What is humanistic psychology?

Humanistic psychology can be defined as both a social movement within psychology, and an enduring perspective. It arose from personality psychology. The leaders of personality psychology founded humanistic psychology. For example, Rogers, Maslow and May proposed humanistic psychology to be the ‘third force’, with behaviorism and psychoanalysis. Humanistic psychology is different compared to scientific psychology. In contrast with behaviorism, humanistic psychology emphasizes human experience, the meaning of life. Most researchers in humanistic psychology have engaged in psychotherapy.

What are the antecedents of humanistic psychology?

During the 1920s and 1930s, American psychology was dominated by behaviorism. As you perhaps know, behaviorism disregarded human experience as being the topic of scientific studies. During this period, personality psychology emerged. This happened because of two books, namely Gordon Allport’s ‘Personality: A Psychological Interpretation’, and Henry Murray’s ‘Explorations in Personality’. Allport described how to study ‘ego’ (Freud) and how the ego develops. Murray emphasized aspects of personality that were unconscious, such as creativity and neurosis. Later, Gardner Murphy and George Kelly also released books about personality psychology. These books initially had little impact. Later, however, during the cognitive revolution in psychology, these books gained popularity. Behaviorism was in opposition to these views on psychology. Later, based on this personality psychology, humanistic psychology emerged.

How was humanistic psychology founded?

Humanistic psychology was launched as a social movement within psychology during a conference in 1964 in Connecticut. The leading figures of personality psychology (Allport, Murray, Murphy, Kelly) participated in this. Carl Rogers, May, and Abraham Maslow became the intellectual leaders of this movement. Humanistic psychology was called the ‘Third Force’. Carl Rogers launched the book ‘Counseling and Psychotherapy’, in which he introduced non-directive counselling, which is now called client-centered therapy. He emphasized self-actualization, and stated that socialization could block this. However, by using certain forms of therapy, self-actualization could be achieved. Abraham Maslow was experienced in the experimental study of primate behavior. Based on Kurt Goldstein’s work, Maslow developed a hierarchical theory of human motivation, described in ‘Motivation and Personality’. He stated that people have basic needs, that need to be satisfied. They also have needs for safety, love, and belonging, and for esteem. He called these ‘deficiency needs’. Only when these needs are satisfied, self-actualization can happen. Thus, both Rogers and Maslow embraced self-actualization as an ideal. They were supporters of Rousseau’s view on human nature, which entailed that humans are intrinsically good and only become bad, because of the society. This is in contrast to Freud’s Hobbesian view, which entailed that humans are intrinsically evil. Rollo May was influenced by Paul Tillich, a theologian. He brought the ideas of existentialism and phenomenology into humanistic psychology. Thus, Rogers and Maslow had Rousseauistic beliefs and they brought these beliefs into humanistic psychology. Thus, humanistic psychology is a positive view on human nature.

What was the impact of the counterculture?

The Third Force coincided with the emergence of a counterculture, namely that of the ‘flower children’ and the ‘hippies’ in the 1960s. There were some similarities, such as that the counterculture also emphasized individualism: the individual as the centre of value, independent of others. So, ‘people should do their own thing’. There was also a belief in human perfectibility. There was also an emphasis on self-disclosure, which meant that people should speak openly about themselves, in other words ‘let it all hang out’. There was also an emphasis on superficial intimacy, and on the here and now. Then, there was hedonism, which means that ‘if it feels good, do it’. Lastly, there was ‘irrationalism’, which means that people disconnected from science and of rational problem solving. Instead, they choose to rely on intuition over evidence. However, the founders of humanistic psychology were not antiscientific. Instead, they wanted to correct the biases of behaviorism and psychoanalysis, with the goal of producing a psychology which emphasizes human life.

What was the encounter group movement?

The leaders of the older generation of founders of the humanistic psychology dropped out, and Maslow and May were ambivalent about the directions that humanistic psychology was taking. Then, there came a new development, namely that of the encounter group movement, which identified themselves with the human growth centres. This was founded by Michael Murphy and Richard Price. The encounter group movement had different roots. One, it was based on the work of J.L. Moreno, a psychiatrist who wrote about psychological encounter and the use of psychodrama. He promoted psychodrama in America as a psychotherapeutic technique. Second, there was the sensitivity training of Kurt Lewin and his students. Lewin promoted “field theory” in psychology, and he founded the self-studying group which was a technique for training people in human relations skills. This sensitivity training became very popular, and even became a movement. It was also linked to industrial-organizational psychology. Aspects of this training were included in the encounter group movement. Gestalt therapy was a third influence. This was a group approach, in which the therapist plays a very active role, uses a variety of techniques such as role playing. The goal of this training was to focus participants on holistic emotional experiences of the here and now. Wilhelm Reich complemented this Gestalt training, by using forms of massage, meditational techniques, and yoga exercises. Thus, in the encounter groups, therapies based on these techniques were set out. But, they were not seen as psychotherapy, because others saw it as being unregulated and not empiric. It flourished for a while. Later, in the mid-1980s, the encounter group had faded.

What is transpersonal psychology?

