Reading Activity Week #12 (Due Monday)

The most interesting piece of information I found in this chapter was the concept of bloodletting. I found this cure to mental illness to be quite interesting. Bloodletting was a common remedy to remove disease or excess blood. It was intriguing to me how it caused the person to become tranquil and made them feel as if they were relieved of their symptoms. I found the least interesting pieces of information to be Freud’s obsession with the importance of sex. I just think some of Freud’s ideas were too much based of sex and that he was so preoccupied with how sex affects people. Freud ideas of what caused hysteria was very sexually based. Freud’s seduction hypothesis said that hysteria was the result o childhood sexual abuse by a parent or other adult. Freud just had sexual ideas involved in all his theories and ideas.

The three important aspects I found in this chapter were the aspects of free association, dream analysis and the tripartite structure of personality. Free association is important because many psychologist use this method today. Free association is when patients are placed in a relaxed position and encouraged to say whatever came to their minds, without censoring anything. Dream analysis is also important to understand because it is used still today as well. Dream analysis is the belief that dreams are the “royal road” to the unconscious. The surface or manifest content of dreams needed to be analyzed for their deeper or latent content. Even though I thought some of Freud’s ideas were quite different, I did think his concept of the tripartite structure of personality is important to understanding personality. The structure was made up of the id, ego, and superego. The ego was the center and was partially conscious and unconscious. The ego helped to maintain a balance between the id and superego. The id constantly demanded that the needs of instinctive drives of sex and aggression be satisfied. The superego was the person’s learned moral values. These three things make up or personalities.

Terms: Bloodletting, Seduction Hypothesis, Free association, Dream Analysis, Ego, Id, and Superego

What I found to be the most interesting in chapter 12 was the section over the early treatment of the mentally ill. I remember learning about some of these things in my intro to psych classes and I just thought to myself how awful it would have been to be alive during these earlier time periods when mental illness was not only unacceptable, but also misunderstood. I particularly enjoyed the work of Dorthea Dix and Clifford Beers because they both had had their own issues whether it was being a woman or being a former asylum patient, but they both kept on in their journey for better treatment of the mentally ill.

The part I liked least was the section over hypnosis. I don’t know what it is but I have always found hypnosis to be a bit odd and I don’t really trust it. I see it as a means of entertainment rather than a form of healing or therapy. I understand that some people do benefit from hypnosis and mesmerism types of therapy, but I find it to be too odd to commit my support to it.

The things I think that will be most useful would have to start out with the prior treatment of those who were mentally ill. Even in today’s world mental illnesses are obviously not fully understood or accepted, but in earlier years treatment and conditions were so poor and no one seemed to want to take the time to learn or even try to treat those people humanely; it was as if their illness made them a threat to society and that they were monsters. Another thing important to understanding the history of psychology would obviously have to be Freud. Freud had his hand in so many different ideas and theories about why people develop or have issues with mental health. I didn’t realize until reading this chapter that he spent so much time developing and learning about the different theories he was creating; I was also interested in the fact that he abandoned or changed several of his theories when new evidence was present. I also think the work of Carl Jung is important to our understanding. He was somewhat of a branch off of what Freud was doing but in a more believable or accepting way. I think word association is a good technique to try to get into a person’s mind that is not so easy to have open up in sessions.

Finally there are a lot of topics, mainly in relation to Freud that have appeared in this chapter as well as in others. There were several names that came up in the Freudian section that have been mentioned in previous chapters such as Hall inviting him to come speak at Clark University; others who came to hear Freud speak were James, Cattell, and Goddard. I find this to be important because it instills in us that these men were in contact in one way or another with what others around them were doing in the world. I am sure that ideas of some of the biggest names in psychology were bits and pieces of other psychologist’s theories and thoughts. This book does a good job of integrating all of the psychologists and how they benefited or relate to one another.

