You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
The International Society for the Psychological Treatments of Schizophrenias and other Psychoses (ISPS) is capping one hundred years in the history of psychotherapy for schizophrenic illnesses with the publication of this worldwide overview. The goal of the ISPS is to disseminate all aspects of knowledge on the psychotherapy of psychoses, “whose secrets almost certainly do not all reside in the neurosciences” (Martindale, p. viii). Indeed, our current understanding of the schizophrenias is that they are manifestations of disordered neurodevelopmental trajectories and circuits in the brain resulting from the interaction of a multiplicity of possible genetic events with a variety of potential environmental risk factors (Freedman 2010; Gilmore 2010; Tienari et al. 2004).
These pages bring together thirty-nine authors reporting on eleven European countries, the U.S., two East Asian countries, and New Zealand, giving historical and contemporary accounts of psychoanalytic and other psychological approaches to the treatment of schizophrenic people.
As is recounted here by Yrjö Alanen, Freud (1914) was pessimistic about the usefulness of psychoanalysis in the treatment of schizophrenia: “patients of this kind … display … diversion of their interest from the external world—from people and things. In consequence of the latter change, they become inaccessible to the influence of psycho-analysis and cannot be cured by our efforts” (p. 74). Despite Freud's misgivings, Paul Federn, one of his first analysands, began in 1906 to treat a schizophrenic female artist who, after being hospitalized, moved to Federn's house, where he continued her treatment, his wife acting as his therapeutic assistant.
In two compelling chapters Klaus Hoffmann deftly captures the personalities in the pioneering development of psychoanalytic therapy of psychoses in Switzerland, at the Burghölzli, the Cantonal Psychiatric University