Word: patients
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...brain). Psychiatrists do not think that they have all the answers, but they believe that their techniques of healing, still very largely in the experimental stage, have had some extraordinary results. They are not always sure just how or why their techniques work, but so long as the patient gets better, they are content to plug away at the techniques and let the theories wait. Psychiatrists use great doses of good will, some guesswork, and a few tricks picked up from mankind's troubled past...
...insane." They did not bother with-in fact, they knew almost nothing about-the infinitely larger number of people who weave a miserable course halfway between the mad and the crotchety. After taking his M.D., Freud "specialized in structural diseases of the nervous system. He was fascinated by patients who had "pains," but no structural disorders-i.e., neurotics. The key problem with a neurotic patient, he decided, was to get him to "remember" things that had been "forgotten"-not forgotten in the usual sense, but "repressed"' because they were too painful or disagreeable to remember...
...Does It Work? How does a psychiatrist straighten out the conflicts? Freud, after finding hypnotism inadequate, devised the most sneered-at tool in all psychiatry: the couch. The couch is supposed to make the patient relax. The analyst places his chair at the head of the couch, where he is unseen by the patient. The idea is to get the patient to put all his thoughts and feelings into words. Such "free association" is the essence of psychoanalysis...
...patient talks, the psychoanalyst listens for evidence of "unconscious wishes." of "suppressed desires," of hidden motives. He watches for these signs in accounts of dreams, in words, in reported actions, in sudden hesitations and slips of the tongue, in strange lapses of memory. As the talks go on-and on & on-the patient gets used to having the analyst there, listening. The analyst does not try to boss, but often guides, the patient. The theory is that if the patient talks enough about his troubles, he will finally get 1) the relief any confession brings; 2) a somewhat less sentimental...
...milder method of dredging the mind is narcosynthesis (with some such "truth serum" as sodium amytal). In a twilight state between wakefulness and deep sleep, the patient often says things he cannot or will not say when fully conscious. Narcosynthesis works best when the patient's difficulties are recent (as in some "war neuroses"). The most desperate treatment of all, for the patient who fails to respond to anything else, is a drastic brain operation, like lobotomy (TIME, Dec. 23, 1946). Lobotomy may relieve the more troublesome symptoms, but it may also leave the patient so irresponsible or lumpish...