Terms: mentally ill, Dorthea Dix, Clifford Beers, hypnosis, mesmerism, Freud, Carl Jung, Hall, James, Cattell, Goddard

The first thing I thought that was interesting wa Mesmerism and Hypnosis. Mesmer thought that if you aligned internal magnetic forces then they would result in good health. He would give them magnants with high doses of iron then hold magnents over their bodies to determine that humans are powered a lot by suggestion. He called this process Animal Magnetism. The medical community started to see that Mesmer was a quack and he started to fade out slowly. Mesmer slowly came back to the forefront when he changed the name of his practice to hypnotism. He thought the general fixation of ones vision, would then lead to his study about suggestion. Hypnosis had a lot of controversys.

The second part that I found interesting was the part about Clinical psychology. Lightner Witmer like most people believed that psychology should help people. It started by him seeing children and identifying their troubles. His first patients were children who were struggling in school. Based on their physical health and family background the children would then be placed into groups as a) experiencing some correctable medical condition, b) possibly experiencing some medical problem but more clearly requiring some special program, or c) having severely retarded, untreatable, and requiring custodial care.

The two parts I did not want to read into further were Psychoanalysis because I have heard tons about freud and just wanted to look at the “lesser” stuff in the chapter. And the second part I did not read further into was the early treatment of the mental ill at insane asylums. Besides understanding that asylums were major places to observe and test on the mentally ill, I did not read inot their change and reform.

Terms: Mesmerism, Hypnosis, Witmer, Clinical psychology, Feud, insane asylums.

The thing I found most interesting from this chapter was the beginning of clinical psychology. Clinical psychology treats and diagnoses mental disorders. Lightner Witmer was credited with creating psychology’s first clinic. He believed that psychology should not just consist of research, but that it should also be used to improve people’s lives. Wittmer began seeing children with various cognitive or psychological ailments. He founded the journal The Psychological Clinic and wrote a leading essay in its first issue titled “Clinical Psychology”. Because his main focus at first was children, clinical psychology developed a narrower focus called school psychology. This was used to diagnose and treat children with school-related problems. He termed his strategy of investigating people who were different or “deviates” as orthogenics.
The least interesting thing I found in this chapter was the psychoanalytic work of Freud, but I also feel it is the most important thing for understanding the history of psychology. Freud is a widely recognized figure in the history of psychology because of the new ideas he brought to the table. During med school Freud met an important person who shaped the beginning of his experience with psychoanalysis. The Anna O. case was a significant part of psychoanalysis’ history. Anna O. referred to a woman by the name of Bertha Pappenheim who experienced various different mental and physical problems. Breur found that his method of catharsis worked well with her. He found that if he asked her to trace a symptom back in her memory to where it first began, he could have her release it emotionally and she would be relieved. By witnessing this case, Freud began to develop his own ideas on psychoanalysis. For example, he believed he witnessed transference between Anna and Breuer. Transference is the transfer of feeling from one person in your life onto your therapist. He also developed the practice of free association. Patents were asked to relax and encouraged to say whatever came into their minds. When patients found it difficult to talk about something, Freud called it resistance. He believed resistances were significant and that they were the root of the patient’s problems. Freud also developed dream analysis. He believed that dreams were the key to the patient’s subconscious. Freud also believed sex played an important role in mental health. He thought that unresolved sexual problems were the root of hysteria. His seduction hypothesis stated that hysteria was the result of sexual abuse as a child from an adult. After much work with these new theories, he began to create what he referred to as metapsychology. This was his general theory of human behavior and mental processes. During this time he wrote Beyond the Pleasure Principle. This explained the difference between eros and thanatos. Eros were the life instinct that showed itself through sexual motivation. Thanatos was the death instinct that showed itself through aggression and self-destruction. Some of his most famous work existed in his book The Ego and the Id. The ego was the center of personality and consisted of unconscious and conscious components. The id made demands and was like instinct. The superego was learned values that worked to control the id. The ego was the mediator. Because of all the demands placed on the ego, objective anxiety existed. Objective anxiety was fear within a person because of past events. Neurotic anxiety exist when we fear we cannot control our impulses and stem from past instances when we were punished for being unable to control ourselves. Moral anxiety leads to shame that is experienced when we knowingly go against our superego. These anxieties are signs that our anxieties are under attack. This means we must create defense mechanisms to protect ourselves. The most common is repression (projecting unwanted impulses into our unconscious). We may also use projection to put our own faults onto others. Reaction formation is when we replace our unwanted impulses with ones that are more acceptable to our ego. In sublimation we channel unwanted impulses into productive activities.
The three things I found to be most important in understanding the history of psychology were psychoanalysis, clinical psychology, and the reformation of asylums. The reformation of asylums resulted in the need for psychoanalysis and clinical psychology.

