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The visit by Freud and Jung to the USA in 1909 was followed in the 1920s by psychoanalytic ideas becoming ubiquitous there. Psychoanalytic ideas became even more ubiquitous in the USA after the arrival there of psychoanalysts from Europe before the Second World War. Yet, after the war, psychoanalytic ideas in the USA were dealt a body blow by Hans Eysenck, says Rutgers professor of psychology and philosophy, Robert Woolfolk.
On the basis of summing up a number of studies, Eysenck (1952) reported that while 72% of patients improved without psychoanalytic or non-psychoanalytic psychotherapy only 44% of psychoanalytically treated patients and 64% of non-psychoanalytically treated patients improved. There were problems, however, with Eysenck's method of summing up the results of different studies of the effects of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. As a result it was widely agreed that Eysenck had failed to validate his critique of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.
Eysenck was not their only critic. Further criticism came from the ‘biomedical psychiatry revolution’ which reinstated the assumption that ‘mental illnesses are brain diseases’ (p. 41). This revolution was evident, argues Woolfolk, when the American Psychiatric Association replaced its 1968 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-II) with a 1980 manual (DSM-III) which, instead of diagnosing mental disorders in terms of psychoanalytic theories about their causation, diagnosed these disorders on the basis of their presenting symptoms. This includes, in its latest edition (DSM-V), absurdly diagnosing ‘grief following a bereavement, if it lasts longer than a couple of months, as a mental disorder’ (Forrester, 2015, p. 32).
Yet the DSM continues to be used in selecting patients for inclusion in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in which the effect on mental disorders of drug company products is compared with the effect of psychotherapy and cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT). Validated by RCTs, the