution-Focused Applied Psychology (SoFAP)

Alongside the popular development of the practical application of solution-focused therapy, its theoretic foundation has been the topic of research in an academic context. The academic discipline of Solution-Focused Applied Psychology (SoFAP) uses the methodology offered by design science to investigate the epistemology that underlies the application of the solution-focused approach. In intuitive form, this approach was originally recognised in the practice of Dr. Milton H. Erickson and subsequently concretised by de Shazer and Berg, particularly in de Shazer’s book Patterns of Brief Family Therapy: An Ecosystemic Approach.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_de_Shazer >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

Who was David H. Malan (1922-2020)?

Published on 10/31/2023 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

David Huntingford Malan (21 March 1922 to 14 October 2020) was a British psychoanalytic psychotherapy practitioner and researcher recognised for his contribution to the development of psychotherapy.

He promoted scientific spirit of inquiry, openness, and simplicity within the field. He is also noted for his development of the Malan triangles, which became a rubric in which therapists can reflect upon what they are doing and where they are in relational space at any given moment.

Early Life

Malan was born in Ootacamund in the province of Tamil Nadu in India on 21 March 1922. His father was English, working in the Indian Civil service as Paymaster General of Madras State, and his mother Isabel (née Allen)was American. When Malan was seven years old his father died from pneumonia and Malan and his mother came to England. They moved into a house in Hartley Wintney which served as Malan’s home throughout his life. This early experience of grief was formative for his later work.

At preparatory boarding school Malan particularly enjoyed learning Latin and Greek, but as a scholar at Winchester he became interested in chemistry which he then studied, winning a scholarship to Balliol College, Oxford. He graduated in 1944 with a 1st class Honours degree in chemistry.

During the World War II, Malan was seconded to the Special Operations Executive (S.O.E), initially to develop devices for Resistance fighters, and later incendiary bombs for use in the Far East.

He was unable to partake in active service due to a foot injury. After the war he studied medicine at The London Hospital qualifying in 1952 and then trained in psychiatry at the Maudsley Hospital. Malan began his training in psychoanalysis whilst at Medical School. His initial analysis was with Michael Balint and then with Winnicott.

After a year at Courtaulds doing fundamental research, he knew he wanted to become a Psychotherapist.

Career

After qualifying from the London Hospital in 1952, he worked as a casualty officer, then as a psychiatrist at the Maudsley before transferring to the Tavistock Clinic in 1956. From 1956 to 1982, he remained at the Tavistock Clinic as a consultant psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst.

In 1956, at the Tavistock Clinic, Balint asked him to join his Brief Psychotherapy research group investigating whether brief focal therapy was effective. Malan analysed the results which were highly encouraging. During his early years as a psychotherapist, he already advocated the accurate, reproducible clinical descriptions, as well as the prediction of desirable outcomes prior to the process of therapy or an “intention to treat”, which are then followed by unbiased evaluation post-treatment. This approach was met with suspicion during the 1950s within the analytic community, including Malan’s colleagues at the Tavistock Clinic.

In 1967 Malan developed the Brief Psychotherapy workshop which all trainees were required to attend for one year and treat a patient under his supervision. It attracted students internationally as well as nationally. The aim was to achieve effective therapeutic results in the shortest possible time and to research the factors that made this happen.

The therapy was actively interpretive, using the elements of the Two Triangles – the Triangle of Conflict and the Triangle of Person – as the basis for many of the interventions that the therapists made.

The outcome data exploded the Myth of Superficiality whereby critics claimed that Brief Psychotherapy could only be helpful with superficially ill patients, that the technique used should be superficial and that only superficial improvements can be achieved.

At this time Malan lectured nationally and internationally many times in the US, Canada, Norway, Switzerland, Italy and Greece, describing his active interpretive approach and his investigation of the factors that made Brief Psychotherapy most effective. He received the highest medical Merit award for this work.

