Transcript History of Psychotherapy - Brad Benziger Counseling .com

The History
of
Psychology
&
Psychotherapy
 This presentation is divided as follows:
I.
Introduction.
II. Pre-history: Psychology in a time when “psyche” meant
III.
IV.
V.
VI.
VII.
VIII.
IX.
X.
XI.
“breath.”
Socrates (470 – 399) used “psyche” to mean “soul.”
Antagonism between Socrates’ worldview and Aristotle’s.
The meaning of “psychology” then and now.
An aside about The Oxford English Dictionary.
The first psychologist -- Wundt.
The first psychotherapist - Freud.
Other approaches to counseling available from 1900 to 1960.
1960.
Today.
 My Master’s thesis had two parts:
The history of the relationship between the
spiritual worldview and the scientific in
psychotherapy; and
2. Suggestions for combing them in psychotherapy.
 This Power Point discusses part 1 of my thesis.
 I will discuss part 2 in the final class.
 When I completed part 1, my advisor asked me to
summarize what I had learned.
1.
 I had been exploring unexplored territory.
 I had found very little to guide me on this journey.
 I asked my dreams for help.
 In a dream a voice said to me, “Try using the images
from Riverworld.”
 Has any one read Phillip Jose Farmer’s Riverworld?
 These slides summarize what I had learned.
 These thoughts came to me in a dream.
 They constitute one chapter of my thesis.
 The dream may have originated in the personal
unconscious, the collective unconscious, or what Assagioli
called the spiritual unconscious, or all 3.
 But one thing it demonstrates beyond contest: the
unconscious is real and powerful; in a very different vein, I
have also written an “A” paper in multivariate analysis in a
dream when I was completely stuck, and a voice said, “Why
not try . . .?”
 No separation between the individual’s psyche, religion, secular power, and
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culture.
Individual human beings felt as if they had been born floating on a
small raft down a wide river. The current carried them. Sometimes the
river was so wide that people could not see the sides. They thought that
the river was all there was.
When people were born, their parents threw them on to the river, as
their parents had thrown them, and from then on the river defined the
meaning of their lives.
If one was a man whose father had been a tailor, that man would
probably be a tailor until the end of his life. If one was a woman, one
would bare children, send sons off to war, and often die in childbirth.
Government, religion, and culture powered the river’s current; they
flowed in the same lineal direction.
No one climbed out onto the banks to look around. The current was
too strong, the banks too steep, and life too short.
 The Iliad was composed in approximately 900 BC,
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the Odyssey shortly thereafter.
They were repeated aloud by rote at important
government holidays.
The Iliad taught courage in battle.
The Odyssey taught the dangers of climbing out of
the river: if you wander far from home, monsters
will eat you.
At that time “psyche” meant “breath.”
 When a tributary joined the main branch bringing
strangers floating on different rafts, conflict arose.
 People conceptualized that conflict either in terms
of power (Aristotle’s student Alexander the Great)
or in terms of understanding (Euripides in the
remarkable Women of Troy).
 People lived in small in-groups, and feared and
fought members of out-groups; so they were more
likely to think of conflict in terms of power.
 From 100,000 B.C.E. to 10,000 B.C.E., perhaps 15
percent of human deaths were accounted for by intergroup wars.
 C. S. Lewis found that moral codes similar to The Ten
Commandments have been envisioned by all cultures.
(Lewis used this as an argument that there is an
inborn moral voice that comes from God. Lewis, The
Abolition of Man (1947), Mere Christianity (1952).)
 Lewis thought that painful experiences were like
thorned buoys in the river guiding us back to the right
and moral course. The Problem of Pain (1940)
 What Lewis did not discuss was that until the 20th Century
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(The Nobel Peace Prize, 1901; The United Nations, 1947),
moral treatment was, as a rule, extended only to members
of our own group.
For example, 40 years after Moses received the Ten
Commandments, his follower Joshua invaded and
conquered Jericho, killing every man, woman, and child
in the city, except the collaborationist Rahab. It did not
occur to Joshua that he was violating any moral code in
doing so.
Most of history’s villains and heroes have been war makers
or the warriors who opposed them.
Only one other species makes wars against its own kind.
What species is that?
What do humans have that ants do not?
Self-critical awareness, flexibility, consciousness.
Creativity.
An ability to retreat or compromise.
A conscience and empathy.
An ability to evolve morally in the collective and spiritual unconscious.
Anything else?
My sense is that, since 1900, humans have been evolving increased
empathy for each other within groups, e.g. men for women and vice
versa, adults for children, and, for the first time, we have been evolving
empathy for members of out-groups: people who do not look like us or
pray like us, or do not pray at all.
 We can all contribute to that evolution.
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 By multicultural awareness and sensitivity.
 Can you think of any other ways?
 There will be a presentation on multiculturally sensitive
counseling on March 5th .
 In The Genocidal Mentality: Nazi Holocaust and Nuclear
Threat (1990), Lifton and Markusen advocated a “species
consciousness” which sees all humans as part of one
species, not as members of subspecies and races. They
wrote that everywhere they traveled in the world, they
found people hungry and ready to share such a view .
