A Short Record Of Psychotherapy - We Look At Freud And A Few Other Key Figures

Some people believe that the concept of psychotherapy can be attributed to one man

, Franz Mesmer, interestingly enough he is also thought by many to be the person who dicovered and popularised the concept of hypnosis. Franz Mesmer was never really popular with the prevailing scientists of the day, and his theories were openly shunned. Despite this fact, some of the techniques he used to cure ailments were far more effective than those used by the scientists and doctors of the day.

Sigmund Freud is a household name when it comes to psychological theories, and he enjoyed huge popularity in his day, a situation that was further empowered by the fact that psychoanalysis was considered exceptionally fasionable at the time. Even so, Freud's theories were not without their flaws, and one of the main reasons for these flaws was the fact that Freud's theories were born of observations alone and not backed up with any research or medical proof.

Early on in his career, Freud wrote a paper that glorified the curative powers of cocaine. Initially Freud believed that cocaine was in effect a miracle drug, comparible in its usefulness to mankind to penicillin (although penecillin was not discovered until 1928, and Freud being born in 1856 almost surely wrote this paper before its discovery). Freud believed that cocaine could cure an array of ailments including indigestion, upset stomachs, deppression, and even addiction to morphine. He also believed that cocaine was not addictive, something that we know today as being way off the mark. This paper was seen as very controversial at the time, and by no means could it be considered as "well recieved", this meant that Freud's career was very nearly a non-starter! Freud would study the effect of cocaine by injecting animals with the "miracle cure" and then marvelling at the excited state it produced in them. However, Freud in due course came to accept that cocaine did indeed create its own problems.

Freud's ongoing observations lead him to suppose that much of human behaviour could be attributed to the unconcious mind. Although regardless of the fact that these seem to be sensible assumptions, the lack of scientific back up supporting these claims mean that psychoanalysis can never really be referred to as a science as such. Additionally there is no real hard evidence that even substantiates any claims that Freud's techniques were even effectual and directly resulted in any form of alleviation of suffering for his patients, and those seeking to uncover such evidence commonly find that their task is made incredibly dificult by the fact that Freud updated and altered his techniques on an almost ongoing basis.

Fortunately psychoanalysis has come a long way in the last century, Jaques Lacan was another important figure in the history of psychoanalysis who formed his own approach to psychoanalytical therapy, though the core of lacanian psychoanalysis can be said to based on Freudian theory, there are actually some considerable differences in the way the human psyche is interpretted that cause these two psychoanalytical approaches to differ far more than one might originally believe.

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