Reading Activity Week #13 (Due Tuesday)

The first thing I found interesting about this chapter was the drastic change that society has gone through in our treatment of the mentally ill throughout history. First off when they started talking about Pinel they said it was revolutionary that he simply brought some of the patients out of CHAINS! CHAINS! To many of us today, I would hope at least this seems unfalthomable that we would ever treat fellow human beings like this just because they were different and sick.
The second thing I found interesting about this chapter was the whole concept of Mesmerism and how it influenced, if only breifly people's thoughts about how to cure any type of illness specifically mental ones. I thought it was fascinating that Mesmer could, through the power that he legitimately believed he had could influence so many people into trying his treatment techniques. It shows the power of manipulation and pursuation of people very well.
The third thing I found interesting about this chapter was the branching off that happened after the Mesmer mess. This whole thing really started the idea of hypnotism and also started the storm of criticism of it's legitimacy. It's an interesting thing to go off of after witnessing people become mesmerized and wanting to discover more just as John Elliotson did.

I think mostly the part about Pinel and the others in the beginning when they discussed the revolutions that were made in the switch from inhuman to humane treatment of individuals with mental illnesses. Pinel must have fought a lot of people to simply get those individuals out of their chains and it started a reaction in most of thinking about these people in possibly a different light, instead of animals or mistakes, thinking of them as possibly humans or eventually as treatable. This is the reason we have psychologists like we do today and i believe it's a very important change in the history of psychology.

All of the other chapters have touched on the theories of psychology and why people do the things they do or think the way that they think but we have rarely talked about the mental illnesses and clinical psychology at all. This chapter brought into view the consequences of those with a mental illness as well as the dark side that many psychologists don't talk about any more, how unfairly we used to treat those with mental illnesses.

I am really interested in learning more about the Anna O. case and how his partnership with Freud influenced Breuer's actions and thoughts about the case. Also what criticisms people have about it now a days and what was learned from a study like this.

I thought a lot about how Freud found the sex drive to be the most powerful drive in humans. I wonder what types of things that Freud must have gone through during his childhood for him to think like this and what does he think about his own conscious versus everyone else's?

The first section that I found interesting in Chapter 12 was the large section about the early treatment of the mentally ill. Back in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, it was believed that the ideas of progress and reform and a strong faith in the ability of science to improve society during the Enlightenment period. Therefore, mental illness was viewed as a biological mishap and very treatable. Phillipe Pinel developed the first mental institution for men around 1793, and then he developed Salpetriere asylum for women in 1795. His most dramatic contribution was to remove the chains from the mentally ill, literally. Some of these people had been chained up for years. He called this “movement” moral treatment, it improved patient nutrition, hygiene, and general living conditions. Similar reforms were being made in England by William Tuke. Tuke founded the York Retreat in north England which was devoted to helping the mentally insane. He designed this establishment as more of a working farm, rather than a prison. Tuke’s York Retreat became the model for at least half of the private mental hospitals created in the United States in the first quarter of the 19th century. Benjamin Rush was the first person in America to bring a scientific approach to the treatment of the mentally ill. A prominent signer of the Declaration of Independence, a surgeon general for the Continental Army during the Civil War, and called the father of modern psychiatry, believed that mental illnesses derived from the circulatory system and blood. He became a promoter of bloodletting, the act where Rush opened the veins and removed blood until the person reached a tranquil state. This treatment was found to actually work pretty well for a short time for especially violent patients. He also created the gyrator, which was a board that the patient was placed on and spun around really fast. It was believed that this act would redistribute the blood to the head. He also created the tranquilizer, which was a chair with straps for restraining arms and legs and a boxlike device that fit tightly over the head. By eliminating movement, the idea was to reduce the pulse and calming the patient. Both devices became common treatments in mental hospitals.

The second section I found interesting was the section about hypnotism. Mesmeric studies were conducted by James Esdaile, a Scottish surgeon working in India. He reported a mortality rate of less than 5% in a time where the normal amount of mortality during or after surgery was close to 40%. The medical community was slow to change, and the prevailing idea of pain was believed to be good considering it was a naturally occurring phenomenon. Mesmerism or hypnotism as it was to later be called, finally gained some respectability in the 1840s. James Braid, a respected Scottish physician set out to initially demolish hypnotism, but found that some of its effects were in fact valid. Because he thought that the trance state was similar to the state of sleep, he coined the term neurypnology. Braid learned that the hypnosis state could be induced by having patients stare at a fixed object just above their line of vision, concluding that the general fixation was behind the phenomenon.

The third section I found interesting was the section about Freud and the importance of sex. I decided to float away from the common things we know about Freud and explore some of his stranger concepts. After being intrigued by hysteria, Freud became convinced that unresolved sexual problems were at the heart of the matter for his many troubled patients. Most patients reported some type of sexual tension or issue in their exploration of their past by means of free association and dream analysis. He then coined the seduction hypothesis which stated that hysteria was a result of childhood sexual abuse by a parent or other adult. Because the young child had no idea what was happening, Freud believed the experience was forgotten and buried in the unconscious mind. Then sometime after puberty, the person would then be able to comprehend what had happened and this memory would resurface in the form of some type of hysteric symptom. Freud presented his hypothesis at a conference in 1896. His idea was not well received by the educational community. Some people calling it a scientific fairy tale, this lead Freud and everyone else starting to doubt the strength of his idea. Freud then abandoned his hypothesis and instead replaced it with the idea that sexual events in childhood were not real but imagined and that sexuality did not begin in adolescence but existed in some form of infancy.

To be honest, I did not find anything that I didn’t find interesting in this chapter. Obviously there were some things about Freud and Rush that I had already known but for the most part I felt like the chapter presented information that I had not known prior to reading it. I think the most important pieces or section of the chapter that would be the most useful in understanding the history of psychology would be about the contributions of Rush, Tuke, Dix, Beers, Freud, and Itard. To just understand the very fundamental things about these people would create a good foundation in understanding the whole main idea behind this chapter. It relates to previous chapters because it focuses on how the discipline began applying scientific methods to age-old philosophical questions and how it developed as a science in an academic environment. I would like to learn more about the therapy and situation with Anna O. While reading the chapter I was just really taken a back a bit by the early treatment of patients and the treatments the preformed on them that were deemed ethical. I find Sigmund Freud really interesting, maybe that is just because he so weird and strange but if you look closely you can see that he did contribute some things to the discipline of psychology even though most of it was just weird.

