DANCEST 805 Lecture Notes - Lecture 40: Poliomyelitis, Moral Treatment, Moral Authority
Task 7 – Freud and Psychoanalysis
Changes in the treatment of mental disorders
Informal support
- Historical writings are mainly confined to strong people
- Few writings about weak mainly consist of sensational events → burning of witches,
fathers who killed their disabled babies
- People with mental difficulties have mostly been treated with a combination of
compassion + contempt → weak and non-productive
o Compassion from parents + other members of extended family
o Contempt from society outside family
- Symptoms not too bad → people stayed at home, died young
Asylums
- Institution for insane (16th century), first modelled after prisons, later after hospitals for
chronic patients
- People should take more individual responsibility, interact w/ other individuals
- 18th century (Enlightenment) → inhabitants of asylums not criminals but ailing patients
- Common-sense medical practices to bring patients back to senses → cold showers, fast
spinning around
- Educational measures to re-instill morality in the mentally ill → moral treatment
o Trying to persuade + influence patient to behave normally under influence of
moral authority of the doctor
Neurologists
- Educational approach seemed to lead to slightly better results than medical cures →
dominant therapy in first half of 19th century
- End of 19th century: new group of physicians → Neurologists
o Particularly interested in milder forms of mental disturbances (nervous
disorders)
o Limited asylums to handling of worst cases of madness
o Advocated treatment in private settings including hypnosis + suggestion
Freud
- 1856 – 1939
- Physician, research on aphasia + poliomyelitis
- Psychodynamic: view that considered living organisms as energy systems governed by
principles of physics and chemistry → influenced Freud
Psychoanalysis
- Private medical practice in 1886, specialized in neurology
- Started new type of treatment based on conversations with patients (instead of
educational or medical)
- Psychological treatment → hysterical symptoms (insomnia, numbness, lack of appetite,
…) were due to repressed sexual childhood experiences (later, childhood fantasies)
- First coherent framework for treatment of nervous disorders
- People’s actions are controlled by their unconscious
Medical case studies
- Intensive study of individuals within context of their own world + relationships
- Aim: understand + help individual patient
- Introspection + interpretation by therapist → talked about thoughts, dreams, feelings
Task 7 – Freud and Psychoanalysis
Article – John Watson’s paradoxical struggle to explain Freud
- Watson → behavioristic concept of conditioned emotional responses vs. Freud’s concepts
of displacement + unconscious transference of emotion
- Watson’s ultimate goal: assimilate discoveries of psychoanalysis into behaviorism
- Freud’s ideas assimilated into American culture → Americanization of Freud
1910 – 1916 - Explaining Freud in terms of James’s Habit
- Watson → explain psychoanalysis in terms of concept of habit
- Psychoanalysis = “new cult” bcs. of exclusion of alternative conceptions within newly
formed psychoanalytic institutes
- 1912: Psychoanalysis could be understood in terms of habit
- Unconscious did not mesh w/ habit theory → Watson rejected it → objective study of
those behaviours
- Freud: psychoanalysis = clinical method; not only restricted to patients bcs.
psychopathology exists in everyday life (→ this element strongly appealed to Watson
who investigated normal behaviour)
- Watson → research on Jung’s association method (= presenting emotionally neutral or
loaded words + looking at participant’s reaction); later replaced with Pavlov’s method
- Watson: Dreams appear irrational because if our wishes were to be expressed in their
logical form they would not fit with every-day habits
1916 – 1920 – Explaining Psychoanalysis with classical conditioning
- Watson: emotion of fear ; not emotional reaction of sex
- Change from learning theory → Pavlov’s conditioned response study emotions in infants
- Psychoanalysis: No experimental control over emotional relations → c. conditioning did
- Conditioned emotional responses: neutral stimulus + stimulus that previously elicited an
unconditioned emotional state will result in the neutral stimulus evoking that response
(e.g. “Little Albert”)
→ The term competed with Freud’s concepts of transference (rather sexual motivation)
and displacement (all types of displaced emotions)
- Transference = displacement
- Transfer of emotions (especially fear) → behaviouristically (without unconscious)
- Watson in 1916: physician’s concept of mental diseases → replaced by behaviourism
After 1920 – Watson as an Anti-Freudian
- Watson accepted many of Freud’s ideas, but used psychoanalysis as a foil for
behaviorism → Behaviorism: attacks on psychoanalysis → called voodooism
- 1916: Watson gave Freud credits → youthful, outgrown, discarded habit + instinctive
systems of reaction can influence functioning of adult systems of reactions
- Watson thought that direct behavioural observations of the emotions of infants in a
nursery would place the study of infancy on a firmer scientific footing than Freud's
retrospective methods
- Freud & Watson traced origins of psychopathology in adults back to stage of infancy
- Watson: "many of phobias in psychopathology are true conditioned emotional reactions
either of the direct or transferred type"
- Watson + Rayner → efforts to validate in the lab Freud's idea that emotions can be
displaced or transferred from one object to another
→ Watson rejected unconsciousness, introspection, sexual component (behaviourism:
there is NO unconsciousness)
Document Summary
Historical writings are mainly confined to strong people. Few writings about weak mainly consist of sensational events burning of witches, fathers who killed their disabled babies. People with mental difficulties have mostly been treated with a combination of compassion + contempt weak and non-productive: compassion from parents + other members of extended family, contempt from society outside family. Symptoms not too bad people stayed at home, died young. Institution for insane (16th century), first modelled after prisons, later after hospitals for chronic patients. People should take more individual responsibility, interact w/ other individuals. 18th century (enlightenment) inhabitants of asylums not criminals but ailing patients. Common-sense medical practices to bring patients back to senses cold showers, fast spinning around. Educational measures to re-instill morality in the mentally ill moral treatment: trying to persuade + influence patient to behave normally under influence of moral authority of the doctor.
