The history of psychotherapy, and its omissions

Psychotherapy as a professional practice is about 130 years old. Its emergence required several conditions: a secularising culture in which suffering was no longer sufficiently explained by sin, an urban middle class with money and time, a medical profession looking for authority over the mind, and the collapse of the confident somatic psychiatry of the nineteenth century.

The omissions

A history of psychotherapy that lists only its discoveries is a marketing document. The field also produced drapetomania; the pathologisation of homosexuality until 1973 and of transgender identity long after; the schizophrenogenic mother; institutional aversion therapy; the recovered-memory episode of the 1980s and 90s, which produced false accusations and destroyed families; and a long period in which women reporting sexual abuse were more likely to be diagnosed than believed.

Who is missing from the standard history

• Mary Cover Jones, whose 1924 exposure treatment preceded Wolpe by three decades
• The women who were the majority of early analytic patients and a large share of its theorists
• Non-Western healing traditions, which handled the same problems for millennia and are treated as anthropology rather than as psychotherapy
• Bertha Pappenheim, "Anna O.", who was a significant social reformer and is remembered as a case