Within humanistic psychology, the concept of ‘transpersonal psychology’ emerged. This was based on mysticism, so it focused on connecting consciousness to a larger spirituality. This was based on the ideas of Carl Jung. It seemed to be some kind of ‘religion’. Thus, the humanistic psychology was a social movement which responded to a lack of faith, hope and charity, but because of this it also seemed to be like some kind of religion, lacking the science which was associated with psychology.

What are other facets of humanistic psychology?

There were not only encounter groups in humanistic psychology. Instead, there was also logotherapy, which was an existentialist version of psychoanalysis which was similar to the approach of Rollo May. It emphasized the human need to think about death and suffering in some way that made life easier. Amedeo Giorgi’s interpretation of phenomenological philosophy was also important. David Bakan’s ‘The Duality of Human Existence’ was also important, because it provided an interpretation on masculinity and femininity. All of these contributions were important to humanistic psychology.

There were some critics on humanistic psychology. For example, Richard Farson, a former student of Carl Rogers. He objected the fascination with the different kinds of therapy. There were also attempts to bring humanistic psychology into the academic scientific psychology.

What was secular humanism?

Secular humanism was neglected in humanistic psychology, even though it was humanistic. It can be best described as a existentialist tradition of humanistic thought. It entails the ideas that humans are vulnerable, incomplete, and need God’s validation. This secular humanism was well-represented in psychology, but not in humanistic psychology. For example, the founders of the personality theory, such as Henry Murray talked explicitly about this secular humanism. Erich Fromm, a neo-Freudian psychoanalyst also published two books about this humanism. Lastly, Isidor Chein, in the book ‘The Science of Behavior and the Image of Man’, criticized behaviorism and provided an integration of psychoanalytic and phenomenological views of motivation and self-hood.

How was humanism related to science in psychology?

The German philosopher Dilthey had proposed a distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘mental or cultural’ sciences. The differences lay in terms of causes and reasons, for example differences between ‘efficient causes’ and ‘telic causes’, between ‘descriptive empirical lawfulness’ and ‘normative regulation’, in other words a difference between ‘behavior and action’. For example, causal understanding means that an external person understand the behaving person’s actions, and interpretive understanding means that the person looks at it from their own perspective, which involves feelings, meanings, intentions, and values. It seems that when we ascribe meanings or interpretations to our characteristics and actions, this is important in what we do. This is called the ‘reflexivity of self-reference’, and this was the subject of research on the ‘attribution theory’, which was developed by social psychologists in the 1960s and 1970s. Thus, meanings and reasons can act like causes. Thus, the distinction proposed by Dilthey should be replaced by a complementation between these differences, that can be the only way that the science of human experience can be satisfactory.

What can be concluded?

The cognitive revolution in psychology changed scientific psychology. There was an emphasis on consciousness. The movement of humanistic psychology became less popular, but can still be used in guiding researchers. For example, humanistic psychology emphasized human experience. Now that technology becomes more popular, a humanistic perspective on human experience is important. Also, the ideas about reflexiveness of selfhood imply that theories of personality and will should pay more attention to the historical and cultural context, if they want to scientifically valid.

What is this article about?

In Brazilian schools, there were high rates of school failure observed with the establishment of a mass education system in the country. This was in the beginning of the 20^th century. This meant that a large group of students from lower social classes had to follow a school system that was actually designed for middle- and upper-class students. This lead to some criticism, and to a re-interpretation of mental tests. In Brazil, in contrast with the prevailing view, Helena Antipoff, a Russian psychologist, stated that the learning difficulties of primary-school students were not to be explained by biological and hereditary factors. Instead, it was determined by the social environment, and teaching practices. This view came to be known as the ‘Belo Horizonte school of educational psychology’. This was thus a reflection of the nature-nurture debate. The work of Helena Antipoff consisted of three periods: first, the experience in Europe, which ranged from 1909-1929. Her second period was called the critique of the public educational system in Brazil, which ranged from 1929-1945. Her third period was called the proposal of alternatives which ranged from 1945-1974.

What was the First Period: The Experience in Europe?

In 1909, Antipoff moved to Paris to study psychology. She liked the thoughts of French philosophers such as Bergson, who had a phenomenological approach to human consciousness, and that of Pierre Janet, who had a functional approach to human behavior. Bergson had influences psychologists in two ways: he criticized associationism and structuralism, and he refused to equate the human mind to that of animals. According to Bergson, there were no such things as instincts. He was one of the founders of phenomenology. Pierre Janet, similar to Sigmund Freud, interpreted mental diseases as disorders that arise at an unconscious level. Antipoff worked closely with Alfred Binet, who created the Binet-Simon intelligence scale. Antipoff also participated in studies that looked at the mental development of children, which had the aim of validating the Binet-Simon intelligence scale. Thus, she became very well studied in techniques that are used to validate mental tests, the analysis of different items, and the relationship between verbal development and motor skills. In Geneva, ideas about ‘École Active’ were developed. This referred to schools in which the purpose was to develop children’s autonomy, and in which the teaching methods were adjusted to children’s interests. In Europe, the “New School” movement was kind of similar to the “progressive education movement” in North America. The École Active, or “The Active School” was different.

