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Since 1926, this country has witnessed a spectacular growth of psychiatry. Fifty years ago the American Psychiatric Association had around 500 members. Today the United States has over 27,000 psychiatrists, most of whom are members of the American Psychiatric Association. A great increase in membership followed World War II. Many Army and Navy doctors, after seeing medical psychotherapy's dramatic success with shell shock and battle fatigue, came home and specialized in psychiatry.
This psychiatric upsurge stimulated and soon gave rise to a corresponding growth in normal psychology dealing with all phases of everyday living. Today the growth of psychiatry has lessened, and man's psychology has become the focus of academic and public attention. In the United States, college enrollment in psychology courses has sharply and steadily increased since the 1940's. At present, the main thrust of psychology is toward psychotherapy.
Medical and nonmedical publications on psychotherapy, especially the latter, present an infinite variety of theories, practices, and recommendations. Each form of psychotherapy has its strong adherents: one-to-one therapy, marriage therapy, family therapy, group therapy, encounter therapy, art therapy, dance therapy, sex therapy, biofeedback therapy, and so on. Sometimes a patient will seek help from two or three therapies during the same period. There is such a great influx of new, untried procedures, along with a return to formulae of the past and a resort to mysticism and astrology, that the available varieties of psychotherapy defy any attempt at classification.
Throughout this welter of contrary and often irreconcilable information and literature from many schools of psychotherapy, both occidental and oriental, one theme exceeds all others: overoptimism. There are promises, implicit and even explicit, of effecting rapid recovery from mental and emotional illness and of curing shyness, fears, and compulsions; there are unrealistic claims to make