In 1974, Davanloo showed his tapes of Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy to Malan who was convinced by the evidence that the technique used was extremely effective. They began a twelve-year collaboration, doing workshops and lectures together with Davanloo showing his tapes of therapy and Malan outlining the concepts and explaining the principles of the technique.

In 1979, Malan wrote Individual Psychotherapy and the Science of Psychodynamics pub. Butterworth-Heinnemann which outlines the principles of Dynamic Psychotherapy from the most elementary to the most profound, using true case histories to illustrate each concept. It has been translated into 8 languages and following a second edition in 1995 is still in print as a classic textbook for psychotherapists.

Private Life

He was married to Muriel (née Still) from 1959 to about 1982, with whom he had a son called Peter. He later married Jennifer (Jennie) Ann (née Stead). He enjoyed travelling in the countryside with his wife Jennie including in Scotland, New Zealand and India.

Retirement and Death

After his retirement, Malan continued to write and lecture extensively on Brief Psychotherapy and Intensive Short Term Dynamic Therapy (ISTDP), publishing his last book “Lives Transformed”, in 2006, which he co-authored with Patricia Coughlin. He also put on Conferences in Oxford in 2006 and 2008 to demonstrate the effectiveness of ISTDP as a method of Brief Psychotherapy. Following these conferences, core training courses developed, and therapists, who completed them and have become experienced, have continued to lecture and teach subsequent core trainings.

In 2005, Malan received a Career Achievement Award in recognition of his contribution to Psychotherapy from the International Experiential Dynamic Therapy Association, of which he was Emeritus President since its inception. He died in 2020.

Brief Psychotherapy

Although trained as an analyst, initially using analysis in therapy, and recognising the validity of analytic insights, Malan has always been concerned that analysis takes too long and too few patients can be treated.

His research and writing therefore focussed on finding the most effective treatment that can help more patients in the shortest possible time.

Balint’s Brief Therapy Research Group

In 1956, after becoming a psychotherapist at the Tavistock Clinic, Malan was invited by Balint to join his Brief Psychotherapy research group investigating whether brief focal therapy was effective. Patients were treated using a radical interpretive approach and the results were evaluated against specified criteria and, in general, they were extremely good. Malan analysed the results in his Oxford DM thesis and subsequently developed the ideas in A Study of Brief Psychotherapy: Tavistock publications 1963. Other publications analysing aspects of the results were The Frontier of Brief Psychotherapy and Toward the Validation of Dynamic Psychotherapy – both published by Plenum in 1976.

Brief Psychotherapy Workshop

Following his appointment as a Consultant in the Adult dept., Malan introduced a Brief Psychotherapy workshop which all trainees were required to attend. They presented cases where they had used the principles of Brief Psychotherapy under his supervision. The aim was to achieve effective therapeutic results in the fewest sessions and to research the factors that made this possible.

In the workshop the technique was actively interpretive. The work was initially focussed on the presenting problems but became more wide-ranging with responsive patients and demonstrated deep and lasting changes.

An account of twenty-four therapies completed by trainees as part of the Brief Psychotherapy Workshop is summarised in ‘Psychodynamics, Training and Outcome’ by Malan and Osimo, pub. Butterworth –Heinemann 1992. It is based not only on the sessions but on the follow-up of a series of patients, and shows that good therapeutic results can be achieved by trainees under supervision.

The Two Triangles

A key element of therapy is the linking of the Two Triangles – the Triangle of Conflict (Defence, Anxiety and Hidden Feeling) and the Triangle of Persons (Current, Transference/Present and Past). The Triangle of Conflict illustrates the relation between anxiety, defences and the underlying impulses or feelings. The Triangle of Persons shows the links between the relationship with the therapist, with current people in the patient’s life, and with people from their past.

