Word: rosen
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...John Rosen was just one bad apple, his story would be an anecdote; one more example of how quacks and con-men can sometimes infiltrate the most august of professions. But Rosen's story is less of an aberration than it is an archetype. The early history of psychotherapy swells with similar quacks...
...Madness on the Couch, Edward Dolnick, a veteran science writer for Health magazine and The Boston Globe, explores how Rosen-type therapists saturated the psychoanalytic profession with bad science, unearned hubris and treatment that was patently dangerous to patients and families. Dolnick does not launch into a diatribe against all forms of psychotherapy. Although psychotherapy can be effective for treating neuroses (relatively benign emotional disorders), Dolnick targets psychoanalysts who tried to cure psychoses (marked disorders of perception or reality) with talk therapy alone. From the 1940s to the 1970s an aggressive cabal of psychoanalysts fit such a bill; they scoffed...
...prove him wrong. From the onset, their intentions were not necessarily bad. One psychotherapist would sit in the urine of her schizophrenic patients to "prove she was no better than them." Another would bring autistic children to his home, convinced that their real parents were "killing them." Even John Rosen believed that his belligerent methods of "shock therapy" could jolt his patients into reality. But the progeny of these psychotherapists' "good intentions" was not a new cure--only a new method for assigning blame...
...psychoanalysts changed what parental behaviors were "psychotic-inducing" with the capriciousness that designers of their same era changed hemlines, their theories always retained one constant: the mother was at fault each time. Mainstream thinking dictated that "mechanized and maladroit" (so called "refridgerator" mothers) produced autistic and schizophrenic children. Other Rosen-type psychoanalysts would also blame the victims and their weakness to fend madness off. But there were no statistics, let alone control groups to back such theories. Often, all these psychotherapists relied upon was the "power" of empirical observation. One psychiatric duo, Maurice Green and David Scheter, came...
Although Dolnick's delivers a fascinating, often riveting, narrative of psychoanalytic history, the narrative style is a little unsatisfying. Dolnick zealously reports on the history of false theories and therapists, but focuses comparatively little on the patients themselves. Dolnick infers that lives were ruined by dozens of Rosen-type fanatics who blamed psychotic illness on patients, on mothers, on families--on everything, it seems, except biology. But beyond these inferences, Dolnick delves very little into the lives of the people affected--and how (or if) they ever recovered from it. What Dolnick focuses on instead is the professional consequences...