History Of Psychotherapy

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psychotherapy has been in practice for many years. Individuals have always been receiving informal psychotherapy in the form of counsel and reassurance from others. According to Colin Feltham, "The Stoics were one of the main Hellenistic schools of philosophy and therapy, along with the Sceptics and Epicureans (Nussbaum, 1994). From the late 4th century BC to the 4th century AD, many philosophers and physicians from these schools practiced psychotherapy among the Greeks and Romans. The principal precursor and inspiration for many approaches of cognitive therapy and rational-emotive behaviour therapy was explicitly Stoic Philosophy.

Sigmund Freud and others developed the first specific school of psychotherapy, which was psychoanalysis. Freud was trained as a neurologist, and focused on the problems that did not have any organic basis. He theorized that these problems originated from psychological causes involving the childhood and unconscious mind. Many techniques like dream interpretation, free association, transference and analysis of the id, ego and superego were developed. Basing their theories on Freud’s fundamental ideas, many theorists like Anna Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Jung, Karen Horney, Otto Rank, Erik Erikson, Melanie Klein, and Heinz Kohut, developed their own systems of psychotherapy.

Notable contributors for Behaviorism and behaviour modification as a therapy were Joseph Wolpe in South Africa, M.B. Shipiro and Hans Eysenck in Britain, and John B. Watson and B.F. Skinner in the United States. This was popularised in the 1950s and 1970s with therapy approaches that relied on the principles of operant conditioning, classical conditioning and social learning theory to bring about therapeutic change in observable symptoms.

Sources: Psychotherapist in Chennai