Terms: Anna O. case, catharsis, transference, free association, resistance, dream analysis, seduction hypothesis, metapsychology, eros, thanatos, ego, id, superego, objective anxiety, neurotic anxiety, moral anxiety, defense mechanisms, repression, projection, reaction formation, sublimation, clinical psychology, Wittmer, school psychology

I found the early treatment of the mentally ill to be very interesting. I actually wish they had gone into more detail on the subject. One of the first people to reform the way mentally ill were treated was Phillipe Pinel. He brought change to the asylums around Paris, France. He used rewards and punishments to treat the patients and worked to bring them better living conditions with better nutrition and hygiene. These were all tied in with the Enlightenment that was going on at the time. Tuke was also a reformist from England who established the use of retreats, that treated the mentally ill more benevolently and felt less like prisons. Benjamin Rush started the use of bloodletting as a cure. At the time, it was thought that many illnesses were related to the blood, and taking some of the bad blood out or mixing it up and rebalancing it could cure somebody of mental or physical illnesses. Dorothea Dix worked very hard to reform asylums across the United States. She visited several of them and wrote an expose about them to get laws passed to improve upon the asylums.

Another topic of interest for me was mesmerism and hypnosis. One thing that is most interesting is that we derived the word mesmerized from Franz Anton Mesmer’s last night and the work that he did. He used magnets to cure people because he believed in the idea that magnetic powers had a strong effect on humans and their health. His patients would eventually enter into what he called a “crisis state” and when they would come out of it they would be cured. He called this theory animal magnetism. Even after his death, mesmerism continued to spread and eventually was turned into hypnotism by Braid.

I found Freud to be of little interest, mainly because he seemed to be very full of himself, and his theories seem to be ridiculous with no proof to back them up. Even from a young age he thought he was going to be something great, as he said in a letter to his wife. He burned all of his notes, just so no one could have any idea as to where his theories came from and people who would author his biographies in the future would have a tougher time. He hated anybody who opposed him in any sort of way. If someone did oppose psychoanalysis, it would be blamed on some kind of complex they had. He did help to start the idea that events of childhood can have a big impact on the personality and motives of an adult. He also helped to popularize the unconscious.

I think it is important to know some of the ideas that make up Freud’s theory, just because so much emphasis is put on him in psychology. He put a strong emphasis on sex and thought that that was the main motive for the things we do, from infancy to adulthood. He split up the personality into three different things, the id, ego, and superego. The id was the things that a person instinctively wants to do and is only worried about being satisfied. The superego is the part of the personality that is morally based, and therefore is trying to stop the instincts that a person wants to do. The ego is the middle ground that tries to balance these issues and conflicts always going on in a person. Conflict can cause three kinds of anxiety. Objective anxiety is a real danger from the outside world that we try to stop. Neurotic anxiety happens when one is concerned that their id impulses will go out of control. Moral anxiety happens when someone’s morals cause them to feel guilt if they violate their moral code.

Freud is related to Hall because Hall invited him to give a speech and receive an honorary degree from Clark University. This invitation helped to spread psychoanalysis to America. Freud also earned his degree at a time when the mechanist zeitgeist, when it was believed that all things could be identified through scientific means. Also Charcot, who studied hysteria, taught Alfred Binet, from the intelligence testing area, about hypnosis.

