Psychotherapy: Myth and Method—An Integrative Approach. Jan Ehrenwald. New York and London:  Grune and Stratton, 1966.  224 pp.*

There can be no doubt that psychotherapy, in bygone times, has been based on mythical motifs. One has only to recall the pilgrimages to shrines devoted to spiritual healing, the miraculous cures effected by a god or by sacred relics. We know that this type of psychotherapy flourishes even in our days in many and varied cultural settings, including our own.

But what about the other type of psychotherapy—the one which is usually regarded as scientific, based on method, not myth, on facts, not on faith of the believer? Ehrenwald asks whether even today the part played by myth is not far greater than we are generally prepared to admit. He wonders whether its conceptual basis and guiding principles are not far less “scientific” than we like to believe and whether psychotherapy is not steeped in an “operational” approach which, however effective, is not substantially different from that of hundreds if not thousands of years ago?

There can also be little doubt that psychotherapy—much more than medicine and surgery—is permeated with what Ehrenwald describes as “doctrinal compliance,” that is, with the patient's apparent tendency to confirm with his productions the therapist's theoretical suppositions (or “doctrines”) regarding the modus operandi of his approach. In fact, it is nearly a commonplace to say that patients in Freudian analysis produce dreams which seem to corroborate Freud's Traumdeutung, while Jungians invariably light upon “archetypes” dear to their master's heart, and Adlerians cannot help but find that their patients are suffering from “inferiority complexes.” The superego, the archetypal images, the masculine protest—are they not, in a certain sense, mythological creations? Today's myths, it is true, are far more amenable to validation than those which surrounded the sacred places and miracle workers of two thousand years ago. Yet they are nevertheless hypothetical constructs, and hence their scientific value is open to some question.

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