The Roots of Psychotherapy Man Is a Social Being. More Than Any Other

Jürgen Kriz / manuscript 1: Introduction: The Roots of Psychotherapy Man is a social being. More than any other species, he is physically and psychologically dependent on others – usually beginning with his parents – for his most elementary needs. The social structures which to a large extend condition his ability to experience, and hence his entire development, are to a large extent socially prescribed long before he appears on life’s stage. The general results of the work of society and other processes of interaction (tools and other materials altered by man, social roles and behavior patterns, and culture – language, writing, science, etc.), along with the specific historical, geographic, and socio-economic circumstances surrounding his birth and development, determine his life at least as much as the "phylogenetic experience" of Homo sapiens. Another feature peculiar to man (at least in the last few thousand years) is his reflexive consciousness: man’s behavior is determined less by instinct and natural environmental stimuli (signals) than by his capacity to meaningfully structure his experience and to anticipate his behavior, along with some of its probable consequences, and thus to act intentionally. These mental structures are of course also to a large extent socially determined and are bound up in sign process (i.e., social stimuli whose significance is learnt; see, e.g., Kriz 1981, 1985). This embedment in social role patterns has always resulted in psychotherapeutic action. On the one hand, everyone has his own ideas and expectations about "normal" behavior and feeling, which makes him in the social community very sensitive to deviations from this norm - although tolerance limits and value systems have varied extremely at different periods and/or in different societies (from "the extermination of subhuman beings" to the worship of "saints"). On the other hand, there have always been those in the social community who have tried through word and deed to mitigate psychological, physical or behavioral handicaps (from family members who took on a supportive function to those with specific roles to play, such as medicine men). Thus, elementary psychotherapeutic practices in the broadest sense are presumably as old as mankind itself. According to most authors, however, professional psychotherapy (in the modern sense) did not begin until the end of the nineteenth century. The most commonly accepted date for its birth is the publication in 1900 of Sigmund Freud’s first comprehensive work, The Interpretation of Dreams, or, still earlier, Freud and Breuer's joint publication of the famous "Case of Anna O." in the essay "On the psychological mechanism of hysterical phenomena" in 1883 and in the Studies in Hysteria in 1885. These works document the beginning of an approach to psychotherapeutic treatment which, under the label psychoanalysis, soon became so widespread that in the first half of the twentieth century psychotherapy and Freud's psychoanalysis were often considered to be identical. Although behavior therapy, for example, already had precursors in the nineteenth century, the focus there was on educational aspects. Freud's psychoanalysis from the very beginning was devoted to treating the mentally ill. To be able to understand and appreciate Freud's extraordinary achievements, it is necessary to become familiar with the intellectual arena in which psychoanalysis originated, as well as with the influence psychoanalysis had on later developments. 1.1 The Psychological/Anthropological Image of Man in Freud's Time Freud was born in Moravia on 6 May 1856. This was several years before Charles Darwin (1809-1882) published his major works of the theory of evolution - a theory that, as Hofstätter (1972) points out, was for a long time widely regarded as the "criminal wanderings of perverted imagination." As late as 1925, an American schoolteacher by the name of Scopes was brought to trial for disseminating Darwin's theories of evolution. People’s view of their fellow men was chiefly governed by the Bible, or to be more exact, by the interpretations of the Bible common at that time (which today are considered rather peculiar). For instance, the eminent Swiss naturalist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), who became professor at Harvard University after his emigration to America, posited with great authority the polygenetic theory, according to which the human races are different species. For this "reason," the blacks did not have to be granted "equality," since they represented a completely different form of life. The American standard work on the human races, Types of Mankind (published in 1854 by Nott and Gliddon), used line drawings to demonstrate similarity between gorillas and Algerian Negroes, orang-utans and Hottentots, etc. Darwin himself argued in 1871 that the gap between humans and lower apes would necessarily widen in the future because connecting links such as chimpanzees and Hottentots presumably would die out (Gould 1981). In contrast to polygenesis, the second variety of scientific racism was monogenesis, which with regard to racial differences interpreted the Bible as follows: although all peoples are descended from Adam and Eve in the act of Creation, individual races represent different degrees of degeneration from the state of perfection in the Garden of Eden. This degeneration is least among the whites and greatest among the blacks. Such views were scientifically "supported" or "proved" by apparently hard objective data obtained by the burgeoning use of measuring methods in the (natural-science-oriented) human sciences. The starting point was the works of Samuel G. Morton, who just before the middle of the nineteenth century had published several volumes of measurements and tables relating to brain size. The data were based on his collection - probably the largest ever - of sculls, which he measured by filling them with mustard seeds and later with lead grain. Proceeding from the generally accepted assumption that brain size would give a direct indication as to developmental stage or innate mental abilities, Morton was able to confirm the prejudice that in the human hierarchy whites were at the top, Red Indians in the middle and blacks at the bottom (Morton subdivided the whites even further, incidentally, ranking Teutons and Anglo-Saxons at the top, Jews in the middle, and Hindus at the bottom.) Similar arguments were put forward by Paul Broca (1824-1880), the French surgeon and anthropologist after whom the motor speech center in the forebrain is named. Broca measured a number of different skulls and bodies, and on the basis of resulting indices tried to prove the innate stupidity of the inferior races. In a random sample of 60 whites and 35 blacks, the average skull length behind occipital foramen was 100.385 mm for whites and 100.875 mm for blacks, but the average skull lengths in the front of the occipital foramen were 90.736 mm and 100.404 mm respectively (note of the amazing measuring "precision," which psychological/anthropological research occasionally strove for, even back then!). In 1872, Broca concluded: "It is thus incontestable...that the physical build of the Negro, in this respect as in many others, is close to that of the ape." Ten years earlier, Broca had abandoned a further "criterion" - the length of the forearm bone in proportion to that of the upper arm bone (!) - with the argument: "...I find it difficult to say that the extension of the lower arm is a characteristic of degeneration or inferiority, since Europeans in this respect fall between Negroes, on the one hand, and Hottentots, Australians, and Eskimos, on the other" (both quotations from Gould 1981). The idea that such indices were somewhat dubious for the precise reason that non-Europeans were also "normal" humans, and not "degenerate" or "inferior," was not in keeping with the zeitgeist. Naturally enough, favorite prejudices current within the whites as a whole were upheld with the same kind of scientific authority and similarly "proved" on the basis of "hard data." To begin with, women had to take their place in the hierarchy at a respectful distance below the men. According to Broca (in 1861): Women (are) on average a bit more stupid than men - a difference which should not be exaggerated, but which nevertheless exists." Broca's colleague Herve stated in 1881: "Men of the black races have a brain which is barely heavier than that of the white women." Similar statements were made in 1879 by Gustave Le Bon, a well-known disciple of Broca and author of The Psychology of the Masses, which is still quoted today: Among the most intelligent races, like the Parisians, for example, there are many women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas than to the most highly developed male brains...Every psychologist who has studied female intelligence acknowledges today...that this is one of the most inferior forms of human development. (All quotations are Gould, 1981, who also gives an impressive and detailed account of unmasking of these "objective" data as methodological flaws.) Turning now to minorities with "deviant" behavior, the theory developed by Cesare Lombroso (1836-1910), an Italian professor of psychiatry in Turin, although controversial was very influential for a long time. According to this theory, criminal tendencies are innate and can be diagnosed on the basis of anatomy. Lombroso's major work, The Criminal, appeared in 1876, when Freud was already 20 years old. The impact of Lombroso's thoughts and those of his

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