Claparède invited Antipoff to join the Swiss group. This was crucial for Antipoff, because at this institute, she became well-known with the functional approach to the psychology of intelligence, and to the Active School methods. Claparède emphasized that intelligence was an active instrument of adaptation to new situations. This approach became to be called an interactionist or constructivist approach. Thus, the idea is that intelligence derives from the individual’s action on the environment, and the structure of the action. In 1913, Claparède developed his theory of intelligence. And, according to him, learning was a trial-and-error process, following ideas of Thorndike.

Later, in 1916 until 1924, Antipoff stayed in Russia, her home-country. She worked at a shelter for abandoned children. Antipoff’s task was to examine the children, and to plan their re-education. Therefore, she used psychological tests such as the Binet-Simon intelligence scale, and Lazurski’s technique for studying children’s personality, which was called natural experimentation. This involved observing children in their natural environment, with the goal of avoiding effects from a laboratory or tests. After the revolution, the Soviet Union valued scientific studies. They thought that science could help to solve the social and economical problems of the country. This lead to the creation of pedology in the Soviet Union. Vygotski was one of the leaders of this group. According to Vygotski, mental retardation for example was not biologically based, but it was determined by socio-cultural experiences. This approach was different than other theories of cognition, which thought that intellectual abilities were the result of biological maturation. But, Vygotski differed from the Genevan school. For example, Vygotski thought that the environment was always a sociocultural and historical environment. Mental development was the result of the impact of the society and culture on the individual, mediated through language, and the individual’s own action on the environment. Thus, the development of higher mental processes is socially and culturally determined. Thus, schooling was a means to develop these capacities.

During her work with the abandoned children, Antipoff found that these children’s performance on the tests were bad. But, they did not seem to be dumb. This made her accept the ideas of Vygotski. In Petrograd, she met Viktor Iretzky, whom she married. Later, she published two articles in Petrograd, which focussed on her findings with regards to children’s mental capacities. Her conclusion was thus that these tests did not do well, and that they were limited to upper-class children. However, she was criticized by the Soviet authorities, because her results showed that upper-class children did better than working-class children. This made her leave Russia, and she also lost her citizenship. She went back to Europe.

What happened next?

Antipoff lived a year in Berlin, and then went back to Geneva. She worked as Claparède’s assistant at the Rousseau institute. Clarapède’s work became very popular, and was translated into different languages. In Brazil, the Minas Gerais state government wanted to establish a Teachers Training College for training educational specialists and managers in Belo Horizonte, the capital of Brazil. Antipoff accepted a 1-year contract and left Geneva. After several renewals of this contract, she decided to stay in Brazil for good.

During the 1920s, there were educational reforms in Brazilian states. In 1924, progressive educators founded the Brazilian Education Association, and they initiated a campaign which was aimed at expanding the number of opportunities for schooling and rationalizing school administration. Psychologists’ contributions were highly valued. The New School movement supported the use of IQ tests for evaluating the possibilities of children. In 1929, Antipoff began with teaching classes at the Belo Horizonte Teachers Training College. Her students were people who were already working as school principals or supervisors in public schools. She also started a research program which was based on studying mental development, ideals, and interests of local children.

What can be said about culture and cognition in children’s development?

Antipoff studied how the children in Brazil were, and how schools should be adapted to them. Thus, she kept cultural differences in mind. To achieve this, she developed questionnaires which measured children’s’ preferred tasks at home and at school, preferred toys and books, adult models, and plans for the future. What became clear was that Brazilian children’s  ideals and interests were more limited and less diverse than those of their foreign countries. Antipoff interpreted these results by saying that in Brazil, family life was the predominant experience in children’s lives. Also, she noted that Brazilian children had fewer daily hours of class compared to Europeans or North Americans. She stated: “there is a constant interaction between children’s nature and the environment in which they life”. She stated that educative work should be organized according to children’s interests. Her ideas were published in Geneva.

She continued her research, and published a report, in which she described children’s results on the Goodenough test, the Dearborn test, and the Ballard’s A Hundred Questions Intelligence. The purpose of these studies was to first study the mental development of local schoolchildren by age group, then compare their mental development with that of peers in other countries, and lastly to investigate how mental development varies according to social background.

What was Antipoff’s Concept of Civilized Intelligence?

According to Antipoff, intelligence tests should be considered as an evaluation of ‘the level of mental development’ of a given population. She developed a view of intelligence measured by tests as “civilized intelligence”. Thus, it could be that in certain countries children score lower, but this does not mean that these children are not as intelligent. Antipoff also distinguished between concrete and abstract thinking.  This idea is related to the Soviet perspective, and to Vygotski’s ideas.

What is a Social-Psychological Approach to School Learning?

Antipoff’s concept of civilized intelligence was backed up by her studies conducted in Belo Horizonte. Her results showed that local children in Brazil had lower performance compared to peers in Europe or North America. The results also suggested a relationship between socioeconomic status and test scores. She concluded that “the ranking of each school corresponds to the level of economic and social welfare of the neighbourhood where each school is located”. She also found a high relationship between fathers’ jobs and test results: lower jobs were associated with lower test scores. Thus, she concludes that general intelligence tests measure a civilized intelligence, and not a natural one. Thus, IQ tests should be used with caution. Instead, they were well fit to measure the socioeconomic status of groups.

