ABSTRACT
Psychiatry is based within the experimental field, is close to physical medicine, and to physical as well as some psychological methods of treatment. Henri Ellenberger states that the emergence of dynamic psychiatry can be traced to the year 1775, to a clash between the physician Mesmer and the exorcist Gassner. Psychiatry, as opposed to psychotherapy, became fully part of establishment medicine in the nineteenth century. Gradually Bernheim developed a treatment called psychotherapeutics, which used suggestion as a method of tapping the unconscious with people in a waking state. In 1882, the Society for Psychical Research was set up in England: one of the phenomena investigated was automatic writing, as a method of exploring the unconscious. Around the turn of the century, the first international conferences of psychology were being held, in French, German, English, and sometimes Italian. Pierre Janet, was already working in France, and in 1900 an Institut Psychologique International' was founded in Paris.
