The treatment of mild psychoneuroses in America began shifting in the 1950s from Freudian psychoanalysis to various forms of psychotherapy that do not delve into patient’s subconscious. Some of the new approaches were termed cognitive, behavioural or cognitive behavioural therapy and in America were practised notably by Joseph Wolpe, Albert Ellis and Aaron T Beck. Modern psychiatric literature makes little mention of two prior innovators in this area – the French neurologist Jules Dejerine and his Boston disciple Joseph H Pratt. In the early 1900s, Dejerine treated patients at La Salpêtrière in Paris using techniques adopted subsequently by Pratt during the 1930s and employed by the trio some decades later. This paper revisits the early history of psychotherapy in America and includes a brief summary of Pratt’s medical career.
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An anonymous reviewer of an earlier draft of this paper reported that Beck had spoken about Dejerine in a second-year course in psychodynamics at the Pennsylvania Medical School, 18 January 1956.
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The priority issue in psychotherapy discussed here has numerous parallels in science. Not infrequently, novel ideas occur independently to several persons. Discoveries are sometimes made, forgotten or ignored, but sometimes ‘re-discovered’. For example, Copernicus (16th century) is popularly credited with proposing the heliocentric theory of the universe, although Aristarchus of Samos (3rd century BC) first taught that the earth revolves around the sun. Few Renaissance Europeans knew of Aristarchus, but Copernicus did. In a manuscript of De Revolutionibus, Copernicus reported the Greek’s heliocentric view in three lines, but these were later crossed out before the text was published in 1543. See Gingerich O. The great Copernicus chase and other adventures in astronomical history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p.66, Fig. 9.2.
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