Later, Antipoff conducted another study using an adaptation of the Binet-Simon intelligence scale, namely the ‘Test Prime’. She examined three groups, who were all illiterate. The results showed that illiterate adults showed the same performance as illiterate children. Fourth graders showed the best performance. According to Antipoff, this showed that schools develop ‘civilized intelligence’. Vygotski also developed an idea, which involved that formal instructions guide cognitive transformations. Thus, these findings point to the role of the social environment on children’s mental development. Thus, Antipoff created five factors that should be taken into consideration when interpreting IQ tests: experience, culture, social environment, opportunities to deal with different life situations, and emotions.

How can we deal with school failure from a cultural perspective?

Thus, Antipoff created an environmentalist approach. She was a supporter of grouping students, because the results she found were for the group, and not for individuals. Classification should be based on IQ tests, and then followed by a careful observation of students by their teachers. Researchers first tried to group students based on age. Among class-repeaters, Antipoff distinguished three groups: children presenting educational retardation, children who also presented intellectual or social retardation, and abnormal children, who suffered from physical or psychological deficiencies. Using school achievement and mental age, these groups could be distinguished. Antipoff stated that failure was to be expected regularly, because of things such as mental development, irregular school attendance. However, others thought the schools themselves were responsible. There was a high amount of repeaters in Brazil, 52% children in the first grade were repeaters. According to Antipoff, grouping students would help to reduce the problem of this repeating.

What was the third period?

Researchers in Belo Horizonte stated that there were a lot of abnormal children in public schools. Antipoff changed this to ‘exceptional’ children. She did not want to label children in a negative way. There were special classes developed for educationally retarded children, which involved children who repeated the same grade three or more times, and those who suffered from physical disabilities, perceptual defects, short attention span, or mental and emotional instability. These special classes had a maximum of 15 students each.  In 1934, Antipoff published a study on ‘mental orthopedics’ for special classes. In this work, she suggested that the activities in these special classes should focus on the ‘Active School methods’: the education of these children should raise their natural interests, use concrete subjects, train them in basic skills, and be individualized. She also founded the Belo Horizonte Pestalozzi Society, which was aimed to help exceptional and socially disadvantaged children. The founders of this Pestalozzi society consisted of a heterogenous group. According to Antipoff, mental abnormality did not only reflect ‘limited intelligence’. Instead, children with lower IQ scores could also show personality problems. This makes sense, because the children that were living below the poverty line experience a lot of stressors, such as alcoholism, violence, and other problems. Thus, she really wanted to support these children.

By the end of 1930, she was discouraged by the directions that public schools were taking. She criticized their emphasis on “new scientific methods, and new work materials”. She felt like this was preventing educators from their role as social reformers. She also felt like Brazilian schools did not adapt well to their children. In the early 1940s, after going to France, she moved back to Brazil and decided to stay there. She promoted the establishment of a school for retarded and abandoned children, which was sponsored by the Pestalozzi society. This school was established on a farm. This Farm-School can be considered as Antipoff’s major creation.

How can we reason about madness?

Madness was seen as something that was supernatural in early civilizations. For example, Assyrians and Egyptians saw diseases as coming from God, and thus healing was entrusted to priests. The Greeks also viewed madness as something that came from God. Later, Greek philosophers pointed to the cosmos and the human conditions as the cause of madness. Plato and Socrates stepped away from God as the cause, and instead analysed people’s psyche: reason, spirit, passion, and the soul. Aristoteles defined man as being a rational animal, within the system of Nature. Protagoras then pointed to ‘Man’ as the cause of all things. Thus, a lot of Greek philosophers reasoned about nature, society, and consciousness. They casted the ‘rational individual’ (educated males) as the basis for ethical and political ideas. They did not deny the reality of the irrational. Plato pointed to ‘appetite’ as the human enemy of freedom and dignity. His ideas were called ‘mind over matter’, became classical values in later philosophies. For example, Delphic stated that ‘know-thyself’ reasoning was important in analysing and explaining human nature. Irrationality became to be seen as a danger, and reason or the soul should combat this irrationality. Thus, Greek philosophers changed ‘madness from the heavens’ to ‘madness of humans’. How did these Greek philosophers suggest to cure madness?

How was madness medicalized?

Medicine complemented the theatrical and philosophical traditions that already existed. For example, Hippocrates, developed a holistic explanatory scheme for health and sickness, such as madness. He excluded the supernatural out of this explanation. Hippocratic medicine involved explaining health and illness in terms of ‘humours’, which were basic fluids. According to Hippocrates, the body was dependent on the dynamics of development and change within these fluids. When people got sick, this meant that their fluids were in imbalance. These fluids were called blood, choler (or yellow bile), phlegm, and melancholy. Blood was the main force behind vitality. Choler was a gastric juice, which was important for digestion. Phlegm was a broad category including all colourless secretions, such as sweat, and tears. When people were sick, and had a cold or fever, phlegm dominated according to Hippocrates. The last fluid, black bile or melancholy was the most problematic. It was a dark liquid and it was seen as the cause of darkening of other fluids, such as when blood or the skin became black. It was also seen as the cause of dark hair, dark eyes, and skin pigmentation. These fluids also influenced physical existence, for example temperature, colour, and texture. Blood lead to hot and wet flesh, choler made the flesh hot and dry, phlegm made it cold and wet, and black bile produced colour and dry sensations. These ideas were in parallel with Aristoteles’ philosophy, in which he thought of air, fire, water, and earth as the elements of the universe. Blood was like air, because it was warm, moist, and animated. Choler was like fire, because it was warm and dry. Phlegm suggested water, because it was cold and wet, and black bile resembled the earth, because it was cold and dry.