One topic that I had found interesting while reading this chapter was how inhumane the treatment of mentally deficient people were in the earlier 18th century. I had learned about the treatment practices in other psychology classes, but I still can’t grasp how the treatment practices prevailed for so long. I know it’s unfair to look at the practices that people had done and not realize that they are a product of their time. However, even after reformers had improved the conditions of these asylums and institutions those treatment practices still existed. For example, Dorthea Dix was successful in implementing better treatment of mentally ill patients for a period of time. After her visits to public institutions, she saw how terrible and animal-like these people were treated. From being chained to the freezing cold walls, to being locked in closet-sized rooms filled with nothing but them and their excrements, the malnourishment and physical injuries these people had to endure, the list goes on and on. She was successful, but to an extent and for a period of time. Because of the overpopulation in these institutions practices would return to how they previously were. She did, in the long run, make a difference.
Another topic that I found interesting relating to Dorthea Dix and reformation of institutions is Clifford Beers. I had also previously learned of him in other psychology classes, but what sparked my interest while reading this particular chapter was how it included another main contribution that he made that had never been addressed in my other classes. I knew that he had first-hand experience in the horrible treatment within the institutions and was an advocate in reformation, but I had never really thought about his contribution to changing the views of mentally ill patients. Because he was a patient “being cared for” at these facilities, his release was a concrete example that people considered to be mentally ill can be rehabilitated. Upon his release, he had documented how he was treated while being “cared for,” and afterwards wrote a book about his experiences so the public could see what really goes on. He had proven that mentally ill patients could prove that they could become educated or were educated when originally submitted for “treatment.”
The last topic that I had found interesting was Breuer’s “Anna O” case, and Freud’s responses to it. It was interesting, because it seemed like Freud kind of outed Breuer on some details of his famous case that he would’ve rather kept buried. For example, “Anna O”’s symptoms were just temporary, and continued to happen after a period of time. She also had other psychological ailments besides hysteria, it was considered that she had psychotic symptoms and a dissociative disorder. Not only did Freud reveal some inaccurately portrayed data in regards to his experiment, but also shed light onto his sketchy personal life. In Freud’s biography, which was left out of Breuer’s notes, it stated that Breuer had to stop treatment with Anna after she had developed symptoms similar to that of a pregnant woman and had declared Breuer as the dog. In a quick-fix though Breuer ended treatment with her and took his wife on a special honeymoon where he had conceived a daughter. I think there might have some underlying information as opposed to just convenient timing.
What I didn’t find as interesting was Freud and his beliefs and theories about sex. I didn’t find it interesting because I think of it as almost annoying. It just seems like every assumption/theory that Freud had has something to do with sex in some way, and I think it’s almost kind of ridiculous. His theories are just so far-fetched it’s hard to believe in a lot of his psychodynamic approach.
I feel like the transformation of how mentally ill patients were treated compared to how they are today is very important in understanding the history of psychology. It proves we have come a long way not only in knowledge, research, or therapy techniques, but in how we treat the mentally ill now. This also kind of builds on the other chapter that discussed intelligence testing, and how we treated as inferiors or people that were considered less than human for being mentally deficient. They weren’t treated to the extent of patients in early public institutions, but were downgraded using terms like “idiot” and “moron”, which are now considered offensive and are said to deliberately attack somebody and hurt their feelings.
This progression also made me think of treatment of mentally ill people in the criminal justice system. Biased and hatred against the mentally ill were more recently added to the definition of Hate Crimes, and people that commit offenses towards them are now eligible for tougher punishments and sanctions. Think of if that was applicable in the early 1800’s!
A topic that I would like to learn more about is hypnosis and the early contributors. The starting point of learning about hypnosis in all of my other classes was with Jean Charcot, and I had never even heard of the Nancy School of hypnosis or it’s contributors.