Malan always acknowledges that each Triangle was independently devised by Ezriel (1952) and Menninger (1958) respectively, but he showed how, when put together, the relation between them for the patient at any given moment in therapy, can form a reliable basis for many of the interventions that the therapist makes. Ref: Individual Psychotherapy and the Science of Psychodynamics (p. 80)

As early as 1963 in his analysis of cases in Balint’s workshop, Malan had identified that good outcome correlated with a high frequency of interpretations making a link between the transference and childhood, but the full significance and usefulness of the concept of linking the Triangles came later.

The Myth of Superficiality

Research from the workshop exploded the ‘myth of superficiality’ whereby critics maintain that Brief Psychotherapy is a superficial treatment that can only be effective with superficially ill patients, bringing about superficial results. Malan maintains that the aim of every session is to ‘put the patient in touch with as much of their true feelings as they can bear and that the long-term outcome should demonstrate deep and lasting changes.’ The work does not have to be focal and limited to specific problems and should lead to therapeutic changes that are wide-ranging, deep-seated and permanent. This has been shown in many of Malan’s follow-up studies where Brief Therapy and Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy have been used.

Collaboration with Habib Davanloo

In 1974 Davanloo presented videotapes of his therapeutic work using Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy (ISTDP) at the Tavistock Clinic. The essence of ISTDP is to enable the patient to reach and experience their hitherto buried, and often unconscious feelings, which have been governing their emotional responses leading to deep-seated neurotic patterns of behaviour that in many cases have crippled their lives. He does this by challenging the defences that the patient has been using to avoid painful feelings of loss, grief, anger, hate and guilt about people who they loved and /or needed when children.

Although aspects of Davanloo’s challenging and sometimes abrasive technique were antipathetic to him, Malan recognised that the challenge was to the defences, not to the patient directly, and results were conclusive and convincing. The videotapes showed undeniable evidence that patients could be treated in a relatively few sessions (40 or fewer) and fully recover from a range of longstanding emotional and psychosomatic illnesses.

Malan and Davanloo collaborated for twelve years from 1974, doing many Conferences and Workshops worldwide. Davanloo showed his tapes of therapy while Malan outlined the rationale and objectives of the technique and explained the elements of the therapy. After his retirement, Malan wrote many books and articles about Davanloo’s concepts and technique.

Subsequent Developments using Intensive Short-Term Dynamic Psychotherapy.

It became apparent that the abrasive element when challenging the defences is not necessary, and the same results can be achieved by blocking them much more gently but persistently until they disintegrate. Malan recognised that as long as the patient reaches and experiences the buried, often previously unconscious painful feelings, they no longer have the power to govern their emotional responses. It is the avoidance of these feelings that underlies many neurotic and psychosomatic symptoms.

Malan has worked with many of Davanloo’s ex-trainees lecturing and writing extensively. In 2006 he co-authored with Patricia Coughlin ‘Lives Transformed – a Revolutionary Method of Dynamic Psychotherapy’ pub. Karnac.

In order to introduce Intensive Short-term Dynamic Psychotherapy to the UK, Malan organised two Conferences in Oxford in 2006 and 2008, where video-tapes of therapies were shown. Following these Core Training groups were established. Subsequent Conferences have been held demonstrating ISTDP and currently there are Core trainings in London and the North of England. Malan hopes ISTDP will become available as a treatment method on the NHS as it so effective, but it is difficult to learn and challenging to do.

Scientific Principles and Brief Psychotherapy

A hallmark of Malan’s work is his scientific approach to research in Psychotherapy. He is convinced that psychodynamic processes can and should be scientifically studied, and he rigorously insists on long-term follow-ups to see how effective therapy really has been and what factors contributed to this.

Outcome Studies

Malan believes that one of the most important tools for this ‘objective study of subjective matter’ is long-term follow-up interviews to obtain reliable psychodynamic outcome data. He considers that questionnaires are useless, and proper follow-up interviews are necessary based on the initial criteria the therapist sets for the complete resolution of the presenting problems. To this end he has carried out many such follow-ups and trained others to do so. These outcome studies are actually process and outcome studies as they analyse the process of change as well as the long-term results. He published papers throughout his career evaluating outcome data which showed that the results of Brief Psychotherapy are as good as, or better than, those found in long-term therapy.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_H._Malan >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is the Cognitive Behavioural Analysis System of Psychotherapy?

