ABSTRACT

A key assumption of the approach to psychotherapy that is taken in this chapter is that the most powerful environmental force for change is suggestion. As a resident, the author was taught that suggestion imposed truth upon a subject and that suggestion was the enemy of insight, the discovery of the deeply buried unconscious impulses that truly drove all behavior. Thus, hypnosis was vilified as the devil that kept the unconscious demons from liberation by suggestion-free psychoanalytic psychotherapy. In retrospect, these psychoanalytically inspired injunctions were themselves suggestions of an intellectually numbing kind. In 1960, the evidence was already strong that genetics played a large part in the determination of schizophrenia, but the psychodynamic model of Sigmund Freud was being extended far beyond the bounds of scientifically sound application. Psychoanalysis may have been justified in the case of Viennese and Parisian hysterics, but Freud's theory was probably flawed even in those ostensibly neurotic cases.