ABSTRACT
In the preceding chapters I have tried to show how and why each school of psychotherapy has developed its particular sub-technique. They are all descended from hypnosis, which was first regarded, in the hands of Mesmer, as a curative technique in itself, but came to be recognized by the Nancy school as merely a facilitant for suggestion, a sub-technique which has survived, with and without hypnosis, to the present day. In the same way, hypnotic anamnesis, first practised by Breuer, was soon found to be merely one way of facilitating anamnesis, and in Freud’s hands hypnosis was replaced as a facilitant, first by concentration and then by free association. The new intermediate techniques of interpretation and dream-interpretation, again with free association as a facilitant, were introduced by Freud a little later. Adler supplemented them with the intermediate technique of re-education, and relegated anamnesis to the status of a diagnostic questionnaire. Jung, while paying more attention to anamnesis, and making full use of interpretation and dream-interpretation, employed a more subtle form of re-education, supplemented free association with picture-painting as a facilitant for interpretation, and allowed the therapist to react less impersonally to the patient. Rogers began with a technique of diagnosis by means of psychological tests, coupled with advice to patients (or parents) about environmental questions; but gradually replaced this with a technique of interpretation that became less and less directive. Finally, some neo-Freudians in the U.S.A. use drugs or have revived hypnosis as facilitants for anamnesis. Meanwhile, as an alternative to treating patients in individual private sessions, experiments were made with grouping them together, at first as subjects for suggestion, then as classes for instruction and re-education, next as members of a body for the carrying out of communal activities, and finally as subjects for the psychotherapeutic sub-techniques which had been evolved in individual sessions.