After reading this chapter I found almost all of it interesting. This was the first chapter that didn’t really discuss psychologists and their theories as much as the others. The first section I found to be interesting was the section on mental illness. This issue has been under discussion for decades now. There were ideas on how to help them deal with symptoms, possible cures and remedies. In the early times of mental illness they were looked at as evil and sometimes possessed which lead to inhumane treatments the majority of the time. The better off you were socioeconomically the better off your treatments options were. The section on moral treatment was interesting because it took a different approach to things than the normal out of sight out of mind approach. Phillipe Pinel was the first to incorporate this idea, he was a French physician. He worked on the bettering of the patient’s nutrition, hygiene, and general living conditions with behavior modification. Reward systems were meant to bring some order to the patient’s lives. This idea was also in motion in England led by William Tuke. He established a resort type of getaway that resembled a farm more than a hub for the mentally ill. The better the patients acted the more freedoms they were given more visitors, work, and more recreational time. On the other hand the bad patients were usually isolated and sometimes even tied to the bed as punishment.
Another topic I found very interesting was the idea of bloodletting. This was the process of removing excess blood or diseased blood from the body in hopes to cure mental illness. The man who proposed this idea was named Benjamin Rush. He was a singer of the declaration of independence and a surgeon general to the continental army. Rush believed that hypertension in the in the brains blood vessels was causing the diseased blood. This was a very interesting subject because Rush also used two other devices that he believed helped the mentally ill. The tranquilizer chair and the gyrator, the gyrator spun the patient around and redistributed the blood throughout the body while the tranquilizer calmed mental patients down. Although these devices don’t seem to be the most humane the tranquilizer could be compared to today’s idea of the straight jacket and bed straps. It was interesting to see how in those times doctors and psychologists used their knowledge to help attempt to cure the mentally insane.
The third topic I found interesting was the theory that Freud proposed in 1896. It was called the seduction theory. He believed that mental traumas were caused by childhood sexual abuse. The child would then burry it away because they didn’t understand what was happening at the time. Once they reached sexual maturity they were re traumatized and it led to the mental problems. He presented this to a group in 1896 and they didn’t buy it. One called it a “scientific fairy tale”. He later started doubting his own theory because other cases didn’t match up to his ideas. Falls, head traumas, severe illness all didn’t involve sexual abuse in childhood. It was really interesting to read how he started to draw back his own theory because of public and eventual self-doubt. Freud has some pretty popularly talked about ideas to this day in psychology. Even though they aren’t as believed as they were back then he is still a pretty popular discussion in psychology. This showed me that even the best doubt their work if others don’t agree and support it.
The only thing I really didn’t find interesting in this chapter was little things that I already learned. There were a few issues with Freud that I remember reading about awhile back. The big topics that summed up and filled in information were the only things that didn’t get my attention. Other than that this was the most interesting chapter I have read so far. It bypassed most of the theories and psychologists and hit on the clinical psychology topic and the treatments they used within clinical psychology.
The thing I feel will be the most useful in understanding the history of psychology is the discussion on mental illness and how it was treated. This set the stage for a transformation from research and theories to actual practicing and formulating cures to diseases such as bi polar and depression. This to me takes the next step in history and starts getting closer to the modern concept of psychology. They started to practice and test how to cure these illnesses rather than why these illnesses exist. This allows for more advancement in the field along with more knowledge due to experiments they attempted to help cure mental illness. After reading this topic/chapter I related the book more with modern psychology/clinical psych than I have in other previous chapters.
This chapter does build on the ideas and practices of older psychologists and their ideas. In this chapter they acknowledged that mental illness exists and that it does cause mental problems to to those who suffer from these diseases. In previous chapters they seemed more focused on why they have the illness and what part of their mind causes it rather than what they can do to help or cure the illness. It still discusses certain psychologists but this chapter goes in depth on what they did to help the field and the patients they were studying.
The one topic I would like to learn more about is all the different ways they used to help attempt to cure mental illness. The book mentioned several ways but there had to be more extreme ways and other ways that didn’t get attention. This to me is very important in psychology because it led to how we do things today. Today’s ideas of a cure are meds which don’t totally work in my mind. It would be interesting to see the vast variety of methods used to attempt to cure mental illness leading up to today’s methods.
a few ideas I has during the readings were how hard it must have been dealing with a mental illness during the 1900s. Also the lower socioeconomic class you were in the harder it would have been to live with a disease. Some of the extreme ideas and thoughts back then blow my mind when thinking about how we handle things today. Also Freud’s ideas of sex and mental illness and how he believed mental illness occurred. I wonder what he went through in his childhood (if anything) to have the ideas he did about sexual abuse and mental illness.

It took a lot of compassion and courage on the part of Pineal to change how society treated the mentally ill. When the majority of society is perfectly fine with keeping mentally ill individuals chained and shut in like animals, Pineal went out of his way to make sure patients were treated morally.
William Tuke was also courageous to set up the system that he did. Although I disagree with the mistreatment of those individuals who behaved “badly” I still think is system was respectable. If people are behaving in such a way that they cannot control, what good does it do to punish them? I don’t blame him for doing so though, simply because it is easier to deal with them using punishment then to come up with an alternative method.
William James is by far my favorite psychologist and it is no surprise that he is mentioned in this chapter. He wrote a letter to Clifford Beers following his work “A mind that found itself” that he completed while staying in several asylums. This work detailed the living environment of the asylums and criticized the methods used by psychiatrists and asylum workers alike.
The passage on Mesmer’s Baquet was hysterical. I can just picture a bunch of lost souls gathering around the wooden tub containing who knows what with Mesmer spinning around and around them chanting and moaning, building his ego to the size of a god. Seems like more of a performance than a treatment.
The concept of suggestion was very interesting. It was eventually characterized as a personality trait. It basically is defined as how susceptible someone is to new ideas and how willingly they accept and believe them.
Cartharsis was interesting to consider. It is the idea that if we can trace symptoms back to the first appearance, we can cure them.
The part about Freud was both informative and interesting. I had not heard that Freud destroyed all evidence that contributed to the development of his theories nor had I heard that he hired a biographer who exaggerated his accomplishments. His techniques of free association and dream analysis never cease to intrigue me and every time I read about them I want to try them out or suggest them to my peers. Eros and thanatos were also fascinating to read about. Freud theorized that human behavior was motivated by life-enhancing (sexual) and life-destroying (aggressive) instincts. (p. 422)
Carl Jung was a cool cat and his theory of collective unconscious caught my attention. He believed the experiences of our ancestors are closely related to our own; therefore our ideas and thinking patterns are similar.
The section on psychoanalysis in America was pretty boring. I mean yeah America is where I'm reading this but I'm not too interested in how it was affected by psychoanalysis.
It was very enlightening to read about how Freud's life and legacy were exaggerated. He is the first person people think of when they consider psychology but he is far from the central figure in the field. He was influential mostly because of his own will to be heard and his insistent desire to be regarded as a psychology god.
This chapter didn't have any real direct references to chapters past but it mentioned several important figures that appeared in earlier sections. Several psychologists such as William James, Cattell and Goddard came to hear Freud speak and were influenced by his ideas.
I would like to learn more about Freud's theories and why people were so quick to dismiss his belief that sexuality is the central motivator behind human behavior. His Eros and thanatos theory is fascinating and I was able to see those motivators in my behavior right after I was done reading about them.
Thought about:
-Just how inhumanely people with mental illness were and are treated
-Maybe mental illness is not illness at all and is, in fact, a higher state of consciousness characterized by apparently abstract thoughts and nonsensical connections that may be true on some higher level of understanding.
-Just how do mental illnesses develop? Are people born with these illnesses, or are they inextricably connected to the environment in which they develop? There have been bad parents since the beginning of time. While there are cases of insane individuals coming from apparently normal families, is any family really normal?
-Dorothea Dix went on quite the expedition when she traveled some 60,000 miles around the country visiting and critiquing asylums. What an amazing journey to define her life’s work and passion.
-thought about crazy theories like animal magnetism and how just about anything will work if the patient believes it will work

