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A Commentary on the History of Social Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Twentieth-Century Germany, Holland and Great Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 July 2012

Michael Neve
Michael Neve
Affiliation:
The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, 24 Eversholt Street, London, NW1 1AD, UK
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Extract

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The detailed essays in this special issue of Medical History provide an opportunity for reflection on common themes as well as on differing medical and historical contexts, specifically examining the organization and practice of European social psychiatry, its various definitions, as well as the history of psychotherapy, in twentieth-century Germany, Holland and Great Britain. The chance has also arisen for one of the two guest editors to comment briefly on various other points that seem pertinent, by way of brief introduction. His fellow guest editor, Harry Oosterhuis, is the author of one essay and co-author of another.

Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 48 , Issue 4 , 01 October 2004 , pp. 407 - 412
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2004

References

1 An editorial collaboration between the Wellcome Trust Centre at UCL and the Lancet is currently generating a very useful series based on medical keywords and their historical shifts in meaning. See, for example, Michael Neve, ‘Neurosis’, Lancet, 3 April 2004, 363 (9415): 1170, or Richard Barnett, ‘Eugenics’, Lancet, 22 May 2004, 363 (9422): 1742.

2 Further connections can be made in an abundant literature on mental hygiene and race and eugenics in Germany. See Paul Weindling, Health, race and German politics between national unification and Nazism, 1870–1945, Cambridge University Press, 1989, and Michael Burleigh, Death and deliverance: “euthanasia” in Germany c. 1900–1945, Cambridge University Press, 1994.

3 Eric Rayner, The independent mind in British psychoanalysis, London, Free Association Books, 1990; Elaine Showalter, The female malady: women, madness, and English culture 1830–1980, London, Virago, 1987, especially ch. 7.

4 On British scepticism regarding psychoanalysis, see, particularly, Trevor Turner, ‘James Crichton-Browne and the anti-psychoanalysts’, in Hugh Freeman and German Berrios (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry, vol. II: The aftermath, London, Athlone Press,1996, pp. 144–55, and Dean Rapp, ‘The early discovery of Freud by the British press: general interest and literary magazines’, J. Hist. Behav. Sci., 1988, 24: 191–207.

5 See Jones's essay in this issue, ‘War and the practice of psychotherapy: the UK experience 1939–1960’, p. 507.

6 R A Sandison, ‘Psychological aspects of the LSD treatment of the neuroses’, J. Mental Sci., 1954, 100 (419): 508–15. On the more general history of the influence, such as it was, of psychotherapy on British psychiatry, the work of Malcolm Pines—himself a consultant psychotherapist at St George's Hospital—remains very useful. See his ‘The development of the psychodynamic movement’, in German Berrios and Hugh Freeman (eds), 150 years of British psychiatry 1841–1991, London, Gaskell, 1991, pp. 206–31. On the legal and consensual history of mental health legislation in Britain, see Clive Unsworth, The politics of mental health legislation, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1987, and Phil Fennell, Treatment without consent: law, psychiatry and the treatment of mentally disordered people since 1845, London and New York, Routledge, 1996.

7 William Sargant, ‘The treatment prognosis for functional psychoses in Great Britain’, Am. J. Psychiatry, 1961, reprint held in the Sargant Papers, Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, London, PP/WWS Box 5 C.1/22.

8 Richard P Bentall, Madness explained: psychosis and human nature, London, Allen Lane, 2003. Bentall sees the legacy of Emil Kraepelin and his followers as the chief obstacle to a revived understanding of the continuity between normal and abnormal mental states. The diagnostic labelling that has followed the Kraepelinian line has very few advantages and—through various forms of inept classification and naming of “diseases”—many disadvantages.