Terms bloodletting, retreats, mesmerism, hypnosis, crisis state, animal magnetism, the unconscious, id, ego, superego, objective anxiety, neurotic anxiety, moral anxiety

I thought the French physician phillipe pinel was a very influential and important person in this chapter. He was the first to bring about reform in mental asylums in the 1700s. he referred to his reforms as “traitement moral” or moral treatment, some of the improvements included patient nutritient, better hygiene and living conditions and even used reinforcement and punishment as ways of changing and modifying behavior.
I thought the idea of hypnotism wasn’t actually all that interesting—probably because it wasn’t explained very well, and I’ve never been a big believer in it anyway. Braid discovered this phenomenon by realizing that people could be put into a trance after fixedly staring at an object that was above their line of vision. Evidently, he reported that many of his subjects remembered and could report memories from hypnotic trance to the next one without having an conscious recollection of it when they emerged from the trance.
I thought bloodletting to be an interesting concept from the chapter. Benjamin Rush, in America was a big promotor of this treatment for the mentally ill. They used it as a “cure” for a wide range of illnesses—Rush believed mental illness stemmed from “hypertension in the brain’s blood vessles” so they would open the veins and remove blood until the person became more tranquil. This ended up working well to calm the patients who were violent, but only because after removing so much blood the patient was too weak to behave in such ways. He also created two more devices—one was the gyrator which was a large revolving board that a patient was sun rapidly on to “redistribute blood toward the head”, and the “tranquilizer” which was a chair with hand, arms, and leg straps which eliminated the patients movemement and reduced the pulse rate.
Dorthea dix was also an influential name in the history of psychology and reforming mental asylums. She traveled the country over 18 months and vistited tons of mental hospitals and realized how cruel the patients were being treated. She wrote down her observations and assisted in the improvement of the the living conditions of those mental patients.
Franz Anton Mesmer’s theories were very interesting as well. He believed that magnetic powers affected humans directly and that good health was the consequence of properly aligned internal magnetic forces.—bad health resulted in the disharmony of forces opposing eachother. He then decided that by giving his patients large amounts of iron and then passing magnets over their bodies, they would fall into a trance and then once they emerged their health would be improved. He called this theory “animal magnetism” and it was one of the first attempts at hypnotism as well.
In addition, even though I’ve learned about freud so many times, I always find his psychoanalysis to be interesting and important to psychology. There was Free association, where he had a patient sit on a couch and relax, then talk about whatever came to their mind. He was also the father of dream analysis, with the theory that our unconscious desires lied within our dreams, and often said that our dreams were the “royal road” to our unconscious.
terms: freud, dream analysis, free association, Mesmer, dorthea dix, hypnotism

The area on Mesmerism (Early version of hypnotism, associated with Mesmer; held that hysteria and other disorders could be cured through the use of magnets) and Hypnosis is interesting to even imagine. We know that hypnotism involves mental control between two parties, but when I heard it was used to try and cure mental illnesses I was immediately focused in.
Mesmerism began to spread throughout Europe more as a form of entertainment before medical treatment. Very few doctors paid close attention to these demonstrations except one, Professor John Elliot. He was astounded by how the patients under hypnosis showed no signs of pain (being poked with sharp needles for example). But hospitals denied any use of Mesmerism on there patients. Later on down the line in the 1840's, physicians started using mesmerism on their patients during amputations. James Esdaile performed mesmerism in several hundred surgeries (before chemical anesthetics were invented) and reported a mortality rate of less than 5 percent (normally 40 percent). From this point on Mesmerism became more popular.
To imagine hypnosis being used during surgeries to reduce or completely eliminate pain is wild when you look at what hypnosis is used for in today's world.
I also found the Psychoanalytic theory to be interesting. Freud was in the process of developing his own theory known as metapsychology - Theory of human behavior and mental processes. He believed that destructive tendencies were just as powerful as sexual ones in motivating behavior. After experiencing his daughter, grandson, and niece die and then discovering he had cancer of the mouth because he smoked 20 cigarettes each day, for him this confirmed that death instincts go hand in hand with life instincts.

