Jan 2023
This special issue (Hist. cienc. saude-Manguinhos 29 (HCS-Manguinhos 29 suppl 1, 2022), coordinated by professors Sonu Shamdasani (Health Humanities Centre/University College London) and Cristiana Facchinetti (postgraduate Program in History of Sciences and Health/Casa de Oswaldo Cruz/Fiocruz) investigates histories of psychotherapies.
According to the authors, the term “psychotherapy” has been used since the mid-nineteenth century. Medical doctors from several schools, like Tuke, Bernheim and Van Eeden, started to use it to define therapies that sought moral treatment, cure of automatism, persuading or producing catharsis, affecting body, mind and unconscious.
This issue features articles on different topics regarding psychotherapies. The article by Sonu Shamdasani reflects about the development of the transcultural perspective on the history of psychotherapies.
In her work, Cristiana Facchinetti discusses the medical-mental interpretations about the relations between art and madness in a psychiatric hospital in Brazil in the nineteenth century and their psychotherapeutic use.
The historian Akihito Suzuki discusses the appropriation of psychiatry in Japan in the second quarter of the twentieth century. Suzanne Nortier Hollman indicates how psychoanalysis was appropriated by a North American psychiatric institution back in the early years of the twentieth century, before Sigmund Freud’s visit to the United States, in 1909. Renato Foschi and Andrea Romano investigate the entry of psychoanalysis in Italy from twentieth century on.
Jelena Martinovic discusses the professionalization process of art therapie in the post-war, in England, France, Germany and Switzerland. Marco Innamorati addresses the different forms by which Freudian, Jungian and psychodynamics (or psychotherapy) theories deal with the patient’s refusal of interpretation. Closing the studies of the group, the article by Ulrich Koch places the emergence and the evolution of psychotherapeutic techniques that seek to establish, maintain and control a transforming relationship between therapist and patient in the broad context of changes in social and political relations in the twentieth century.
This special issue has three other articles by Latin American authors, highly interconnected with the theme of transculturalism.
José Ignacio Allevi studies the case of shock therapy circulation in Rosario, Argentina, highlighting local issues that enabled its appropriation and the resulting specificities. Debating the impact in Brazil of the end of the Second World War, Guilherme Marques and Carolina Carvalho study the local psychiatry performance in a context in which mental health sought to gain legitimacy in the selection of immigrants, under the key of reading war traumas. Finally, Carla Ribeiro Guedes, Vanessa Maia Rangel and Kenneth Rochel de Camargo Jr. historicize the formation of a disciplinary field in Brazil, “psychosomatic medicine” or “medical psychology,” organized by the physician and psychoanalyst Julio de Mello Filho (1933-2018).
We wish you a good reading!
Shamdasani, Sonu and Facchinetti, Cristiana. Transcultural histories of psychotherapies: new narratives. 2022, v. 29, suppl 1 [Accessed 10 January 2023], pp. 7-9.