The first thing that interested me was the material on how the mentally ill were treated in the past. One person who was determined to make sure the mentally ill were treated better was Frenchman Phillipe Pinel. One of his goals was to eliminate the use of chains from patients who had been restrained. In some instances, patients had these chains on them for years. The chains were replaced with more humane forms of restraints. Pinel also had a program he called moral treatment. He wanted improvements in patient nutrition, hygiene, and general living conditions. In this program, he also gave rewards for good behavior and handed down punishments for bad behavior. Patients who behaved well were given greater freedom of movement, allowed more visitors, and given more opportunities for recreation and work. People who behaved badly were punished through isolation from the other patients and sometimes by being tied to their beds. The first of this kind of stuff happening in the United States was done by Benjamin Rush. He came up with bloodletting, which was to remove diseased or excess blood to cure diseases. In one case, he gave the patient 47 different bleedings, which involved a total loss of blood of about 450 ounces. He was eventually pronounced cured and was returned to the community. Shortly after, he relapsed and hung himself. Rush also created two devices to calm the blood. He called one the gyrator, which was a revolving board on which a patient would be spun rapidly. His idea was to redistribute blood toward the head. The other was called the tranquilizer, which was a chair with straps to restrain the arms and legs, and a boxlike device that fit tightly over the head. The goal of this was to reduce the pulse rate. The different things done by Rush are very surprising and seem very inhumane. Taking almost 500 ounces of blood in one session is just crazy. It makes me wonder what made them think mental illnesses could be treated by taking blood. Also, the thing that spun rapidly and the chair with restraints were both very different. Both of those things probably did more harm than they did good.
The next thing that interested me was the material on mesmerism and animal magnetism. Franz Anton Mesmer was a scientist who was interested in forces such as electricity and magnetism. Once he studied it, he became convinced that magnetic powers affected humans directly, with good health being the consequence of properly aligned internal magnetic forces. However, he thought if the forces were to become misaligned, ill health would be the result. His attempt to help his patients was to give them medicine containing heavy doses of iron, and then passing magnets over their bodies. The patients would fall into a type of trance, and when they came out, they would find their health improved. He called this animal magnetism. He eventually stopped using the magnets as he realized he could produce cure without them. He thought he had magnetic powers and he would pass his hands over affected areas. He was soon exiled from Vienna as his techniques became criticized. People became worried when most of his patients were women, and part of his treatment was touching the stomach and back area. Mesmer’s work is very intriguing. His work with electricity and magnets is interesting, because he thought this could be a way to cure a human’s illness. It’s kind of funny how he eventually thought he had magnetic powers himself. It seems like he got a little caught up in what he was doing. Also, it was interesting to learn that he was exiled from Vienna as they thought his work was inappropriate toward women. It seems like he took advantage of women by using his praised work, which soon became highly questionable.
Another thing that interested me was the material on Freud’s theory that unresolved sexual problems were at the heart of the matter for his troubled patients. His patients exploring their past by means of free associations and dream reports often seemed to have experienced some type of sexual trauma when they were young. He researched this a lot and came up with a theory known as the seduction hypothesis. Freud argued that hysteria was the result of childhood sexual abuse by a parent or a different adult. He thought that since the children didn’t understand what was happening when they were being sexually abused, the experience was forgotten and buried deep in the unconscious mind. As the child advances through puberty and begin to understand sex, the long-buried memory resurfaces in the form of one or more hysterical symptoms. When he first presented this theory, it wasn’t well-received. He then replaced his original idea by stating that sexual events in childhood were not real but imagined and that sexuality did not begin in adolescence but existed in some form from infancy. His original idea was very interesting, because I believe it’s partly true. To this day, people who were sexually abused as children find themselves scarred for life from that incident. I don’t agree that this could be the only that caused hysteria. That’s the one area I didn’t agree with, and I think that’s probably why his idea wasn’t well-received.
There wasn’t really a section that I wasn’t interested in while reading this chapter. This is probably the first time I’ve been able to say that. If there was anything, it would have just been some of the material that I already knew, so it just became a review. There wasn’t a lot of information that was review for me, so I really enjoyed reading this chapter, and especially learning more about Freud. The material that will be most useful to me in understanding the history of psychology is the information about treating mental illness. It just gave me an idea how far we’ve come in treating mentally ill patients. There were some very crazy things done as chains were used and a method was done where the patient was spun rapidly. Today, there are a lot of great things done in order to help mentally ill patients, and that just goes to show how much things can improve as time moves forward. This builds on previous chapters by continuing to introduce pivotal people in the field of psychology. Freud is a very well-known figure worldwide, and it’s very interesting to learn more about him that wasn’t introduced in previous classes I’ve taken. Also, this chapter acknowledges that mental illnesses do indeed exist. It introduced the treatment methods during this time, and some of them were very inhumane. It’s crazy to think how far they’ve come in the treatment of different mental illnesses. I’d like to learn more about the different methods first used to treat mental illnesses. I was very interested to learn about this, and some of the methods introduced in this chapter were mind-blowing. While reading the chapter, I wondered what made people think that spinning someone rapidly would help treat mental illness. I also wondered what it took for people to finally intervene and decide these methods were inhumane.

Chapter 12

The first thing that I found interesting in chapter twelve was the earlier methods for treatment of the mentally ill. I have seen a few movies that take place during this time period, so I know that things were much more corrupt back then which makes me upset but interested to learn more about. The fact that “moral treatment” had to be introduced somewhat baffles me because I can’t imagine treating anyone, especially someone ill, immorally. The second thing that I found interesting was the power of suggestion, such as hypnotism. I don’t like to word paranoid, but I will admit that I am skeptic of a lot of things so reading about how Mesmer treated patients through control was interesting and made me think how subtle hypnotism can be. Normally we think of people being hypnotized as voluntary and a form of entertainment such as at a circus or carnival, but I sometimes wonder if people are more controlled by figures of power than we think. One example that comes to mind is the Holocaust and how much control Hitler had over all the Nazis. To think about how a person could suggest something this horrific is one thing, but the millions of people who followed the suggestion is what shocks me. It is nearly impossible to say that I would have done the same if I was in that position, but then again we all look up to our leaders, especially when it comes to politics, and depending on how influential that person is can determine how much control we really have. The third thing that I found interesting in the chapter was Freud and his treatment of hysteria. Mental illnesses are so interesting to me for some reason, maybe because they are unknown and so out of the ordinary to me. I found two things about Freud that I liked in this reading. First was his belief that hysteria is a result of repressed traumatic memories that can be real or imagined and his purpose was to bring back those memories looking for patterns that help identify the root cause of the problem. The second thing I liked about Freud was his belief that all events have causes and even accidents can be traced back to unconscious purposes. I found this interesting because I like the idea of everything happening for a reason and it is neat to think about the possibility of our unconscious playing a role. The one thing that I found the least interesting was Freud after WWI because I was already aware of his theories on aggression, sex, and the id or ego.