What was the most interesting part of this chapter…hmm? Well let us see now; there was Freud’s psychoanalysis which was of some interest and then there was Mesmer and all he had to offer animal magnetism. There is so much to cover; where do I even begin! Well, good ol’ Franz Anton Mesmer was the founder of animal magnetism which was a type of therapy he offered individuals. He would give them some medicine containing heavy doses of iron and then he would pass magnets over their bodies and then people would fall into a ‘crisis state’ or a trance and when they woke up they would feel better. By doing all of this Mesmer quite accidently discovered hypnosis or at least the power of suggestion. Eventually Mesmer was run out of town because of his unique treatments, eventually called Mesmerism, because he was quite the womanizer in a very seductive setting. After Mesmer died along came the science of neurypnology, which means ‘nervous sleep’ which eventually became known as hypnotism. Hypnotism was used primarily used to cure various types of hysteria, which is a disorder that had many symptoms with no apparent nervous system damage ranging from partial seizures to nervous tics and even memory lapses. There was never a whole lot of evidence supporting this treatment but individuals still believed in its ‘magical’ powers and continue using it.
The next important and interesting individual to take a look at is Sigmund Freud. While going through his education Freud became a close contact of Joseph Breuer who had his famous Anna O. case. This case involved a woman who had severe and unexplainable symptoms of hysteria including seizures, sensory blocks, weird eating behaviors, and losing the ability to speak German while holding onto English. Breuer’s semi-successful cure for her was what he called catharsis, which entailed tracing a symptom to the occasion to when it first occurred. This would cause the patient a sense of emotional release just from this experience, which in turn provided some temporary relief. Once Freud was off on his own he hit the ground running. He eventually came up with the field of psychoanalysis, which was a field of therapy that sought to dig deep into an individuals’ subconscious to find problems. Freud had developed various theories to explain whatever he thought he discovered in the subconscious. Some ways that he sought to explore the subconscious was through free association, the uncensored thoughts of the patients spoken aloud, dream analysis, looking at dreams to explore what was not fully conscious, and word association, giving patients a prepared list of words and asking them to respond to each word with the first word that came to mind. Whenever Freud ran into a problem he would label it as resistance which meant that the individual was unable or unwilling to mention something that just occurred to them. Freud’s theory put a very heavy emphasis on sex. This can first be seen in his work with Breuer and the Anna O. case in which he suggested transference or the transferring of intense, strong feelings from one individual to another, sometimes sexual; in this case it was from Anna’s father to Breuer. Freud formulated a seduction hypothesis, in which he argued that hysteria was the result of childhood sexual abuse by a parent or other adult. This idea was not received well by the scientific community at large. He later changed his idea to the sexual situations were imagined rather than the result of actual physical/sexual abuse. Freud came back big with his revised edition calling it Metapsychology, which was his general theory of human behavior and mental processes. It is here that he formulated the eros, life instinct, and thanatos, death instinct. These two motivated us by life enhancing and life destroying instincts and these instincts are constantly acting on our lives. Another part of Freud’s work was the invention of the id, superego and the ego. The id was fueled by instinctive drives of sex and aggression with an insatiable appetite to be fed. The superego is a person’s learned moral values and works to inhibit the free expression that the id craves. The ego then is left as the middle man balancing these two instincts. With these established Freud named imbalances in these as specific disorders. His baseline for all of this was objective anxiety which is a normal reaction to a perceived threat from our environment. Imbalances of the superego and id resulted in neurotic anxiety, when a person fears that id-based impulses will get out of control and moral anxiety, when a person feels guilt and shame from a sense that one is about to violate the strict moral code of the superego. As a result of these imbalances certain actions