Psychotherapeutic Approach

“The psychotherapeutic approach became dominant in American psychiatry after World War II. Up until then American psychiatry, in broad orientation, had been more community oriented than European psychiatry. It was more prepared to see disorders such as neurasthenia, alcoholism, and substance abuse as being within the psychiatric remit. In terms of theoretical models it was poised between the disease model of Emil Kraepelin and the psychosocial model of Adolf Meyer. World War II led to an influx of clinicians into psychiatry, whose experience in the management of combat reactions led to a decisive switch in orientation from a disease model to Meyer-ian and analytic approaches. This coincided with an expansion in the number of psychiatric departments, professorships, and residency programs. These positions all went to analysts. The expansion happened at just the time that effective somatic treatments were about to appear, setting the state for a series of conflicts between an analytic establishment and a new breed of somaticists, conflicts that have spanned thirty years” (Healy, 222-223).