One last thing…
Before setting off on Freud, Adler and Jung, there was an earlier period of psychology that needs to be explained. Before the Western enlightenment, all of psychology, philosophy, and religion were a primordial mix. Afterwards there was a shift to add science to the discipline of mental health and break off from the earlier influences. In the early period of the 20th century, psychological advances saw various forms of primitive psychotherapy compete for dominance. From exorcism to magnetism, to hypnotism and then to dynamic psychiatry, The Discovery of the Unconscious, by Henri Ellenberger, is a vast tome documenting this story from prehistory up until the early psychoanalysts.
The influence of culture
Ellenberger based his book on the cultural trends of the times, and how they moved different therapies into the forefront:
From Exorcism to Magnetism, we have a movement of power from the Clergy to Aristocracy.
From Magnetism to Hypnotism, we have a movement of power from Aristocracy to Bourgeoisie.
Then from Hypnotism to Psychoanalysis, a shift from Bourgeoisie to Non-authoritarian attitudes.
From shift to shift of socioeconomic structures we have a position of powerlessness of the patient to an evolution to give more power to the patient. The more primitive the method, the more belief the patient needed in order to feel better. As belief naturally waned with cultural advancements, then so the mental health methods had to advance.
From the Paleolithic to the Clergy
Disease object
At this time people believed that disease was caused by a presence in the body of a harmful foreign substance. This was often viewed as a cursed object shot into the victim by a sorcerer. The method of healing was extraction by mouth-sucking, even if more logical methods were available. In a society like this, what is required is the healer’s faith in their own abilities, the patient’s faith in the same, and acceptance by the group that the healer and the method are appropriate.
Soul theft
Instead of gaining a disease object, a patient could end up losing their sense of self to soul thieves. This would require restoration of the soul by a Shaman. How this was supposed to happen was a victim, either during sleep or fainting, finds their soul separated from their body. In the victim’s dreams, human shapes would appear that differed from their conscious personality. These human shapes had the power to venture into the world or to other-worldly realms. The shaman’s goal was to provide gifts to the thieves, and return the soul to the victim’s body.
Possession
If spirits can leave the body, then they can also enter. How possession occurred was the actions of evil spirits taking over a victims body. Then they would make the victim do things that was out of character. Over the years the many methods to deal with the possession were quite brutal. This included beatings, bleeding the victim, and whipping.
From the Clergy to Aristocracy
Exorcism
A less violent way to deal with possession was Exorcism. The exorcist would to speak to the possessed spirit with the air of a higher being that is competent and capable. Then the exorcist would bargain with the intruder. For the exorcism to work, both the exorcist and the possessed must have belief in the power of exorcism.
Taboos
One of the major psychological traumas a person can go through is guilt over violating a taboo. The violator of the taboo would be seized with a debilitating anxiety. This anxiety in some cases could lead to death or suicide. The solution was confessing the transgression and accepting the punishment that society deemed appropriate.
Baquet
Beliefs of special dimensions other than our own continued on with Mesmer. He believed that there was a subtle physical fluid that filled the universe and connected humans, the earth, and the heavenly bodies. The fluid was mediated by people who had differing levels of the fluid. The method was to restore the equilibrium of this invisible liquid in the patient, and then they would be cured.
Originally the method was touching people and doing passes on the body. To accommodate more clients Mesmer needed to find a better way, so he used a Baquet. This is a vessel that many individuals can sit around with rods and ropes, to connect the clients to the special fluid.
Mesmer would use his eyes and hand movements to move the fluid between patients. Peculiar body sensations would be felt by the patients, or they could go into a crisis, which was an activation of symptoms related to the patient’s illness background.
The patient would then return from the procedure with ideas for self-treatment.
Aristocracy to Bourgeoisie
Magnetism
The Marquis de Puységur advanced magnetism further by trying to produce a perfect crisis, now called hypnotism, where the patient maintains some wakefulness. He then would present suggestions to the patient. While patients had temporary amnesia from the treatment, they could still self-prescribe their own treatments, just as in the case of Mesmer’s method.
Spiritism
With the scientific values of the Enlightenment period, and the human emotional needs of romanticism, there was a push to find methods to prove that there was an afterlife. Spiritism was a response to those desires, and required certain skills from the person conducting the seance. They had to have powers to talk to the dead, and initiate free association writing. The other skill necessary in Spiritism was speaking in a trance to allow the dead to speak. The therapeutic value was to talk to deceased loved ones, and to find evidence of an afterlife to create a sense of comfort in the audience.
The Bourgeoisie to Anti-Authority
Hypnotism
As prior methods of therapy fell into disrepute, Pierre Janet would combine the best methods and focus more on subconscious fixed ideas and the related trauma. He would use multiple methods like hypnosis, dream analysis, and automatic writing. The most therapeutic part of this analysis was to have the patient dissociate or transform these fixed ideas that were causing harm. This was a kind of early cognitive therapy.
Dawn of the 20th century
The remainder of the book focuses on the contributions of Freud who looked at dream work as the gateway to the repressed unconscious content. It covers Adler’s psychology of understanding how early childhood dynamics of interpersonal relationships affect the individual unconsciously, and their adult style of life. It ends with Jung’s individuation process to unify the personality.
The thread through all these early methods of dealing with psychological problems is the unmet desires of unconscious forces. The key to mental health with these approaches is to communicate with the unconscious and learn to integrate the wisdom inside.
“Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself. And when you stare for a long time into an abyss, the abyss stares back into you.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
The Discovery of the Unconcsious by Henri Ellenberger: https://www.isbns.net/isbn/9780465016730/
Psychology: https://psychreviews.org/category/psychology01/