were developed. These included defense mechanisms such as repression, unwanted impulses that are forced out of our minds, and projection, seeing one’s own faults in others rather than in ourselves. Another defense mechanism was reaction formation which is when unacceptable impulses are repressed and replaced with the opposite ones. Some other interesting findings or theories created by Freud and Carl Jung included inferiority complex, which is when infants view life as an attempt to compensate for their inferiority, and collective unconscious, which is the collective experiences of our ancestors…this sounds particularly stupid to me. All of this was very interesting to take a look at just how some very unique ideas can be widely accepted.
In this chapter, I was a little disappointed that they didn’t spend a whole lot of time discussing the history and treatment of mentally ill. It did discuss it in a little detail but it would have been better to take a deeper look at this so that we could better grasp just how badly the treatment of the mentally ill was. If we better grasp just how bad it once was it will better enable us to realize how much of a sensitive issue it really is and how much care is needed for those with mental illnesses. I thought everything else in this chapter was interesting; it just didn’t cover the treatment of the mentally ill in as much depth as I had hoped.
The first thing that helped me to understand history and systems of psychology better was the fact that Mesmerism first discovered his idea of the power of suggestion. It really is amazing at how much of what is taken for granted today was discovered accidently by scientific means. This was just one example which ultimately led to hypnosis, a semi-useful tool for psychologists now days. The second thing that is helpful is looking at Freud and his tactics for developing his theory of psychoanalysis. Yes, looking back now, he had some pretty funky ideas and he is usually the butt of a lot of jokes. It was interesting to see that when he proposed his initial hyper-sexual theories of the subconscious that he changed it when the scientific community as a whole rejected his thoughts and ideas. At first I thought that he was just being a pussy and wasn’t staying true to his beliefs and theories. When I gave it some more thought I realized that what he did is just the intelligent thing to do when the majority of the scientific community has rejected the work that an individual has done. If he can’t back it up then I would say that it would be the wise thing to do. I think that many could learn from this example. Not to just simply back down when others challenge your ideas, but to use conventional and scientific wisdom and knowledge to back your ideas up. The third and final item was to look at what clinical psychology did for psychology as a whole. In previous chapters other individuals had sought to make psychology a completely recognizable, reputable field of science. Clinical psychology brought along the finishing touches to this and is now the final step and brings everything up to date, as of 2011 that is.
This chapter offered a lot of material that related back to earlier chapters. For one thing psychoanalysis was similar to introspection in quite a few ways. It was dealing with two unobservable events that led to a whole lot of disagreements within the scientific community. How can we prove that we have a subconscious and what it affects? Similarly, introspection was highly criticized for being impossible to prove. I simply believe that there are some aspects of human nature/mind that will be impossible to ever break down into little known pieces. This study of the unconscious built off of many other earlier areas of psychology because it sought to be a strictly measurable/observable science. These earlier areas of science included the behaviorists, functionalists, and experimental psychology. Earlier chapters also mentioned some of the treatments that were applied to the mentally ill, but this chapter emphasized it much more than it had been. These are just some of the areas in which this all applied to earlier chapters.
Terms-bloodletting, Dorthea Dix, Dementia praecox, animal magnetism, neurypnology, hypnotism, hysteria, Anna O. case, catharsis, transference, free association, resistance, dream analysis, seduction hypothesis, displacement, condensation, metapsychology, eros, thanatos, superego, id, objective anxiety, neurotic anxiety, moral anxiety, defence mechanisms, repression, projection, reaction formation, inferiority complex, individual psychology, word association, analytical psychology, collective unconscious, clinical psychology, school psychology, orthogenics