Published on 10/05/202310/05/2023 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The cognitive behavioural analysis system of psychotherapy (CBASP) is a talking therapy, a synthesis model of interpersonal and cognitive and behavioural therapies developed by James P. McCullough Jr. of Virginia Commonwealth University specifically for the treatment of all varieties of DSM-IV chronic depression.

McCullough writes that chronic depression (i.e. depressive disorder in adults that lasts continuously for two or more years, or one year continuously in adolescents), particularly the type beginning during adolescence (early-onset), is essentially a refractory mood disorder arising from traumatic experiences or interpersonal psychological insults delivered by the patient’s significant others (nuclear or extended family).

Basic Assumptions

Absence of felt interpersonal safety in patients. Chronic mood (e.g., chronic depression) denotes an absence of felt safety as regards (a) the precipitating (original) trauma event(s) or on a less sudden and violent level, (b) maltreating-hurtful significant others who have inflicted psychological insults on the individual through interpersonal rejection, harsh punishment, censure, or emotional abandonment/neglect. The lack of felt safety (c) has been transferred to a generalized fear of interpersonal relationships.

For patients, more often than not, “people are hell” to borrow a phrase from Jean-Paul Sartre. Whether the aetiology includes sudden trauma or psychological insults, the predominant coping strategy that maintains the dysphoric mood condition is an interpersonal avoidance of persons in the home, at work, or in the social environment. The patient’s successful situational and interpersonal avoidance pattern is the major treatment issue when the chronically depressed individual enters psychotherapy.

No change is possible as long as interpersonal avoidance patterns remain. As noted above, no emotional modification or termination of the chronic depression mood is possible apart from terminating patient interpersonal avoidance by enabling them to encounter the original precipitating trauma (violent/sudden event) or the psychological insults that stem from chronic interpersonal punishment, abuse or emotional neglect. The active arena where change processes are targeted and occur in CBASP psychotherapy involves the current interpersonal milieu within which the patient functions.

Treatment Strategies

In-session focus exercises in an atmosphere of felt safety help patients confront the feared stimuli and modify the Pavlovian fear driving the refractory emotional state. Learning appropriate non-avoidant ways to deal with the fear stimuli also decreases Skinnerian avoidance behaviour and prepares the way for mood change. In the beginning of therapy, it should be remembered that the chronic mood associated with trauma or psychological insults may involve stimulus events that remain tacit knowledge (out of awareness) for patients (i.e. the pain, fear and anxiety are clearly observable but the actual precipitating and maintaining stimuli may not be clearly understood or recognised by the patient). Material derived from the Significant Other History (SOH) often illustrates the tacit knowledge dimension of the patient’s avoidance patterns. In summary, another way to describe what’s going on in the beginning of therapy is to say that patients are avoiding others (including the therapist) and not responding to the interpersonal environment. Interpersonal avoidance always dictates that the patient’s primary focus remains on himself or herself (i.e. patients stay “in their heads”). In such a psychosocial functioning state, these individuals remain helpless and hopeless and continue to respond to themselves in a solitary and never-ending circle of pain, fear, anxiety (and depression); hence, they are unable to connect with their interpersonal world in any informing way.

Therapist Role

A feature of CBASP is the interpersonal role of the psychotherapist. CBASP clinicians enact a “disciplined personal involvement role” to heal the injurious interpersonal traumas and psychological insults patients have received at the hands of harmful significant others.

