Allen Esterson wrote:
No one argues that Freud remains influential in current academic psychology or academic clinical psychology. But I think a check on the historical record will show that Aubyn is mistaken when he writes (18 Oct) that Freud has never been much more than a marginal figure in most currents of American clinical psychology. In *A History of Psychiatry*
(1997) Edward Shorter recounts how psychoanalysts were dominant in most prominent departments of psychiatry in the US in the two decades after WW2. Nathan Hale has a chapter called "The Rise of a Psychoanalytic Psychiatry, 1945-1965" in his book *The Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States* (1995) in which he details how Freudian ideas prospered mightily in academic psychiatry in those decades. (Hale dates the start of the decline from 1965, when he reports that the percentage of UCLA psychiatric residents in training at psychoanalytic institutes was 50
percent.)
Allen, it surprises me that you seem to be missing the main point of
these recent posts. No one denies that Freud was important in American
*psychiatry*. What was denied was that he was ever a dominant force in
clinical *psychology*, which (despite obvious overlaps) is, and always
has been, a wholly different discipline. The two don't get along all
that well, and haven't since the emergence of psychology (much later
than most people think) as a *therapeutic* endeavor. (for all the hoopla
over Witmer's early "psychology clinic," what he invented was much more
akin to school psychology than clinical psychology as we now think of
it. Until around WWII, "clinical psychology" was much more about
testing and assessment than about psychotherapy, per se.
Regards,
--
Christopher D. Green
Department of Psychology
York University
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M3J 1P3
e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
phone: 416-736-5115 ext. 66164
fax: 416-736-5814
http://www.yorku.ca/christo/
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