Abstract
After World War II, several psychiatrists in the USA began treating schizophrenic patients psychoanalytically. Various methods were applied. However, all approaches were based on the assumption that people with schizophrenia had suffered severe trauma in their early childhood. The therapy was intended to give the patients some of the love and care they had previously missed, and heal them in this way. In the early 1950s, the Psychiatric University Hospital of Zurich was likely the first state hospital in Europe to apply and study analytical psychotherapy for psychoses. Although clinical psychiatry was usually suspicious of, if not radically opposed to, the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, these trials attracted wide international interest. By pursuing a cultural-historical praxeological approach, the contribution examines the psychotherapeutic attempt and its consequences in Zurich and beyond. Based on medical records, further internal clinic documents, correspondence and contemporary specialist articles, it identifies the patterns of perception, interpretation and action in the analysed context. The focus is on the interaction processes between the new method and the relations among various groups of actors, the clinical setting as well as institutional routines. Analytic psychotherapy resulted, so the argument goes, in a fundamental, largely unintended, change in psychiatric practices, which was driven by many other factors that influenced each other.
Meier, Marietta