I found it to be that most of the chapter was very interesting starting with the early treatment of the mentally ill. Especially when Phillipe Pinel introduced the concept of moral treatment; the tendency to rely exclusively on physical restraint of patients was reduced, and direct efforts were made to improve the behavior of patients. I also found the mesmerism and hypnosis to be very interesting when Franz Anton Mesmer developed a procedure for treating hysteria; based on his belief that the disorder was the result of disturbed magnetic forces within the body. He was able to cure and treat patients by mesmerizing them, an idea where he thought he had magical powers. Tying in it with it, I liked James Braid’s procedure neurypnology; term reflecting Braid’s belief that hypnotism was related to the state of sleep. Based on what Sigmund Freud said about psychoanalysis, the study and treatment of hysteria started to interest him. Hysteria is a disorder characterized by a wide range of symptoms that appeared to indicate neurological malfunction, but without apparent physical damage to the nervous system. Freud would eventually refer to this attachment for the therapist as transference; occurs when the patient develops a strong emotional attachment to the therapist.

The thing that I found the most interesting in chapter 12 was the section was how the mentaly ill were treated early in history. I found this section most interesting because of how we are conditioned today on how to deal with the mentally ill. Early they were thought just to have demons or evil inside them and were just thrown on the streets to basically live like an animal and just survive. Many of them were burned, drowned, or just killed. This is important to note because we have come a LONG way since these times. There were no facilities to help the mentally ill, basically just a place to gather them all up and be able to moniter what they did and keep them in the shadows of the main stream society. This is similar to what we do in a sense today, but not to the extreme with the menally ill. I found it interesting that as like today, the class matters. Mental help and hospitals are very expensive and the poor still today aren't as affluent in understanding that there is help out there versus the hollywood stars that you see being able to hire a shrink or psychologist/psychiatrist to help them on the spot. One thing I did not find interesting about this chapter was the secion on Sigmund Freud and his biography. It was hard to find something in this chapter that was not interesting. I feel like learning what each psychologist did versus where they were born is more interesting than giving a biography. There are many things in the chapter important to the history of psychology but I will pick three. The first is stated above, the treatment before mental illness was really looked into and seen as something that was more than the devils and demons in someone. The second thing that is most important to the history of psychology is how Dorothea Dix and Clifford Beers reformed the places where the mentally ill went. They were able to create more places for the mentally ill to go and to allow for the growing populations in the US to be able to handle the higher numbers of individuals in the facilities. The third thing that was important to the history of psychology is Sigmund Freud and his controbutions to psychoanalysis. He was able to get the patients into comfortable positions and allow for what we picture now as therapy or free association. They were to express their thoughts openly. Many of the patients had resistance, and wouldn't mention everything on their minds. Freud also used dream analysis to explore the patients unconscious.
Some topics that fit in with earlier chapters are psychoanalysis. Another is how Freud discovered that there was more to people than just being mentally ill, as Pavlov found there was framing of people through conditioning. Many of the mentally ill had different conditions they were put in or surrounded by that could have caused their mental illness.

Terms: Sigmund Freud, free association, psychoanalysis, unconscious, Dorothea Dix, Clifford Beers, reform, mentally ill

The history of the mentally ill is a very interesting one to me, mostly because the reasons people believed ‘mental illness’ existed have changed so drastically over time. Some of the earliest beliefs on people who exhibited odd behavior was that they must be possessed by the Devil or some sort of demon, while today there are many factors that we believe cause mental illness, from environment to biological factors.
One idea that remained prominent until fairly recently was that mentally ill people were ‘less than’ and many people believed they didn’t belong in ‘normal’ society. Asylums were said to be created in order to help mentally ill patients get better and to provide them with a better life, but they were run much like prisons, seeking mostly to keep them locked inside and away from society. Conditions in asylums were terrible until a man named Phillip Pinel from France came along and instated a program of ‘moral treatment’ for the patients. He was appalled to see people chained to walls, among other things, and called for the removal of chains and more humane treatment of patients.
Treatment of the mentally ill has gone through as many changes as the views on the causes of mental illness. In the days when it was believed that ‘odd’ behavior was caused by evil spirits, people were literally beat so that their body would no longer be a suitable or desirable home for a demon. When theorists like Benjamin Rush believed that the root cause of mental illness lay in the circulatory system, bloodletting was a common practice believed to release tension and put patients in a tranquil state.
Today, there are numerous medications on the market that help patients to live a happier and more ‘normal’ life, despite their mental illness. While medications are about the only option for certain disorders, there are still many other forms of treatment used today to help mentally ill patients, such as therapy, ECT, etc. Today we even have a manual known as the DSM-IV, which provides diagnostic guidelines for mental health professionals and this ability to diagnose guides them in the best course of action to help their patients.

This chapter also makes you think of the advancement in mental illness treatment and what the world would be like if it never happened or got as advanced as it is today. The world could be more violent or graduation rates could be lower because of minor mental illnesses that aren't serious today because of the medicine there is to treat could be more serious and affect learning.

There could be countless issues and difference in the world today without the advancement of mental illness study… which is still constantly advancing to this day year after year.