Psychodynamic Psychiatry

“Psychodynamic psychiatry from the 1940s to the 1960s was virtually synonymous with the psychotherapies and, to a lesser extent, milieu and other psychosocial therapies. . . . Yet within the psychodynamic synthesis lay elements that would hasten its eventual decline. Whereas most medical specialties had committed themselves to biological and physiological research that would illuminate organ function and pathology, to the eventual development of therapies that might be evaluated by randomized clinical trials, and to an emerging hospital-based technology, psychiatrists all but abandoned research into brain pathology. Consequently, the gap between psychiatry and medicine widened precipitously. . . That psychotherapy could not be defended in strictly medical terms meant that psychiatry was vulnerable to challenges from other professional groups, particularly clinical psychology. By the close of the decade of the 1960s, psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychiatry had begun to lose the paramount position it had enjoyed since World War II” (Grob, 213).