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Another thorn in psychologists’ side was psychoanalysts’ insistence that only those who had themselves undergone analysis were fit to evaluate psychoanalytic theory. Thus, criticisms levied against psychoanalysis were simply dis- regarded if the critics themselves had not un- dergone analysis. To psychologists, this seemed incredibly cultish. Robert Sessions Woodworth (1869–1962) of Columbia University said that psychoanalysis was an ‘‘uncanny religion’’ and published an extensive critique of what he called
‘‘Freudism’’ in 1917 in theJournal of Abnormal Psychology(Woodworth, 1917, p. 175).
Nevertheless, in an attempt to understand this new phenomenon, several well-known experimental psychologists embarked on anal- ysis themselves. One of these was Edwin G.
Boring (1886–1968). He entered analysis in 1934 with Hanns Sachs and received treatment for 10 months, until he eventually ran out of money (his sessions cost $10 an hour). He concluded that his own analysis had not been a success but remained open to the possibility that his experience was anomalous.
By the early 1940s, psychoanalysis had become so popular that it threatened to eclipse scien- tific psychology entirely in the popular mind.
In response, psychologists came up with an- other strategy not unlike the strategy they had used in dealing with the claims of spiritualism.
They decided to use their own methods—the methods of laboratory science—to examine the claims of psychoanalysis. They decided to sub- ject psychoanalysis to the cold, objective gaze of psychological science. In the 1950s, research on psychoanalysis by psychological scientists be- came somewhat of a cottage industry. Two learning theorists, John Dollard (1900–1980) and Neal Miller (1909-2002), published a book called Personality and Psychotherapyin 1950 in which they translated several psychoanalytic principles into learning theory terms and tested them. Other studies included experimental investigations of defense mechanisms. In this way, psychoana- lytic theory was operationalized, tested in the
laboratory, and brought into the psychologists’
own expert sphere of science.
Hornstein makes the point that it mattered less whether the experiments proved that psy- choanalytic theory was right or wrong than that psychoanalytic phenomena were being made subservient to empirical test—thus vindicating empiricism and psychological science and sub- jugating psychoanalysis to definitions of science articulated by psychologists. Even while some psychologists were seeking to discredit psycho- analysis, others sought to find ways to use their scientific work to explore psychoanalytic con- cepts in the emerging field of psychosomatic medicine.
Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatic Medicine
As a new approach to understanding illness, psy- chosomatic medicine emerged first in German- speaking countries during the 1920s. Its core principles were grounded in psychoanalytic the- orizing, but its context of development was the movement in German-speaking countries to re- capture the soul of German life. This movement emerged as resistance to the mechanistic view of life that had dominated German science since the time of Helmholtz in the second half of the 19th century (see Chapters 1 and 8). You may recall that Helmholtz and his colleagues in vari- ous sciences had argued that the workings of the universe, including human life, were reducible to their physical and chemical constituents. This mechanical view of life helped make Germany a world power in industry and military might, but many critics charged that it had destroyed the German soul (Seele) and diminished Germany’s rich cultural and philosophical heritage. This movement of resistance had many facets, but all of them incorporated some aspect of wholeness or holism. As we discuss in Chapter 8, Gestalt theory in psychology was one facet. Psychoso- matic medicine as it was formulated in Germany
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and Austria in the 1920 was also an expression of holism.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, psychoso- matic conceptualizations of illness and treatment spread to the United States, where a somewhat modest reorientation also occurred in the life and medical sciences toward organicist–holist concepts and away from reductionist approaches.
In North America, psychosomatic medicine became an approach marked by its interdisci- plinarity.Contributions to research and practice were made by scientists and clinicians from various scientific and clinical fields, includ- ing Psychology, as they sought to understand the relationships among emotions, mental pro- cesses, and illness. These interrelationships were thought to be important factors in such diverse illnesses as coronary heart disease, colitis, peptic ulcers, and asthma. Two of the primary leaders in the growth of the new field were Helen Flanders Dunbar and Franz Alexander.
Dunbar (1902–1959) was a central figure in the promotion and establishment of psychoso- matic medicine in America. She held both an MD and a PhD in philosophy, with an extensive background in religion and psychology. Dunbar traveled to Europe in 1929, where she worked with some pioneers in psychosomatic medicine.
According to Dunbar, emotions played a vital role in maintaining or disrupting the person’s equilibrium; thus, disease was a manifestation of disequilibrium within the person and between the person and his or her environment. Her massive survey on the relation of emotion to dis- ease,Emotions and Bodily Changes(1935), served as an invaluable resource for the establishment of psychosomatic medicine by providing a bib- liographical guide to potential areas of fruitful research and by explicating what had already been discovered about the relationship of mind and body in health and disease.
Alexander (1891–1964) was the other key medical theorist and researcher. A Hungarian- born psychoanalyst, Alexander headed the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis. What
psychoanalysis offered, according to Alexander, was precision concerning the role of psycholog- ical factors in disease. He offered as an example his work on psychological contributions to peptic ulcer; the route to peptic ulcer lay in the identi- fication of being fed with being loved, an iden- tification that occurs in infancy. The emotional association that occurs at this time is the baseline for the connection in adulthood between unmet dependency needs and peptic ulcer. Alexander drew upon the work of physiologist WalterCan- non (1871–1945) on the effects of emotions on the body to argue that the physiological linkage occurred through the action of the sympathetic nervous system. Personality, Alexander argued, was the key to understanding health and disease.
Psychologists’ contributions came from a growing number of younger researchers who had begun to develop a new approach to un- derstanding mental disorders, usually labeled experimental psychopathology, that used ani- mal research in the laboratory to model disease.
While this could not be characterized as main- stream psychological science in the 1920s and 1930s, these young psychologists were located in mainstream universities and medical settings, so they had access to communication networks and the philanthropic foundations that supported the development of psychosomatic medicine.
A leader among these younger psycholo- gists was Saul Rosenzweig (1907–2004), who began doing research in the early 1930s on Freud’s concepts of frustration and aggression while a member of psychologist Henry Mur- ray’s (1893–1988) research group at the Har- vard PsychologicalClinic. Rosenzweig used the phrase ‘‘experimental psychopathology’’ to de- scribe the approach. During this period, young psychologists at Yale University, Brown Uni- versity, Worcester State Hospital, and other institutions delved deeply into psychoanalytic concepts as a source of hypotheses to test in the laboratory. There were studies on frustration and aggression, complementary to Rosenzweig’s research; studies on hoarding; and extensive
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research on the experimental induction of neu- roses.
As the new field began to develop, philan- thropies took an interest in the work for its perceived potential to help shed light on social order. As we discuss in more detail inChapter 7, because foundation officers were positioned in such a way that they had contact with a range of trends in medicine and related sciences, they were able to bring together investigators and practi- tioners who might not otherwise have connected with one another. The Josiah Macy Founda- tion did just this in the mid-1930s when it sponsored conferences on ‘‘Problems of Neu- rotic Behavior’’ in New York City. Physicians who were oriented to psychoanalytic and psy- chosomatic approaches attended, along with psychologists, internists, physiologists, and sev- eral other disciplines to formulate a systematic approach to the problems exemplified by psy- chosomatic medicine. The immediate result of the conferences and the collaboration was the establishment of a new journal, called Psycho- somatic Medicine, which began publishing in 1939, with many contributions from psycholo- gists. The field of psychosomatic medicine grew rapidly during the 1940s and was an important source of theory and research for many years. It served as the foundation for the later develop- ment of the specialty of health psychology.