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Hypnotherapy In The 19th Century

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away from the social notion that the mentally ill were hopeless individuals that had no function or place in society, the field of psychiatry in the 19th century opened the door for the introduction of psychotherapy and the overall understanding that mental illness could be scientifically understood (Havenaar, 1998).
In the last quarter of the 19th century, comfortable psychiatric hospitals were built in large cities, where humane treatment of patients was emphasized. Although resources were put forth to allow for quality care, psychiatric hospitals rapidly filled with chronic patients who essentially ended up living at the hospitals terminally. With time it became apparent that in order to treat patients from more distinct locations, individuals …show more content…

Tokarsky, who in 1890 wrote a book called The Therapeutic Use of Hypnotism and later began teaching hypnotherapy at the Moscow University (Havenaar, 1998). Vladamir Bechterv who started conducting hypnotherapy sessions with alcoholics furthered Tokarsky’s work. In the following years, physicians in every large town began practicing hypnotism as the primary treatment for the mentally ill or otherwise afflicted (Tucket, 1907). Bechterv is also notable for bringing Rational Therapy, initially conceptualized by Paul Dubois in Switzerland, to Russia. Rational therapy was based upon the belief that irrational thoughts were one of the primary causes of neuroses. Essentially, this therapy taught practitioner that talking and convincing the patient would help them return to the path of reason (Miller, 1998). Another pioneer in the field of Russian psychotherapy was a physiologist named Ivan Sechenov. Sechenov who was the first to conceptualize a paradigm regarding the conditioned reflexes of the brain, which later influenced and lay the scientific groundwork of Ivan Pavlov’s famous experiments. In later years, Lev Vygotsky, in opposition to Sechenov’s and Pavlov’s reflex theories, established his own theory regarding bio-social development where he outlined that the individual psyche can be studied as an independent entity outside of psychological confines (Havenaar). As academic thought into mental illness began to flourish in the late 19th century, Russian psychiatry would become strongly influenced by the professional developments in Germany and France in the early 20th

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