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It has always been a pleasure for me to read Dr. Martin's papers because of his originality, perceptivity, and intuition. In addition, his learned observations dip deeply into poetry, philosophy, and clinical experience. In this paper, he was able to orchestrate many of his ideas that he has shared with us over the years.
There is very little, if anything, that he has told us with which I would disagree. All his points are well taken: his focus on man's uniqueness; his constructive forces; his destructiveness to himself and others when frustrated from realizing his humanistic potentialities; his innate healing powers microscopically and macroscopically; the question of whether he will master technology for his own use, or whether he will be mastered by it, thereby losing his humanistic possibilities.
An article in the New York Times the other day reported the meeting of the Club of Rome, composed of the best minds of our times. A shift of opinion as to the future of the world was stated — from their very pessimistic position of a few years ago to one in which the following conclusions were made: (1) science, broadly considered, is incomparably the most successful enterprise human beings have ever engaged upon, and (2) to deride the hope of progress is the ultimate fatuity, the last word in poverty of spirit and meanness of the mind.
Psychotherapy is probably as old as man himself, regardless of what system it was practised under. We find it in primitive man's magical rituals and in the exorcism of the middle ages, as well as in current prevailing methods.
I would prefer to direct my discussion of old and new psychotherapy to my professional lifetime. Fortunately, since I entered the psychiatric field in 1941, this constitutes the fairly considerable time of thirty-five years. During my stay at CISH, I have seen many fads in therapy come and go, marked by initial bursts of enthusiasm, plateaus of habitual, mindless acceptance and a finally peetering out as useless. I hav