Even though Freud was treated with much skepticism, I think he is the most important when it comes to studying the history of psychology. Even if a person has never taken a course in psychology, they most likely have still heard of Sigmund Freud. He has contributed to psychology and society as a whole by his concepts of the unconscious, repression, the importance of early childhood, and the psychological nature of mental disorders. His name is well known for a reason which means he would be an important person to research and have information on. This chapter builds off of the previous ones by finally bringing psychology into the medical field and showing its importance when diagnosing mental illnesses. People may fall ill due to cognitive reasons just as much as physical, so psychology can provide ways to alter the treatment of those specific reasons. If I could learn more about anything from this chapter I would probably choose to research more about Clifford Beers and other stories of mistreated mental patients. I think I want to learn more about this because of the reoccurring idea of control or power, and how people can treat one another so cruel without feeling any remorse. This made me think that maybe a person can become so influenced or controlled by another that they lose the ability to see right and wrong or moral and immoral.

While reading chapter 12, one of the first things I found interesting was Freud’s Id, Ego and Superego. The Id works to satisfy the person’s basic need and desires. The Superego is the part of a person personality that holds our internalized ideals that we learn from our parents and society. The Superego works to suppress the urges caused by the Id and controls the Ego to act morally.

Another subject I found interesting was Freud’s defense mechanisms. Freud believed that defense mechanisms were used to defend the ego from anxiety. Some of examples given in the book were repression, projection, reaction formation, and sublimation. Repression is where unwanted memories are forced out of awareness and into unconscious. Sublimation is defined in the book as the process which psychic energy associated with sex or aggression is channeled into socially activities (for me this means activities like sports). To me, when I think of defense mechanism, I think of things like deflecting or using humor. I never thought about it in terms of protecting our ego from anxiety. Freud believed that defense mechanisms are critical for protecting the ego from anxiety.

The third thing from chapter 12 that I found interesting was Lightner Witmer and his psychological clinic. Witmer was interesting because of his clinic and his work with mental illness. Witmer’s clinic started in 1896 at the University of Pennsylvania. Witmer’s main participants were children. Lightner recognized individual differences, but didn’t think that mental illness is all due to inherented traits. He believed that some deficiencies could be corrected with proper training. This differs from the view of most psychologists at this time and I thought of Goddard and how his view was different. I also found it interesting how -like behaviorists- Witmer believed that environment could change behavior. Lightner set the groundwork for clinical psychology.

If I had to name one thing that to me wasn’t as interesting in chapter 12 it would be the discussion of hypnosis. Hypnosis I found the least interesting because it does not really help my understanding of psychology.

The concept from this chapter most useful in understanding the history of psychology is Freud and his psychoanalysis and studies with mental illness. Freud, although sometimes confusing, is an important piece of psychology and its history.
Witmer is important to understanding the history of psychology as well. His work is one of the fundamental pieces of clinical psychology and is important to understand

This chapter relates to previous chapters because it shows another branch of psychology and how it developed and lead to later developments like clinical psychology..

The topic I would like to learn more about is mental illness and treatment for it.

The main idea I had when reading this chapter was about how broad the field of psychology is and how it could be applied to explain many different things.

After reading Chapter 12 on mental illness and its treatment, I found so many topics interesting. This was one of the most enjoyable chapters to read about so far in that it was intriguing, shocking, and sometimes entertaining. The first topic I found interesting was Rush’s inventions to calm the blood. The gyrator was a large revolving board where a patient would be strapped onto and then spun around in order to essentially redistribute the blood into the brain. The second invention was called a tranquilizer. It was a chair with straps to restrain the patient’s arms and legs, then a box like device was placed tightly on their head to reduce their pulse rate. I found these interesting because it seems so cruel and bizarre, yet in that time, anything that was though to help mental illness was pretty much accepted. The second topic I found interesting was Dorothea Dix’s research and reforms on mental institutions. After touring Massachusetts’ insane asylums, she was appalled at the treatment of the patients. They were chained to walls, living in cold, tiny rooms and were malnourished and beaten and abandoned. After her return, she wrote about what she saw to the government that led to reforms and an increase in funds to improve these asylums. Later on, she continued her tours in almost every state to help better living environments for the mentally ill. I found this interesting because it’s crazy to think that the mentally ill were so unfairly treated and were basically animals to the staff. The third topic I found to be of interest was hypnotism and the use of it as an anesthesia in medical surgeries. Even in amputation, patients were just hypnotized and it was shown to be effective in providing a pain-free surgery. This was incredibly shocking to me because it shows how powerful the brain can be in blocking even the most excruciating pain. I truly didn’t find any topic to be least interesting in this chapter.
I think knowing how treatments of the mentally ill evolved and the use of different techniques to provide beneficial help to people suffering from mental illnesses is the most useful knowledge in better understanding the history psychology. This chapter builds on the previous chapters because it takes a specific topic, mental illness, and goes into depth about the history of it and all the different research and stories on the topic. I would really like to learn more about all the different techniques that were used to supposedly try and cure mental illnesses in people. I want to learn more about this because many of the ways that were talked about were just absurd! Some made me think how in the world did people think some procedure were going to work? It just was very interesting. While reading about how patients in insane asylums were treated, it brought me back to the movie, “Changeling,” starring Angelina Jolie. In that movie, she was put into a mental institute and was treated basically like an animal. The doctors were manipulative and the staff was cruel.