These humours were also used to explain temperaments, which were also called personality and psychology dispositions. Someone who would be dominant in ‘blood’, would also have a ‘sanguine’ temperament: lively, energetic, and robust, but also hot-bloodedness and a short temper. Someone who was dominant in choler or bile, may have high verbal abilities, same as people with high phlegm and black bile. Humoral thinking thus also explained how people shifted from healthy to sick, both in physical and psychological ways. When there was a good balance in the humors, everything was good. But, if this balance shifted, perhaps through a bad diet, then people became sick, and developed ‘sanguineous disorders’ (what we might now call high blood pressure). In terms of mental disorders, excessive blood and yellow bile could lead to mania, and a surplus of black bile could lead to lowness, melancholy, or depression. Thus, certain treatments of the sick involved blood-letting, and a change of diet. For example, madmen would be put on a diet containing greens, barley water, milk, and were banned from drinking wine and red meat. Thus, mental disorders arose from physical disorders.

What was the clinical gaze?

Thus, the humoral framework was not only abstract. It was full of practical treatments for the sick. Mental abnormalities were also the focus of Hippocratic writings. For example, there are reports of  a woman who was noted as having rambling speech and obscenities in speech. She also exhibits fears, depression, and grief. Another woman was very silent, and would not speak at all. The latter was described as melancholia. In the Greek medicine, there were two causes of mood and behavioural disturbance, namely mania and melancholia. Melancholia was seen as a mental disturbance, with anguish and dejection as its elements. IT also involved powerful emotions, such as hallucinations and sensations of mistrust, anxiety, and trepidation. Mania was a condition marked by excess and uncontrollability, and was described by ‘fury, excitement, and cheerfulness’. Someone suffering from mania could for example ‘slaughter the servants’ and feel grandiose. It thus often included euphoria: someone feels great, and inspired. There was also mania that involved the idea of being possessed by a god. For example, people suffering from this ‘divine furor’ would sometimes even castrate themselves and offer their penis to the goddess. Arateus came up with bipolar disorder. This entailed that some patients, after being melancholic have mania, and after the mania, they may become melancholic again.

A continuing tradition?

Islamic and Christian medicine follow the medical traditions of Hippocrates, which was systematized by Galen, Arateus, and others. Diagnoses of melancholia and mania dominated the diagnoses in this medicine. Later, Bartholomeus Anglicus, expanded ‘melancholia’ with states of ‘anxiety’, ‘hypochondriasis’, ‘depression’, and ‘delusion’. Also in the Renaissance Greek thinking remained stable. For example, Denis Fontanon described mania as ‘it occurs sometimes solely from the warmer temper of the brain without a harmful humour, and this is similar to what happens in drunkenness. It occasionally arises from stinging and warm humours, such as yellow bile’. He also addressed the varieties of mania. For example, it was good when mania involved laughter, but when there was a mixture of blood and choler, mania would turn into ‘ brutal madness, and the most dangerous form of mania’. Felix Platter described melancholia as leading to ‘imagining, judging, and remembering things falsely’. Maniacs would ‘do everything unreasonably’. Platter also emphasized anxiety and delusion in his descriptions of melancholia. He says that ‘it is a kind of mental alienation, in which imagination and judgement are so perverted, that without any cause, the victims become very sad and fearful’. Timothie Bright, another contemporary writer, published the first English writings on melancholia in  1586. Shakespeare’s writing about psychiatric problems probably were based on these writings of Timothie Bright. However, the humoral approach came to a peak after Robert Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’. Burton described melancholia similar to Hippocrates, but he added different causes or antecedents of the condition, namely ‘idleness, solitariness, overmuch study, passions, perturbations, discontents, cares, miseries, vehement desires, ambitions’. According to Burton, marriage was the best remedy for melancholy maids. He also suggested music therapy. Burton said that he was himself a sufferer of melancholy, he states: “I wrote of melancholy by being busy to avoid melancholy”.

How did these ideas go into psychology?

In the seventeenth century, the mind became prominent in the philosophical models of man. For example, René Descartes stated that reason was the only thing that could rescue mankind from falling into ignorance, confusion, and error. Descartes dedicated his life to the pursuit of truth. He built on himself, saying ‘Cogito, ergo sum’, which means “I am thinking, therefore I do exist”. Descartes felt like Ptolemaic/Aristotelian thinking should be replaced by a new philosophy, which was grounded in reality. Thus, a philosophy that was composed of particles of matter in motion, which obeyed mathematical laws. Therefore, he created a distinction between matter and mind. Matter is extension from the mind, so the body is also ‘matter’. According to Descartes, humans possessed minds, but animals were mere matter and motion (and thus machines). Descartes also introduced reflexes in his account of the nervous system. He also equated the mind to the soul. But, it was immaterial, and thus had no location in space (no extension in space). But, the mind was thought to emerge in the pineal gland, which was a structure in the middle of the brain. Later, after Descartes died, researchers pointed to different areas of the brain such as the medulla oblongata, the corpora striata, and the corpus callosum. These were then seen as the true seat of the soul.

