Читать книгу Understanding Mental Health and Counselling - Группа авторов - Страница 41

This chapter has reconstructed some of the key moments and movements in the history of psychotherapy as a practice. It has examined the precursors to modern-day psychotherapy, including the widespread fascination with hypnosis and unconscious suggestion in the nineteenth century. Until Freud, psychotherapy was focused more on unconscious suggestions made by authority figures than on analysing the content of a patient’s own words. The birth of psychoanalysis saw a shift towards free association and the examination of unconscious transference from the patient’s early relationships towards the analyst, which forms the basic underlying idea for the psychodynamic tradition in psychotherapy.

Behavioural and cognitive therapies departed from psychoanalysis, rejecting the idea of an unconscious mind. In the 1950s, behaviour modification emerged to treat phobias and anxiety, drawing on learning and conditioning theories to change an individual’s associations and responses to stimuli. It was also deployed for unethical purposes including the ‘treatment’ of homosexuality. In the 1960s, CBT approaches began to emerge in the US, which focused on rationally challenging the automatic thoughts that contribute to negative patterns of thinking. CBT became successful worldwide, partly because it was amenable to randomised control trials that could provide an evidence base for its efficacy.

This chapter has traced the history of the humanistic approaches, which first emerged in response to the Second World War. It showed how Carl Rogers’ person-centred ideas developed through engagement with various influences, from religion and biology to democratic thought, and the impact that these ideas had on popular culture in post-war US and elsewhere.

Finally, this chapter discussed the types of evidence that different schools of psychotherapy have drawn on, both to build new theories and practices and to defend and popularise their approaches.