 What has been your experience?
 Over time the number of groups has decreased as
groups have increased in size.
 Thus, today, it might be said that Europe and the
Americas constitute one group; Africa another group;
the Near East another; etc.
 Simultaneously, the consequences of intergroup
conflict have increased drastically, so that today a war
involving atomic bombs could destroy all living
creatures on earth.
 In 560 BC one man climbed out of the river alone in
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northern India.
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, the “awakened one.”
His concerns were mainly spiritual.
His principle dispute was with the river: he objected to the
Hindu caste system and taught that each individual man or
woman can be her or his own spiritual guide.
He did not articulate a position on whether the spiritual or
scientific view of life was superior. The scientific worldview had not yet developed.
Although the 14th Dalai Lama speaks of “Buddha science,”
so I wonder.
 Buddha conceived of conflict in terms of
compassion.
 Small group conflict was so wide spread that
Buddha could not return to his own home town at
the end of his life, because it had been invaded
and conquered.
 We will return to the Buddha in the class on
Meditation and Mindfulness.
III.
Socrates
(470 – 399 BCE)
 Socrates (470 – 399 BC)
 Socrates thought independently, not as the
government and state religion had taught him to
think. As a result, he was found guilty of both treason
and atheism, and condemned to die.
 He encouraged others to join him in climbing out of
the river, including Plato and Aristotle.
 Socrates used the word “psyche” to mean “soul:” an
eternal part of him, which he intuited had pre-existed
him and hoped would continue to exist after his
death.
 Aristotle climbed out on
the other side of the river.
 Aristotle began to develop
the scientific world-view
of nature and of human
beings.
 For example, he collected
and catalogued shells
along the river’s bank and
coined the term mollusca,
meaning soft-bodied.
 Socrates and his student Plato were of a metaphysical
temperament.
 They climbed out on the spiritual side of the river.
 They sat by the river’s bank and wondered about the
true, underlying nature of reality; they wondered
about morality and virtue, about the soul and the
meaning of life, and about death.
 They gained knowledge by inner contemplation and
Socratic dialogue, demonstrating the human ability to
think for one’s self and to defend the value and truth of
one’s thoughts.
 Aristotle climbed out on the materialistic,
naturalistic side of the river.
 He valued gaining knowledge by careful
observation of external reality,
 And by logical deductions based on those
observations.
 Aristotle defended his views by syllogism.
 Socrates, Plato and Aristotle were contemporaries.
 They could have built a bridge across the river.
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They did not. After Plato’s death, Aristotle was twice denied appointment as
head of Plato’s Academy. So Aristotle opened his own Lyceum. Plato thought
that Aristotle’s view did not take account of the true nature of human beings,
and Aristotle thought Plato was a misguided mystic.
Socrates, Plato and Aristotle represent two distinct acts of divergence.
(1) All three diverged from the river. They stepped out onto the banks, saw the
world with independent eyes, and described what they saw for others.
(2) Then they diverged from each other: Socrates and Plato described the
world symbolically and metaphysically; Aristotle described it literally and
physically.
Instead of seeing themselves as supplementing each other’s world-view, they
took the attitude that one view was correct and the other view was incorrect.
This antagonism has existed from their time to ours.
Very few thinkers and writers have attempted to bridge it.
In suggested reading, posted on D2L, I name a few who have.
 Hippocrates (460 – 377).
 Represents a separate stream of thought from either
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Socrates or Aristotle.
Is considered the father of modern medicine and thus of
modern psychiatry.
Took the view that all illnesses, including mental illnesses,
can be accounted for by natural causes, not by spirits or
gods.
Prayers and sacrifices did not hold the central place in his
theories.
He is the grandfather of the medical model of mental
illness and psychotherapy,.
 At the time of Socrates and Aristotle, there was no word for
psychology and no need for it.
 Most people did not think of themselves as having any
questions which the culture did not answer.
 The river, however, did have an undercurrent: the
collective unconscious, which carried human capacities in
symbolic form. This accounts for similarities in the myths
of different parts of the ancient world.
 As we will see, “psychology” came to mean first the study of
the soul, and then the scientific study of human thinking
and behavior.
 When was the word “psychology” first used
in English?
 What did it mean?
 The term “psychologia” was first used by a Serbo-
Croatian writer named Marulic in 1520. The same
term was used by the German writer Rudolf
Goeckel in 1590.
 The word “psychology” was first used in English in
1653. According to the Oxford English Dictionary
(2006) it originally meant “the study or
consideration of the soul or spirit.”
 It was at that time a part of philosophy.
 What does “psychology” mean now,
according to the Oxford English
Dictionary?
 “The scientific study of the nature, functioning,
and development of the human mind, including
the faculties of reason, emotion, perception,
communication, etc.; the branch of science that
deals with the human or animal mind as an entity
and in its relationship to the body and to the
environment or social context, based on
observation of the behavior of individuals or
groups of individuals in particular, ordinary, or
experimentally controlled circumstances.”