One person I found interesting from this chapter was Phillipe Pinel. He changed the way we treated the mentally ill. They called his program of moral treatment. Basically he decided we should treat patients in a more humane way. Pinel removed the chains that were being used on patients as restraints. Some of these patients had been restrained by chains for years. I found this interesting because he recognized that these mentally ill patients are still people and they should be treated like people. He also used behavior modification on these patients. He used rewards and punishment to control these people.
Another thing I found interesting was bloodletting. Benjamin Rush promoted this as a cure for many different illnesses. Bloodletting is a remedy that was common that removed diseased or excess blood. Rush thought this helped remove tension on blood vessels leading to the brain. I found this interesting because this was kind of like cutting, but people approved of it. They thought that bloodletting cured and reduced tension in people and people who are cutters find it therapeutic as well as a tension reducer.
I also found Adler’s idea interesting to read about. He looked at Freud’s inferiority complex from an interesting angle. He believed that all infants are inherently inferior and in life we try to compensate and overcome this. Our social environment during life also puts obstacles in our way that make us feel inferior as well. Adler saw the social factors as more important and as having more of an impact than the biological ones, this was different from Freud. In fact, these opposing views created a feud between the two and they never made up. This is interesting because Freud is talking about so much in psychology, so it is intriguing to hear the person who challenged Freud’s perspective.
I found Mesmer to be the least interesting to learn about. He saw ill health kind of like magnets. The disharmony of forces opposing each other within the body was what caused illness. These forces need to be strengthened out in order to be cured. He gave his patients large doses of iron and ran magnets up and down their bodies. They entered a trace called “crisis state” and when they came out of this state were cured. He called this whole theory animal magnetism. After a while Mesmer started to believe he had magnetic powers himself. So, he started doing this therapy without magnets and just he hands. This is pretty creepy and makes him seem like a pervert. I liked this when I started reading it, but the idea of him just running his hands up and down someone’s body is just wrong. It is also weird that he believed he had magnetic powers.
This chapter built on the other chapters because the history of psychology would not be complete without talking about some of the ways to use psychopathology and psychoanalysis. The others chapter focused a lot more on research and experiments rather than actually trying to do things on mentally ill patients. This chapter was more about clinical psychology which made it very interesting to read.
I would like to learn more about Phillipe Pinel. The section in the chapter that talked about him was very short and did not go into a lot of detail. He seems like he was a very wise man. He basically started the Enlightenment in progress because of the reforms he did.
This chapter made me think about how much differently we treat people compared to back when psychology was just being born as a science. We are a lot more humane now and have lots of rules and laws about how you can and can’t treat someone. It also seems like people were really desperate for answers. I feel like you would have to be in order to believe some of theories Freud came up with.

Chapter 12

The best section of this chapter by far was the early treatment for the menatally ill. It is really interesting to see how we got from burning "witches" at the stake to were we are today. As the book points out a few hundred years ago those who were considered different were often classified as witches and drowned or burned at the stake. Slowly as time went on the treatment for individuals with psychological problems. They went from being killed to being chained, and pretty much banished from the community. This is were things fared for quite some time until a few indivuals saw the treatment of these individuals and implemented changes.

Phillipe Pinel is known for beginning this time period and the concept was called "moral treatment", which was the start of exactly what was to become of it. Pinel started a new treatment faciltiy that was known as the York Retreat, which allowed those that were capable to lead more normal lives. Many were allowed to work. Another interesting figure in the development of moral treatment was Dorthea Dix. For many years Dorthea Dix was considered to have been a person that lead to the demise of the psychologically ill, because of her implementation of state run institutions. However, it is seen today that quite the opposite is true. By umplementing state fun institutions individuals were subject to more standard treatment and not there for monetery purposes, but rather as a treatment facility to all, not just the rich.

Another interesting topic in this chapter was the section on Franz Mesmer. Mesmer was a scientist who beleived that the body needed to have a delicated balance of electricity and magnetism, without it people would become ill, either physically or mentally. The interesting part about Mesmer, however is not his insane theory of magnatism, but rather his life. Mesmer originally started his practice in Vienna, but because of controversies over the effectiveness of magnatism and the treatment itself he was "forced to leave". The controversies were of course valid as magnatism was not proven to be affective. In addition to that "hands-on" would be an understatment in his application of the healing. To give you a clue, mesmerize as a term was coined by Mesmer, who spent much of his time in a robe with women who were the primary patients of Mesmer.

The last part of the book that I found interesting was the section on Lightner Witmer. Witmer was a psychologist who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and studied with Wundt in his laboratory in Leipzig. Witmer beleived that psychology would be of great use of it was able to be used to help people directly. So, when a schoolteacher asked him to help teach a student that was having trouble with spelling. As Witmer, examined the student he came to discover that they had poor eyesight and with that clinical psycology was born. It was of course based on much different principles and was focued on school psychology, but that was the beginnings.

One section of the chapter that I did not care for was the section on Freud. To be honest, im tired of hearing about it. Very few of his ideas have come of have any validity and the basis for which they were founded upon can be annoying. That is sex is not the only reason that people have problems. For me, it seems that he was infatuated with the topic and may have been a little eccentric himself. I will say thought that the book gives some vary vaild contributions of Freuds that I had never thought of. Those are the needs to study motivation, issues and the importance of early development and the importance of psychotherapy.

This chapter relates alot back to other members of the psychological community from previous chapter. I really like how it tied in those affiliations of former people to those that are presented in this chapter. Something that I would like to learn more about is Dorthea Dix and how she was able to overcome all odds and help individuals with psychological issues. As a women of the age, I can see that she would have had a very heard time getting people to take her seriously and despite that she changed the institutions for the better. In my eyes she is a inspirational women.

When I first started reading chapter 12, I got a spooky feeling. Maybe it’s because it was just recently Halloween and the chapter started off with mental illnesses and societies depressing way of handling individuals with mental disorders at the time. None-the-less, I found the techniques of the time interesting and intriguing. My interest focuses on Benjamin Rush and his inventions and ideas about curing mental disorders. Particularly, bloodletting to remove an individual’s “bad blood”. Rush believed that bad blood was the cause of a patients illness. Therefore, the bad blood needed to be removed. I find it humorous because the text states that Rush’s patients were in a more tranquil state after a bloodletting procedure. Well of course they are, they just lost an important biological fluid necessary to sustain life. It seems ludicrous now, but at the time, it’s reasonable to suggest such ideas were acceptable. I also found Rush’s other “blood-correcting” devices interesting. One was the “Tranquilizer”, which completely restrained (physically) the patient in every possible way in an attempt to calm the patient, returning their pulse rate to normal. The other was the “Gyrator”. This contraption spun individuals around very fast in an effort to redistribute throughout the body, particularly the head. I can’t believe these two methods of treatment became standard use at many asylums of the time. Then again, I have to remember that during the time period, the theories behind the devices most likely made sense to society.