Outcome Goals of Treatment and Beyond

The goals of CBASP treatment are (1) to connect patients perceptually and behaviourally to the interpersonal world they live in so that their behaviour is informed by environmental (interpersonal) influences; (2) CBASP teaches patients how to make themselves feel better emotionally as well as how to maintain affective control; (3) patients are taught to negotiate interpersonal relationships successfully which means that patients acquire the requisite skills to obtain desirable interpersonal goals; finally, patients learn the crucial importance of “maintaining” the treatment gains after psychotherapy ends. Maintaining the gains requires daily practice of the in-session learning which protects (perpetuates) the extinction of the old pathological patterns of behaviour. Post-therapy practice for the rest of their lives holds in abeyance the ever-present danger of relapse and recurrence.

Combination Treatment

A large-scale study, published in 2000 by Martin Keller of Brown Medical School and others, compared the (then available) antidepressant Serzone (aka Nefazodone) with CBASP. Six hundred and eighty-one patients with severe chronic depression (some with other psychiatric illnesses) were enrolled in the trial, and were assigned to either Serzone, CBASP, or combination Serzone-CBASP for 12 weeks. The response rates to either Serzone or CBASP alone were 55 percent and 52 percent, respectively, for the 76 percent who completed the study. In other words, a little more than half of the completers in those two arms of the trial reduced their depression by 50 percent or better.

The Serzone findings roughly correspond with many other trial results for antidepressants, and underscore a major weakness in these drugs—that while they are effective, the benefit is often marginal and the treatment outcome problematic. Similarly, the CBASP findings validate other studies finding talking therapy about equal in efficacy to taking antidepressants.

The results for the combination drug-therapy group, however, were surprising, with 85% of the completing patients achieving a 50 percent reduction in symptoms or better. 42% in the combination group achieved remission (a virtual elimination of all depressive symptoms) compared to 22% in the Serzone group and 24% in the CBASP group.

The authors of the frequently cited study noted that “the rates of response and remission in the combined-treatment group were substantially higher than those that might have been anticipated on the basis of the outcomes of previous trials in similar patients.” Their figures show that treating depression with a combination of both an anti-depressant drug and a form of cognitive behaviour therapy can be highly effective, giving substantially better results than other methods of dealing with depression.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_behavioral_analysis_system_of_psychotherapy >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is the World Council for Psychotherapy?

Published on 07/07/2023 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

The World Council for Psychotherapy is an NGO with consultative status at the Economic and Social Council of the United Nations. It was founded in 1995, has its headquarters in Vienna, and holds a World Congress every three years with more than a thousand participants.

Objectives

The main objectives of the association are the promotion of psychotherapy on all continents (based on the principles in the Strasbourg Declaration on Psychotherapy in 1990), to improve the conditions of patients, to cooperate with national and international organizations to improve crisis management and peacekeeping, and to unify world training standards. Members are both psychotherapists and organisations. President of the WCP is Alfred Pritz.

The World Certificate for Psychotherapy (WCPC) is only awarded on the basis of recognized psychotherapy training and aims to encourage mobility within the profession. Each year, together with the city of Vienna, the Council awards the International Sigmund Freud Award for Psychotherapy.

What is the European Association for Psychotherapy?

Published on 07/07/202307/07/2023 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The European Association for Psychotherapy (EAP) is a Vienna-based umbrella organisation for 128 psychotherapist organisations (including 28 national associations and 17 European associations) from 42 countries with a membership of more than 120,000 psychotherapists.

Outline

Individual members may also join the organisation directly rather than through one of its member organisations.

The EAP has sponsored much of the European effort from the mid-1990s toward the professionalisation of psychotherapy and the formation of pan-European training standards, ethics and guidelines.

A submission to the European Commission to establish the Common Training Framework for the Profession of Psychotherapist is currently in process (2021).

The President of EAP is Irena Bezić (Croatia); the general secretary of the EAP is Prof. Eugenijus Laurinaitis (Lithuania).