Thus, Descartes clearly revolutionized philosophical thinking and medicine. However, he was unable to respond appropriately to the question: “how do mind and body interact?”. This is called the mind-body problem, which still exists in contemporary times. Materialists were inspired by Descartes, even though Descartes was not a materialist. Materialists went further than him, and denied the reality of anything at all, except for matter. Thomas Hobbes was one of such materialists, and was the greatest enemy of orthodox Christians. According to Hobbes, the universe was only matter, and there were no spirits, and no God. According to Hobbes, knowledge derived from sensations, and behaviour was determined by physical laws of matter in motion. Emotion was according to him, only motion. According to him, religion was a form of delusion. Insanity was thought to occur because of some defects in the body. John Locke, in his ‘Essay Concerning Human: Understanding’, supported these ideas, and claimed that all ideas originate from sense impressions (taste, sight, touch, hearing, smell). The mind is initially a blank sheet (tabula rasa), which is shaped by experience and nurtured by education. According to Locke, witches and goblins are false beliefs. Madness was also a delusion. According to Locke, ‘Mad men put wrong ideas together, and make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from these ideas. But, idiots make very few or no propositions, but argue and reason scarce.” This Lockean thinking formed the basis for new secular and psychological approaches to understanding madness, or insanity. According to Locke, madness could be treated by thinking appropriately. Thus, among the 17th century philosophers, madness was not associated with demons, humours, or passions, but with irrationality. However, mental disorders remained to be mysteries.

What can be said about science and psychiatry?

Psychiatry has often had two goals, namely understanding mental disorders through a scientific perspective, and healing mental disorders. Sometimes, there has been more an emphasis on one than on the other goal. For example, in the nineteenth century, for many psychiatrists, the emphasis was on creating a true scientific enterprise for their discipline, alongside other biomedical sciences such as neurology and pathology. They wanted to be different from non-scientific fields, such as mesmerism and spiritualism. Thus, there was a strong emphasis on creating a scientific basis for psychiatry. John Hughlings Jackson for example, told Herbert Spencer to use evolutionism as the basis for his account of the nervous system. Henry Maudsley also used a Darwinian basis to look at psychiatry. Freud was also fan of Darwin, and wanted to achieve a ‘Copernican’ revolution in his field. Also, German Emil Kraepelin wanted to make psychiatry more scientific.

Kraepelin became an important figure for psychiatry. For example, he became a professor at university of Heidelberg. He created descriptive clinical psychiatry and psychiatric nosology. According to him, his patients were ‘symptom carriers’. According to him, the course of the illness was best to understand the nature of the disease, in contrast to only looking at the symptoms that the patients had. He innovated psychiatry, by creating disease concepts and classifications. He created a model of a degenerative condition, namely dementia. He based this on Morel’s ‘deménce précoce’ and hebephrenia (psychosis in young people). He distinguished dementia from manic-depressive psychoses.  According to Kraepelin, dementia praecox was a precursor of schizophrenia, and patients were describes as having ‘atrophy of the emotions’ and ‘vitation of the will’. Because he was interested in the course of the disorders, he tracked his patients’ entire life histories in a longitudinal perspective. The prognosis, the outcome of the disorder, was a very important point. Kraepelin was also fan of Wundt, and thus of experimental psychology. Thus, he pioneered psychological testing of psychiatric patients. Another colleague of Kraepelin, Alois Alzheimer, created the speciality of ‘psycho-geriatrics’. All of this lead to the creation of a Munich-clinic-inspired centre, such as the hospital created by Henry Maudsley in South London. This hospital was created to be a research centre. Heredity was an important concept in Kraepelin’s work. He was also positive about he outcomes of psychiatric disorders. Therefore, something called ‘Pinelian optimism’ arose. However, later this lost support. One German asylum doctor even commented:  “we know a lot, but we can do only little”. Later, a psychiatric politics emerged that was very pessimistic, and that even stated that mentally ill people were not worth living. For example, in the 1930s, the Nazi psychiatry thought that schizophrenics should be eliminated, similar to their ideas about Jews. Thus, between January 1940 and September 1942, there was a run called ‘the final solution’, in which 70.723 mental patients were gassed.

What was psychodynamics?

In reaction to pessimism and asylum psychiatry, there were new dynamic styles of psychiatry launched. For example, Franz Anton Mesmer’s therapeutic ideas, and the Enlightenment were the roots of these dynamic psychiatry. This raised questions about the will, the unconscious, and the unity of the person. All Cartesian ideas were disregarded, and people became to think that ‘man was not master in his own house’. Using mesmeric techniques, Nancy Liébault and H.M. Bernheim made hypnotism a diagnostic device for hysteria. According to them, only hysterics could be hypnotized. But, later it became clear that this was not a scientific method.

Who was the conquistador of the unconscious?

