Brief history of psychotherapy

Psychotherapy is a very recent branch of psychology. In fact, we cannot properly talk about it until the last quarter of the 19th century, when mental illness was finally separated from natural conceptions. Nevertheless, Meanwhile, society has always had an interest in explaining some phenomena that occurred in people in which no clear biological cause could be found.

If we go back to the most distal beginnings, tribal societies already spoke of a soul that was present in all natural objects. They believed in animism and thought that illness was a phenomenon of possession of a strange soul. The methods available until then were: ceremonies for the restoration of that lost soul, exorcism, confessions and incubation.

A little later, With Greece and the ancient world, we find the origin of contemporary psychotherapy and his rational thought, as well as philosophy and medicine. In this context, Aristotle distinguishes the different uses of the word incantation. It was a persuasive word according to which human beings change.

We cannot fail to mention Hippocrates and Galen.

He Corpus Hippocraticum It is one of the milestones of modern medicine. Hippocrates related diseases to states of the organism and postulated the existence of four humors associated with a temperament, namely: blood-sanguine, phlegm-phlegmatic, yellow bile-choleric and black bile-melancholic. Galen, for his part, developed the postulates Hippocratics and distinguished between preternatural, natural and non-natural things.

From the Middle Ages to Psychotherapy

In the middle Ages The Church considers mental illness as a product of the devil’s will. Confession was the vehicle of healing. Later, in the Renaissance, authors such as Pinel began to stand out, who introduced moral treatment to the mentally ill. It was about beginning to humanize these patients, having an optimistic conception of the disease.

As we have commented, Psychotherapy appears as such in the 19th century. Cobbe uses the term “psychotherapeutic” in an article in which he defends the role of faith in healing.. At this stage, isolating diseases for which an anatomical lesion could not be found are key elements. On the other hand, mesmerism is purified and hypnosis is seen as an acceptable procedure. The therapeutic procedure par excellence is hypnotic suggestion.

From this current, followers (the “fluidists”) and detractors (the “animists”) emerged.. The Marquis of Puysegur would be one of these animists, he used hypnosis as an “artificial sleepwalking” with which he allowed the patient to recover memories that outside of that state he was unable to recover.

Later, Braid coined the term hypnosis and defined it as a nervous dream. Subsequently and based on these advances, The schools of Nancy emerge, with Liébault and Berheim as representatives, which abandon hypnosis, creating the same state, but awake. This state was then called “psychotherapy.”

In 1895, a Viennese neurologist, Sigmund Freud, published with Breuer Studies on hysteria . With this work they would develop the cathartic method, applied to the patient Ana O. Later, they would develop free association, through which the patient would lie down on a couch and talk about some topic from their biography freely.

Development to date

After psychoanalysis, A variety of alternative approaches emerge, such as that of Carl Rogers, which is more person-centred. Subsequently, behaviorism is presented as a tool that understands disorders as learning. But it was not until the 60s and 70s that behavior therapy was consolidated with authors such as Skinner and Wolpe.

Carl Roger

In addition, models such as humanistic psychology led by Maslow and his pyramid of needs and the systemic model emerge, applied especially to family therapy. On the other hand, cognitive models appear as an evolution of behavioral theories based on learning. Its representatives are Beck, Ellis, Mahoney and Meichembaum.

Finally, Since the 90s, third generation therapies or contextual therapies have begun to emerge.. They mean returning to radical behaviorism, taking into account the cognitive part, but without trying, like the rationalists, to modify its content, but rather the patient’s relationship with it.

What is clear today is that psychotherapy is more effective than no treatmentbut that it would not be possible to establish significant differences between the different approaches and that they would have to be considered equivalent, as already postulated by the Dodo bird paradox or “everyone wins.”

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