The history of psychotherapy is relatively recent. In fact, we can only talk about it correctly in the last quarter of the 19th century, when mental illness became disconnected from supernatural conceptions.
In the meantime, however, the company has always had an interest in explaining certain phenomena that have occurred in people, for which a clear biological cause could not be found.
- If we go back to the farthest origins.
- Tribal societies spoke of souls who would be present in all natural objects.
- Believed in animism.
- And believed that sickness was a phenomenon of possession carried out by a strange soul.
The methods they had until then were the recovery ceremonies of this lost soul, exorcism, confessions and incubation.
A little later, in Greece and the old world, we find the origin of contemporary psychotherapy and its rational thinking, as well as philosophy and medicine.
In this context, Aristotle distinguishes the different uses of the word ensalmo, a persuasive word that human beings change.
Plato highlighted the beneficial effects of a beautiful discourse on the soul and body. Some of his observations on passions, dreams and the unconscious seem to be a history of Freudian thought.
We can’t stop mentioning Hippocrates and Galien
In the Middle Ages, the Church regarded mental illness as a product of the devil’s will; confession was the vehicle of healing.
Later, in the Renaissance, authors such as Pinel, who introduced moral treatment for the mentally ill, began to become humanized and the disease began to acquire an optimistic conception.
As mentioned above, psychotherapy appeared as such in the 19th century. Obbe used the term? Psychotherapeutic ?, in an article in which he defended the role of faith in healing, at this stage a key element was the fact that it ingested diseases for which an anatomical injury could not be found.
On the other hand, mesmerism was brazen and hypnosis became an acceptable procedure. Hypnotic suggestion has become the most common therapeutic procedure.
The origin of hypnosis can be attributed to Van Helmont’s animal magnetism, with Messmer being its main representative. It was believed that a physical fluid filled the Universe and that the imbalance of this fluid caused a disease. A cure would be achieved by rebalancing this fluid.
From this current come the followers (the “fluidists”) and the opponents (the “animists”) The Marquis of Puysegur was one of the animists. He used hypnosis as an “artificial sleepwalking,” allowing the patient to recover memories he could not get out of this state.
Later, Braid coined the term hypnosis and defined it as a nervous dream; later, and from these advances, Nancy’s schools appeared, with Liébault and Berheim as representatives.
They abandoned hypnosis creating the same state, but when they woke up, this condition was then called “psychotherapy. “
In 1895, a Viennese neurologist named Sigmund Freud published studies on hysteria with Breuer, with him developing the cathartic method, applied to patient Ana O.
Subsequently, they developed the free association, where through which the patient lay on a sofa and spoke freely about a topic from his biography.
After psychoanalysis, several alternative approaches emerged, such as Carl Rogers’s, more person-centered; later, behaviorism was presented as a tool that understood disorders as learning.
However, it was not until the 1960s and 1970s that behavioral therapy was consolidated with authors such as Skinner and Wolpe.
In addition, models such as humanist psychology led by Maslow and its needs pyramid have emerged, and the systemic model, applied mainly to family therapy.
Cognitive models, on the other hand, have emerged as an evolution of learning-based behavioral theories, and their representatives are Beck, Ellis, Mahoney and Meichembaum.
Finally, from the 1990s on the beginning of the 1990s, third-generation therapies began to emerge, implying a return to radical conductism, taking into account the cognitive part, but without seeking to modify its content, as rationalists did, but focusing on the patient’s relationship with that part.
What is clear today is that psychotherapy is more effective than non-treatment, but that it would not be possible to establish significant differences between different approaches and should be considered equivalent.