Sigmund Freud was born to a middle-class Jewish family from the Czech Republic. He was trained in Vienna in medicine and physiology. He was specialized in clinical neurology, and he was a supporter of Darwin’s ideas. He was also a supporter of Ernst Brücke’s ideas, and he brought a materialist approach to the study of humans. He thought that the mind was all in the brain, and he disregarded religion, calling it an illusion. He worked closely together with Josef Breuer, and he was interested in hypnotic states, hysteria, and neuroses. Breuer once told Freud about a patient called ‘Anna O.’, who suffered from hysterical symptoms. He told Freud that he treated Anna with hypnosis, and that this helped to vanish her symptoms.

Later, when Freud worked under Charcot in Paris, Charcot told Freud that hysteria had a sexual side. Later, Freud and Breuer together published a book called ‘Studies on Hysteria’, in which Freud described that neurosis stemmed from early sexual traumas. For example, the hysterical female was said to have experience ‘seduction’, which is the term for sexual abuse by the father. According to Freud, repressed memories of this abuse later would get to the surface, in the form of hysterical symptoms. This was thus called the ‘seduction theory’. Three years later, he went public during a lecture in Vienna and told the listeners about his ideas.

However, one year later, Freud confessed to Wilhelm Fliess that he no longer believed in neurotica (the seduction theory). According to Freud, who was now very interested in autobiographical dreams and self-analysis, his patients’ seduction stories were just fantasies, which originated from their erotic wishes. Therefore, he created a new theory, namely that of infantile sexuality within the Oedipus complex. Thus, the two key concepts in psychoanalysis were the unconscious and Oedipal sexuality.

Well, how could this shift in Freud’s thinking be explained? Orthodox Freudians thought of this as Freud having a ‘Eureka-moment’, in which he suddenly saw the light. Others, critics of Freud, thought of this as Freud having lost his nerves, and thought that the abandonment of the seduction theory was actually a mistake, and even a betrayal. Why a betrayal? Well, if they were really abused, then Freud would disregard their stories, calling them liars.

Freud later distanced from Breuer, who was a fan of hypnotic techniques. He also broke with Fliess. He advanced the fundaments of psychoanalysis, by including unconscious mental states, the repression of these states, and the neurotic consequences. He also outlined the techniques of ‘free association’ and ‘dream interpretation’, which were two methods for overcoming resistance and for uncovering hidden unconscious wishes. He also introduced the idea of ‘therapeutic transference’. During the Great War, Freud applied his ideas to shellshock and other war-related neuroses. According to him, the soldiers that displayed paralysis and loss of speech, sight, and hearing, suffered from conversion hysteria. Later, he elaborated his theory by including the notion of developmental phases, the conflict between eros and death, and his ideas about the ego, superego, and id. He also created theories about the origins of incest, about patriarchy and monotheism. He also introduced the idea of ‘Freudian slips’, which refer to that someone unintentionally speaks something that he or she did not want, and that this reveals his or her true, subconscious feelings.

Freud’s ideas were very important for the twentieth-century views of the self. The funny thing is, Freud viewed himself as a natural scientist, but his theories and ideas were not of this nature, at all.

What can be said about the psychoanalytical movement?

In Switzerland, ‘depth psychiatry’ emerged. At the Zürich psychiatric hospital, Eugen Bleuler used psychoanalytic theories of ‘schizophrenia’, which he based on Kraepelin’s dementia praecox. He defined schizophrenia by delusions, hallucinations, and disordered thought. According to Bleuler, schizophrenics are ‘strange, puzzling, inconceivable, uncanny, incapable of empathy, sinister, and frightening’. However, these ideas were overshadowed by the ideas of Carl Jung, who developed the ‘analytical psychology’, which was less sexual and a more realistic view of the unconscious.

Carl Jung was the son of a pastor, and he was trained in medicine. He became Freud’s ‘favourite son’, and gained a reputation of the ‘crown prince’ of psychoanalysis. However, with the publication of his book ‘The Psychology of the Unconscious’, Jung challenged many of Freud’s theories, and the sexual origin of neuroses the most. After two years, they split. According to Jung, his analytic psychology provided a better view of the psyche compared to Freud’s. He also introduced personality types, such as the ‘extravert’ and the ‘introvert’. According to Jung, a healthy balance of opposites was good, as well as a balance between thought, feeling, and intuition. Jung introduced the idea of the ‘collective unconscious’, which refers to latent memories of mankind’s ancestral past, which are passed down from generation to generation by some kind of Lamarckian mechanism. His study of dreams, art, and anthropology fascinated him with archetypes and myths, which he believed to shape the collective unconscious and experience. He described all of these ideas in his book ‘Man and His Symbols’.

In France, there was another psychodynamic tradition. Pierre Janet created theories of personality development and mental disorders which dominated French dynamic psychiatry. He also focused on the unconscious, and created descriptions of hysteria, anorexia, amnesia, and obsessional neuroses, and of their treatments using hypnosis, suggestion, and other psychodynamic techniques. He suggested to treat hysteria with ‘psychological analysis’, because he thought hysteria was related to ‘subconscious fixed ideas’.

Freud’s ideas were also received well in America. For example, Alfred Adler, who is best known for his ideas about the ‘inferiority complex’ (which refers to that someone is very aggressive, because of neurosis), was one of these recipients. After working together with the ‘master’ Freud, he broke with him, and created his own theory, described in ‘The Nervous Character’. He described his ideas about the relationships between the individual and the environment, and he stressed the need for social harmony as a means to avoid neurosis.