The association is based on the Strasbourg Declaration on Psychotherapy of 1990 whereby the EAP promotes the need for high standards of training on a scientific basis, and fights for free and independent exercise of psychotherapy in Europe. Important activities include:

Creating a collaborative democratic forum for all European national and method-based professional associations in psychotherapy.
Establishing pan-European professional post-graduate training standards consisting of a minimum of 2,400 hours, over a minimum of four years, of specialist training, with a significant component of supervised practice.
Awarding the European Certificate of Psychotherapy (ECP): The aim of the European Certificate of Psychotherapy is to implement a comparable standard of training and mutual recognition of training across Europe.
Building the Register for ECP Psychotherapists: creating a searchable database of the availability of over 5,000 psychotherapists in Europe.
Promoting EAP Ethical Guidelines: The EAP has developed ethical guidelines to protect patients and is establishing these across Europe.
EAP is also a founding member of the World Council for Psychotherapy (WCP).

Publication

Publication of the International Journal of Psychotherapy ISSN 1356-9082, a professional journal with 3 issues per annum.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Association_for_Psychotherapy >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 26 February [2023]

Published on 02/26/202302/17/2023 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Births)

1857 – Émile Coué, French psychologist and pharmacist (d. 1926)
1947 – Sandie Shaw, English singer and psychotherapist

People (Deaths)

1969 – Karl Jaspers, German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher (b. 1883)

Emile Coue

Émile Coué de la Châtaigneraie (26 February 1857 to 02 July 1926) was a French psychologist and pharmacist who introduced a popular method of psychotherapy and self-improvement based on optimistic autosuggestion.

Considered by Charles Baudouin to represent a second Nancy School, Coué treated many patients in groups and free of charge.

Sandie Shaw

Sandie Shaw, MBE (born Sandra Ann Goodrich; 26 February 1947) is a retired English singer. One of the most successful British female singers of the 1960s, she had three UK number one singles with “(There’s) Always Something There to Remind Me” (1964), “Long Live Love” (1965) and “Puppet on a String” (1967). With the latter, she became the first British entry to win the Eurovision Song Contest. She returned to the UK Top 40, for the first time in 15 years, with her 1984 cover of the Smiths song “Hand in Glove”. Shaw retired from the music industry in 2013.

Concentrating on a new career as a psychotherapist, Shaw opened the Arts Clinic in 1997 with her husband, to provide psychological healthcare and creative development to those in the creative industries.[6]: 387 The clinic is now styled Barefoot Therapy: The Arts Clinic and continues to provide psychological support for those in the fields of entertainment, media and sports. In 1998 she was invited to join the Royal Society of Musicians as an Honorary Professor of Music.

Karl Jaspers

Karl Theodor Jaspers (23 February 1883 to 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept the label.

On This Day … 03 November [2022]

Published on 11/03/202210/27/2022 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Deaths)

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

Wilhelm 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), The Function of the Orgasm (1927), 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 public 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.

From 1956 to 1960 many of his writings and his equipment were seized and destroyed by FDA officials. In the 21st century some considered this wholesale destruction to be one of the most blatant examples of censorship in US history.

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 … 14 October [2022]

Published on 10/14/202210/09/2022 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Births)

1936 – Jürg Schubiger, Swiss psychotherapist and author (d. 2014).

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 … 30 September [2022]

Published on 09/30/202209/20/2022 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

People (Births)

1897 – Charlotte Wolff, German-English physician and psychotherapist (d. 1986).
1911 – Gustave Gilbert, American psychologist (d. 1977).

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.

Gustave Gilbert

Gustave Mark Gilbert (30 September 1911 to 06 February 1977) was an American psychologist best known for his writings containing observations of high-ranking Nazi leaders during the Nuremberg trials. His 1950 book The Psychology of Dictatorship was an attempt to profile the Nazi German dictator Adolf Hitler using as reference the testimonials of Hitler’s closest generals and commanders. Gilbert’s published work is still a subject of study in many universities and colleges, especially in the field of psychology.