A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology

As indicated by its title A History of Great Ideas in Abnormal Psychology, this book is not just concerned with the chronology of events or with biographical details of great psychiatrists and psychopathologists. It has as its main interest, a study of the ideas underlying theories about mental illness and mental health in the Western world. These are studied according to their historical development from ancient times to the twentieth century.

The book discusses the history of ideas about the nature of mental illness, its causation, its treatment and also social attitudes towards mental illness. The conceptions of mental illness are discussed in the context of philosophical ideas about the human mind and the medical theories prevailing in different periods of history. Certain perennial controversies are presented such as those between the psychological and organic approaches to the treatment of mental illness, and those between the focus on disease entities (nosology) versus the focus on individual personalities. The beliefs of primitive societies are discussed, and the development of early scientific ideas about mental illness in Greek and Roman times. The study continues through the medieval age to the Renaissance. More emphasis is then placed on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, the enlightenment of the eighteenth, and the emergence of modern psychological and psychiatric ideas concerning psychopathology in the twentieth century.

Antiquity
The Middle Ages
The Renaissance
The Scientific Revolution and the Beginnings of Modern Philosophy
The Eighteenth Century: The Age of Enlightenment and Reason
The Nineteenth Century: Vitalist-Mechanist and Psychic-Somatic Controversies
Positivist Reaction: The Rise of Modern Organic Psychiatry
The Twentieth Century: Modern Psychiatry is Born
The Constitutional Psychiatry of Ernst Kretschmer
Sigmund Freud: The New Dynamic Psychiatry
The Psychobiology and Commonsense Psychiatry of Adolf Meyer
The Roots of Behaviour Therapy
The Impact of Philosophy on Psychiatry at the Turn of the Century