A lot of Jewish researchers flee from Europe, and went to the United States. Therefore, the United States became the key location for psychoanalysts. Thus, it is not surprising then that America was heavily psychoanalytically oriented. Psychoanalysis also spread to the United Kingdom. There was however some resistance there, but psychoanalysis still claimed some space. The British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones became close friends with Freud and he published the first book in England about psychoanalysis. Anna Freud, Freud’s daughter, also lived in England together with her father after the Nazi occupation in Austria. There was a lot of debate about infant/mother relations.

What was ‘the shock of the new’?

Freud was seen as ‘the conquistador of the unconscious’. At the same time, the medical treatment of the mentally ill innovated, by therapeutic innovations. Some innovations were effective, many were dubious, and a few were simply dangerous. For example, the effects of bacterial infections on brain pathology were identified, such as syphilis. Julius von Wagner-Jauregg found that counter-infection with artificially induced malaria was effective against mental disorders. This led him to win the Nobel prize in 1927. Wagner-Jauregg was a fan of Faradization (electric shock) for the disorder called ‘shell shock’. Also, sleep therapies with the use of sleep medication was introduced. Insulin-induced coma had been introduced against diabetes, and against schizophrenia. Even though it was dangerous, it seemed to have some benefit.

Ladislaus Joseph von Meduna also developed a shock treatment against epilepsy. He used a drug called Cardiazol or Metrazol, which produced seizures which were so violent that patients’ bones sometimes broke. According to Meduna, epileptiform seizures were beneficial to schizophrenic patients. Later, based on this idea, Ugo Cerletti began to use electric shocks (ECT) to alleviate severe depression.

Psychosurgery also became popular from the 1930s on. Egas Moniz for example, stated that obsessive and depressive symptoms could be alleviated by using leucotomy, which involved a surgical removal of connections between the frontal lobes and the rest of the brain. These ideas were received well in the United States, for example by Dr. Walter Freeman, who was a neurologist. Using a cocktail-cabinet ice-pick inserted via the eyes, Freeman conducted a lot of lobotomies in a week, sometimes 3600 in one week. Before these ideas were criticized, around 18.000 patients in the U.S. had undergone lobotomy.

However, before this, lobotomy seemed to be very beneficial. Some lobotomized patients were discharged from institutions and became well adjusted. Lobotomy was said to ‘turn the troublesome into quiet, placid, uncomplaining persons who showed little concern about their troubles’.

What was the chemical revolution?

In the 1940s, penicillin was introduced. It was one of the innovations of psychopharmacology. It was introduced as a treatment for manic-depression. There were also other anti-psychotic and anti-depressant drugs introduced, such as the phenothiazines (chlorpromazine, named ‘Largactil’ or ‘liquid cosh’), and Imipramine (against depression). These medicines helped a lot of patients to maintain a life in the outside world, even though it was under continuing medication. William Sargant, a British psychiatrist, supported these drugs and thought it was the best way to treat patients, and he also thought that this would help to eliminate mental illness, by the year 2000. Diazepam, a tranquillizer, became the world’s most often prescribed medication In the 1960s. In 1970, one in five women were using minor tranquillizers. By 1980, American doctors were prescribing ten million prescriptions a year for anti-depressants, mostly tricyclics such as Imipramine. Prozac, which was introduced in 1987 and which raised serotonin levels (and creates a good feeling), was prescribed a lot against depression. Currently, central nervous system drugs are at the top of the medicines the most sold in the USA. Even though these medicines have reduced the amount of people institutionalized, they come with a lot of side effects, and the long-term effects are often unknown. Thus, there are a lot of ethical and political questions with regard to this kind of treatment of mental disorders.

What is anti-psychiatry?

Thus, psychotropic drugs seemed to offer hope, because they helped to reduce the amount of people institutionalized. Since there were a lot of European and American psychiatrists who were against asylum, this was great. These psychiatrists did not like asylum, because there were a lot of problems in the day-to-day management of the English asylums. Also, the segregation of the ‘mad’ from the ‘normal’ did not make any sense. Psychiatrists even came to the conclusion that the greatest proportion of mental disorders was not to be found in the asylum, but in the community at large. Thus, mental disorders became to be seen as extremities of normal conditions. These ideas had big implications, and led to a shift from the institutional provision to the needs of the patient. By the end of the twentieth century, the psychiatric hospital and psychoanalysis faded. There was also an explosive growth visible in certain psychiatric conditions, such as in post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This lead to the introduction of clinical psychology and cognitive therapy.

However, most psychiatrists were still using the ideas of Kraepelin, and described and taxonomized mental disorders. In 1952, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association was published. In 1980, there was a revised version, which mapped the following categories of mental disorders: disorders of childhood (hyperactivity, anorexia, autism), disorders with known cause (disease of old age, disorders that are drug-induced), disorders of schizophrenia (disorganized, catatonia, paranoia, undifferentiated), paranoid disorders, affective disorders, anxiety disorders, somatoform disorders, dissociative and personality disorders. In 1994, the DSM-IV was published, and created a trend towards a more organic orientation. The DSM is revised every few years, and there is always a lot of debate about terminologies and ideas. For example, in 1975, homosexuality was removed from the DSM. I wonder what else will change in 20 years.