 We can trace the history of the meaning of any English
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word because of the OED.
L'Académie Française was established in 1635 by Cardinal
Richelieu, the chief minister to King Louis XIII. It has 40
members, whose task is to act as an official authority on the
language. It is charged with publishing an official
dictionary of the language.
In 1755, Samuel Johnson published an English Dictionary,
boasting that one Englishman could do in 3 years what had
taken 40 Frenchmen 40 years.
It took him 9 years.
He and the English literati decided not to form an English
Academy.
 English wo/men of letters thought is was best to allow
new words to join the language and old words to
change meaning without any official standard.
 Thus we have the OED: begun in 1858, first completed
in 1884, with the help of many volunteer readers, and
under constant review ever since.
 It gives the definition of every word ever used in
English, and every change of meaning of that word,
with the date of each and examples.
 The OED is available as on on-line resource at the PSU
and Multnomah County Library.
 There is a hilarious installment in Black Adder the
Third, starring Rowan Atkinson and Hugh Laurie (now
“House”) as the incredibly stupid prince of Wales.
 Samuel Johnson brings the completed Dictionary to
show the Prince of Wales.
 They come to think that Baldric, Black Adder’s
servant, has inadvertently burned the dictionary for
firewood.
 Black Adder must reconstruct the dictionary (nine
year’s work) in one night, before Dr. Johnson returns.
 The first social science was sociology.
 Who was the first “sociologist?”
 What did he believe?
 Founder of sociology and positivism.
 Our sense perceptions and logical inferences based
thereon are the only admissible basis of human
knowledge.
 If the scientific attitude could be applied to all aspects
of life, this would lead to a complete and beneficial
restructuring of the social order.
 Sociology would discover the laws of social dynamics
that would lead to these advances.
 Carl Rogers wrote that positivism “is settled dogma” in
psychology (Rogers, 1989a, p. 232).
 Who was the first person to describe
himself as a scientist and as a
psychologist?
 Wilhelm Wundt.
 Conducted the first
psychology experiment in
a lab at the University of
Leipzig in 1879.
 It involved a stimulus
followed by a mechanical
measurement of the
subject’s response time
combined with a
recording of the subject’s
conscious sensations and
feelings.
 One objection to having a science of psychology had
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been that the most psychologists can hope to measure
is correlation.
That remains a weakness of psychology today.
That is why one must take a statistics class if one is to
study psychology -- and
What is one o f the first things we learn in a statistics
class?
“Correlation does not equate to cause and effect.”
 Who was the first person to call himself a
psychologist in the United States?
 William James.
 What was James’s most famous book?
 The Varieties of Religious Experience.
 It has never been out of print since it was
first published in 1902.
 I found it a beautiful and moving book – but
if it is taught in college today, it will
probably not be in a psychology class.
 Wundt was a monist.
 James was a pluralist. He thought that monism is a
hypothesis.
 He believed that there is no system of rules that works in
every situation or at all times. He believed that this
incompleteability characterizes all reality: material and
subjective.
 James was not a therapist, but if he had been, he might
have taken a constructivist approach, with an openness to
the importance of the spiritual world view for some clients.
 We will study the constructivist approach on March 12th.
 Who was the first psychotherapist?
 Sigmund Freud.
 Who were Freud’s first and most famous
followers?
 Jung was the president of the Guild of Pastoral
Psychology, which was “committed to building
bridges between psychology and theology”
 He believed in the soul.
 Freud did not.
 Freud believed that religion was composed of false
and unhealthy beliefs and a threat to science.
 One interesting question Jung asked was,
Where was the psyche before the mid 19th
Century?
 Did it not exist?
 What do you think?
 Why did its interest and treatment suddenly
come to public awareness around 1900?
 Jung said that until the late 19th century, the
psyche had been “external.”
 What does that mean?
 My sense is that the psyche is still largely
external in some cultures.
 What was one thing that Freud, Jung, and
Adler all had in common?
 They were all medical doctors.
 Therefore, they are prone to the disease
model of mental health counseling.
 As you will learn in this class, there are
alternatives to the disease model.
 Freudian psychotherapy was the main
approach to counseling available until the
1960s.
 Freudians believed it was the only valid
“scientific” approach.
 What are some other sorts of counseling
that came into existence between 1900 to
1960?
 Career counseling offered in Boston schools
around 1900 and then extended to the
military.
 Pastoral counseling in churches.
 Person-centered counseling began with
Rogers in the 1950s. He was accused by
Freudians of committing malpractice.
 Family counseling – Satir and others in the
1950s.
 What career tracks were available to
“counselors” in the 1960s?
 Psychiatrist, MD, almost all Freudian.
 PhD in psychology.
 What additional tracks are available to
persons who want to be counselors today?
 Many different Master’s degrees including
Masters in mental health counseling, family
counseling, “rehab,” social work, community
counseling, school counseling.
 PsyD.
 Can anyone think of any other tracks?