The chapter undoubtedly had a heavy emphasis on Sigmund Freud. Although I found most of the information regarding Freud and his work to be review, (since this is another person who is constantly beat into our heads throughout our education as psychology majors) I did find something rather interesting right away about him when the author started introducing Sigmund Freud to the chapter. It concerned Freud’s belief (at a young age) that he would one day be famous and have biographies written about him. Freud was certain that he would make an impact on history, and he would never be forgotten. It’s made clear towards the end of the section on Freud that he was a bit ignorant and didn’t hold the traditional scientific persona. Freud believed in his ideas and was rarely open to discussion that involved discrediting his theories. As a result, Freud lost many friends and a hit to his reputation. I find it interesting though, that Freud knew he was going to have such an influential impact on the scientific community so early in his career. Either he was completely ignorant, or amazingly confident in his work. It’s hard to say he was ignorant though, because Freud and his ideas are indeed famous. Tied to this, I found it confusing and interesting at the same time that Freud was compelled to destroy fourteen years worth of notes and letters, so that his biographers (before he was even famous or recognized within the scientific community) couldn’t get a hold of them. Why did he do that? Privacy concerns? Or maybe he just liked the idea of confusing people trying to understand him and his ideas. Still, it’s interesting that he predicted he would be famous and took precautionary measures.

The last thing I found profoundly interesting was the Anna O. case. I found it rather interesting because it’s considered to be the spark that gave birth to the concept of psychoanalysis. Anna O. was not the patients real name, Bertha Pappenheim was. Joseph Breuer was considered her therapist. Anna suffered from an array of obvious psychological issues but was considered a young, attractive, and intelligent woman. It seemed to a certain degree that Breuer’s attempts to talk to Anna in a therapeutic manor, trying to trace disorders back to their origins, had some success. However, it’s obvious there were other problems, probably biological, affecting Anna. Even though therapy worked to a degree, it couldn’t solve all of Anna’s issues.

I found Mesmerism and Animal Magnetism to be the LEAST interesting. Franz Anton Mesmer was in my mind, completely delusional. I found this section hard to read because I found Mesmer, his ideas, and perception of himself completely stupid. I went along with the idea of mesmerism and magnetism at first, until I was reminded that mesmerism is reliant on suggestion. I just couldn’t stand how this guy, actually considered himself to be some sort of divine healer. Able to restore the magnetic balances within a person just by touching them, and then taking it further, he said he could positively magnetize objects and people could just go and touch them and be healed. These people are only feeling better because they believe it themselves. Mesmer was crazy and I think he had an overdose of delusions of grandeur.

What did you read in the chapter that you think will be most useful to in understanding the history of psychology? I think that reading about the treatment of the mentally ill was an important piece of psychological history that started the clinical psychology movement. Instead of leaving these people chained up like animals (which was also inhumane and unethical), people strived to better understand the nature of their illness and believed that they could be cured and once again be an asset to society.

How, in what ways, does this chapter relate (build on) to the previous chapters? This chapter builds on the mental testing movement. Instead of deeming someone incompetent, advising them not to reproduce (sometimes forcibly), removing them from society, clinical psychologists were born and strived to understand the nature of mental issues and help people live normal lives.

One person I found interesting and would like to learn more about was Lightner Witmer. I found him to be quite interesting and very comical because of a certain excerpt in the text describing how he liked to use himself as a subject for experiments. One consisted of getting tossed by a horse and the other was that Witmer liked to ride his “brake-less” bicycle down steep hills with his legs over the handlebars. I mean, that’s funny stuff.

**Idea:
-One idea I have concerns medical/psychological treatment. I wonder if someday in the future, humankind will look back and see some of our modern day treatments that we practice now to be absurd just as we consider some of the treatments of the past to be.

The first thing that interested me in the chapter is seeing how far we’ve really come in dealing with people with psychology related disorders from back in the dark ages till now. It talks about and enlightened time where a group of U.S. and French elevated science and instead of keeping patients chained up and put away they let them loose to learn and help them. They had a ton of different ideas that they tried such as moral treatment with rewards and punishment factors to give order. They also believed that calming the blood through a bloodletting technique worked to reduce the movement of patients and tranquilize them. This technique and others involving a chair with a box over there head to calm them down seemed ineffective later.
Dorthea Dix was also someone I’ve never heard of before and really interested me. The mental asylums in the early 1800’s were almost like jails and weren’t great places to house any type of person so Ms. Dix took many tours of jails, asylums, and hospitals in order to present a case to fight the standards of common asylums for the needy and poor patients with mental disabilities. Most asylums that were nice in that time period were private and had a 2:1 staff to patient ratio. Dix was responsible for the building and improving of close to 50 facilities to improve treatment and over crowdedness.
Learning new ideas about Freud was also interesting when you can relate all these other psychologists to his work and see what he was really thinking in terms of the time. I learned that Freud was interested in dream analysis and hypnosis which interested me to see how he related to sex. He thought that troubled thoughts about sex were related to many of his patient’s problems. He also talked about how the seduction hypothesis was coined from hysteria and it related to sexual abuse as a child that one tries to bury in their own lives. It is cool to see how Freud’s new concepts were in fact derived from past trial and error forms of treatment and research. I did enjoy learning about the obscure treatments and ways they tried to help patients. I’d love to learn about more ways they tried to use treatments and if any of those ways may still be used today.

