Mind Games: American Culture and the Birth of Psychotherapy (Medicine and Society)
by Eric Caplan
Medicine and Society
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Description
Eric Caplan's fascinating exploration of Victorian culture in the United States shatters the myth of Freud's seminal role in the creation of American psychotherapy. Resurrecting the long-buried "prehistory" of American mental therapeutics, Mind Games tells the remarkable story of how a widely assorted group of actors-none of them hailing from Vienna or from any other European city-compelled a reluctant medical profession to accept a new role for the mind in medicine. By the time Freud first show more set foot on American soil in 1909, as Caplan demonstrates, psychotherapy was already integrally woven into the fabric of American culture and medicine.What came to be known as psychotherapy emerged in the face of considerable opposition, much-indeed most-of which was generated by the medical profession itself. Caplan examines the contentious interplay within the American medical community, as well as between American physicians and their lay rivals, who included faith-healers, mind-curists, Christian Scientists, and Protestant ministers. These early practitioners of alternative medicine ultimately laid the groundwork for a distinctive and much heralded American type of psychotherapy. Its grudging acceptance by both medical elites and rank and file physicians signified their understanding that reliance on physical therapies to treat nervous and mental symptoms compromised their capacity to treat-and compete-effectively in a rapidly expanding mental-medical marketplace. Mind Games shows how psychotherapy came to occupy its central position in mainstream American culture. show lessTags
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Therapeutic Society
61 works; 1 member
Author Information
2 Works 25 Members
An award-winning teacher and former William Rainey Harper Fellow, Eric Caplan has taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Chicago, and Wesleyan University. He is currently on staff at the Pfizer Research University
Series
Common Knowledge
- Epigraph
- The truth is that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as sensitive to outside influence, political, religious, philosophical, imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of the atmospheric density. Theoretica... (show all)lly, it ought to go on its own straightforward inductive path, without regard to changes of government or to fluctuations of public opinion. But...actually there is a closer relation between the medical sciences and the conditions of society and the general though of the time, than would at first be suspected.
Oliver Wendell Holmes (1891) - First words
- My original intention was to write a history of the image of the psychotherapist in the United States.
- Blurbers
- Zaretsky, Eli; Woolfolk, Robert L.
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, History, Sociology, General Nonfiction
- DDC/MDS
- 616.89 — Applied Science & Technology Medicine & health Diseases, Allergies, Skin Conditions Nervous Disorders: Autism, Anorexia, OCD Mental disorders: bi-polar/schizophrenia
- LCC
- RC443 .C33 — Medicine Internal medicine Internal medicine Neurosciences. Biological psychiatry. Neuropsychiatry Psychiatry
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 13
- Popularity
- 1,588,849
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 4
