Psychotherapeutic Services history

A further émigré figure from interwar Europe rediscovered in this special issue is the Hungarian psychiatrist Francis Reitman, who resettled in the United Kingdom in 1938.

As a direct result (and very much bearing on the matter of words and their historical meanings mentioned earlier), Schmiedebach and Priebe show how the retrospective identification of the term “social psychiatry” with medical Nazism meant that after 1945 the expression was not used.

J. Psychiatry, 1961, reprint held in the Sargant Papers, Archives and Manuscripts, Wellcome Library, London, PP/WWS Box 5 C.1/22.

By 1970, psychotherapy was an obligatory part of the medical teaching curriculum, a symbol of post-war reconstruction within medicine.

In 1972 at the International Conference on Computer Communications, staff from Stanford and UCLA linked computers to demonstrate a psychotherapy session.

For the Czech-American psychiatrist Jan Ehrenwald, writing an introduction to a large textbook aimed at clinicians in 1991, psychotherapy appeared to be

By dealing in human kinds, the ‘psy’ professions therefore engage in what Hacking has called ‘making up people’ (Hacking, 2006: 23).

9.Ian Hacking has discussed the ways in which autistic self-advocates have created new languages of human kinds to define their identity, although he does not discuss their engagement with therapeutic interventions (see Hacking, 2009).