it was interesting reading about the different treatment ways of the mentally ill. The first one i read about was by Phillipe Pinel and he followed his own rule of moral tratment. This was just basically behavior modification through using rewards and punishments to shape the behavior of the patients. Then there was Benjamin Rush. He was known as being the first person in America to bring a scientific approach to the treatment of the mentally ill. He believed that illnesses come from problems with the blood and circulatory system. A common thing that occured for treatment done by him was called bloodletting. this was to remove the diseased or excess blood and this was suppose to cure a very wide range of illnesses. He also came up with two divices. one was the gyrator and that was a revolving board which the patient would be spun rapidly to make the blood go to the head, and then another one that has the opposite kind of appraoch and this one is called a tranquilizer which is a restraint chair to where you cant move your arms or legs and you have something managing your head as well. this was used to calm you down and get your heart rate back to normal. the second one reminds me of my job. I work at a treatment facility for teens and they have to be mandt approved restrained if they are having a safety issue harming themselves or others due to a mental illness and being escalated. When we restrain, we only get to use our hands in certain restraints and then are able to place them into a safety room which is just an empty room that they can de-escalate. I think the chair has the same concept and something similar to this is still used in todays jails and prisions or inmates that need to calm down. I think that my job should allow something like this because it would be more effective and time efficant than the safety room, however it would not be very trama sensitive. Freud was also discussed in the chapter. Almost all of what i read I had read before, but going back to my job, his defense mechanisms are about the only thing left today that people see as being correct. I dont agree that any of his work is now really relevant but the defense mechanisms are still used today. I see them on a daily basis from the teens at my job and even among friends and family. It is just a coping skill that is used to protect you from insults are statements that are unpleasant.

As most people have said, it’s obvious that it is beyond interesting how far we have come in the treatment of mental health problems and the mentally ill. I can’t imagine who thought that it would be a productive or useful way to handle the mentally ill to chain them up. I suppose that it makes sense that if they didn’t think they could treat the problem, they wouldn’t want to deal with it. I am very interested in the fact that people were so willing to “imprison” those who they felt they couldn’t treat. It’s also interesting that, though medicine in terms of physical illness (not high quality medicine but still!) existed for treating and curing people, it seemed as if curing someone mentally wasn’t even a thought. Today, I couldn’t imagine treating someone who is sick in the way that they used to treat the mentally ill.

Back in high school and at opening week here at UNI hypnotist are popular forms of entertainment. I have always found it creepy to think that you can willingly give someone control over yourself. What is now entertainment for us, was once, interestingly enough, a way to decrease mortality rates for those who were undergoing surgery. It’s cool how hypnotism slowly became more popular and was referred to as being in a sleep like state (trance). I’m interested in neurypnology and the general fixation aspect of hypnosis that Braid introduced.

Must Freud always be talking about sex? After taking Developmental Psychology I felt that all Freud ever really did was creepily talk about idea related to sexmost of which are not empirically proven. It’s interesting to think that if Freud tried to study the things he is known for in today’s time-he would be considered a maximum creep and could possibly get into legal trouble. If it were for the social norms that existed at the time when Freud studies…he would have had little to no support. Further, it’s interesting to contemplate whether we have the social norms we do today as a result of Freud’s influence, or if those social norms would have developed on their own. On interesting thing that Freud studied was sex for pleasure. He basically analyzed people and related everything back to the fact that they were “sexually frustrated”. Perhaps Freud was really the one who was sexually frustrated.

This is the first chapter where I didn’t find something to be “least interesting”. I suppose if I had to choose I would say that Freud is less interesting and more creepy. However, I also find some of what is discussed about Freud to be interesting. Freud is interesting because of the ideas that he had and the things he proposed. He would be the least interesting thing that I read about in this chapter because: 1. You learn about Freud constantly as a Psych. Major and 2. He’s just creepy and it’s hard to always want to read about or believe that he even had some of his kooky ideas. Freud is just ridiculous and I am quite over reading about his views on sex.

The changes in the care and treating for mentally ill individual is imperatively important to the understand and history of psychology and even today’s practices. It not only gives science and psychology a horrifying reference point, but it also give a base line from which the studies have GROWN! This idea did a good job of giving us all a reality check that helped us to realize that the psychologist who were are learning about in this class were basing and building their information off of this, and not what we know today. Further, I think it’s good to think about the fact that this mal-treatment was addressed and that psychologist worked on better practices. This is where much of the mental health research originated-how can knowing these drastic origins be anything but useful!?

This chapter builds on the previous chapters as it follows up on all of the different brain problems, general studies, and research that was previously done. The past chapters all put heavy stock in looking at where illnesses in the brain are stations and what the cause is. This chapter seemed to follow up by looking more at the effect. Most specifically looking at ways to treat and cure the effect. This chapter looked more specifically at what could be done about the issues that have been previously discussed.

I would like to learn more about the mental institutions of the pastsome of the old procedures, how things shifted, etc. Reading about some of this stuff reminded me of the German Torture museum I visited in Rotenberg, Germany. It sounds horrific. I would like to learn more about why anyone thought it would be a good idea to treat people like this in the first place. What kinds of people were working at these institutions? Were there other research experiments that were performed on people in these institutions? As awful as it sounds, the better the records, the higher the potential of using the “ways” of these old mental institutions for today’s research or understanding or even just as a reminder of how drastically things have changed. As an individual who is hoping to go into mental health counseling, I can imagine how much more these methods would have damaged individuals. People in chains?!!!? Reading this stuff made it sound like they were in prison! It would be fascinating to take a more in depth look back at the history of mental health institutions.

While reading I had many new ideas and thoughts about how mentally ill individuals can be victims of hate crimes. I never really considered that to be an issue. It seems like common sense to know not to pick on someone who is unable to defend themselves. It’s like picking on someone in a wheel chair or stealing someone’s crutches. This led me to connect this topic with what I’ve been learning about in my gerontology classes. Recently we have been discussing elder abuse in some of my other classes. I never really thought about all the ways in which people could abuse and take advantage of older adults. Neglect is not just a form of abuse for children or pets… I caught myself wondering what the abuse laws were exactly and how everything fits together. Is there a lot of overlap between what I’m learning about in terms of abuse in older adults and those who are mentally ill? Not to insult older adults, but those who suffer from Alzheimer’s and Dementias are also considered to be “mentally ill”. Would they have ended up in mental institutions? I wonder how they could have possibly survived! I also had the thought that older adults likely did not suffer from these different dementias and mental illnesses as they often didn’t live long enough. I had so many ideas while reading this section. I was so interested in this chapter because I was able to connect it with things that I am learning in my minors.