I'm a Senior duing a reasearch project on psychotherapy, i cannot find information on the following; What was the pychotherapy given to the soldiers during the CIVIL WAR? How did it affect them and did many soldiers have this problem?

-- Sheona Sleiman (kathleenhanley@hotmail.com), September 19, 2001

Answers

Response to psychotherapy

"Psyhotherapy" as a term isn't coined until the 1880s, so your research would have to be into the work of what was then 'the alienist'. 'Alienists' were the early psychiatrists who worked with 'the alienated,' and there was even a journal called The Alienist. Any work done with soldiers then would have been done by the physician, but even Zilboorg's A History of Medical Psychology doesn't index 'war.' There was virtually nothing on 'war neurosis' until WWI. Some of the best work during WWI was done by the British psychologist W. H. R. Rivers, whose work on what we would now call post-traumatic dreams was far ahead of its time. Trained in medicine, Rivers was the first officially recognized teacher of experimental psychology at Cambridge (1897), specializing in vision (following Hering) and the special senses; he headed the expedition of the Cambridge Anthropological Society to the Torres Straits in 1898, and later authored studies on the Todas and on Melanesian Society. He was a founder of the British Journal of Psychology in 1904 (with James Ward & others).

Rivers's observations on traumatic dreams came from his work with soldiers at the Craiglockhart War Hospital in Scotland. The detailed studies are reported in Rivers (1920). Rivers was convinced that PTSD dreams could not be understood as wish fulfillments.

Rivers, W. H. R. (1920). Instinct and the unconscious. Cambridge: University Press; Rivers, W. H. R. (1923). Conflict and dream. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner.

To answer your question, I think you'd have to dig into Civil War records not yet studied by historians of psychology.

-- Hendrika Vande Kemp (hendrika@earthlink.net), September 19, 2001.

Response to psychotherapy

[posted for JW by cdg.]

I don't know the answer to this question, but you might investigate S. Weir Mitchell, the neurologist. His career took off during the civil war.

-- James Walkup (Jaywalks@AOL.COM), September 19, 2001.

Response to psychotherapy

[posted for RKT by cdg.] Some insight may be gained from the book, "The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dctionary" by Simon Winchester. New York:Harper Collins, 1998. The "madman" was an ex-Union Army surgeon who was treated for his "monomania" very soon after if not near the end of the Civil War. Otherwise, the book provides a fascinating account of the construction of the OED. The "madman" contributed approximately 12,000 of the quotations used to document the first or earliest known uses of each word in the English language.

-- Roger K. Thomas (rkthomas@ARCHES.UGA.EDU), September 19, 2001.

Response to psychotherapy

[psoted for PL by cdg.]

I don't think any formal counseling or therapy was done during the war. Afterward, the government set up a number of Federal "Soldier's and Sailors Homes" which became the nucleus that would become the Veterans Bureau in 1921 and later the Veterans Administration, after WWII. My purusal of the records (which are stored at the library of the Dayton VAMC, which was where the board of governors had their annual meetings and set policies for the homes) revealed considerable evidence of problem behavior. Then, as now, substance abuse was a major problem. But little is said of any specific medical or other sort of therapeutic intervention on what as viewed largely as a disciplinary problem.

-- Paul Larson (PLarson@CSOPP.EDU), September 19, 2001.

Response to psychotherapy

[Posted for EIT by cdg.]

Try looking at *William James on Exceptional Mental States* New York: Scribner's Sons, 1982, which I think was done by a historian of psychology who HAS consulted the Civil War records (Hyperbole? yes, because I love teasing Hendrike). Try also looking at the work of Silar Weir Mitchell (Gunshot Wounds and other Injuries to the Nerves, The Rest Cure, etc) and also the Civil War Records of the United States Sanitary Commission, especially cases of "imitative chorea." Try also the literature in neurology on medical electricity (The Journal of Electrology and Neurology, for instance), especially articles on the involuntary life, after effects of traumatic neurosis, sequelae of natural disasters, and the use of hypnosis, all written by George Miller Beard, a New York neurologist in the 1860s and 1870s. Had he lived, he would have been both the American Charcot and the American Freud, but he died in his early 40's in 1883. Your reader should also be aware that systematc techniques in what was later identified as sound psychotherapy were being practiced by the spiritualists and mental healers in the 1860s. The mesmerist who cured Mary Baker Eddy, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, alone was believed to have seen 10,000 patients during that period. See J. Stilson Judah, History of Metaphysical Movements in America; Braden's Spirits in Rebellion, etc..

-- Eugene I. Taylor (etaylor@IGC.ORG), September 19, 2001.

Response to psychotherapy

[posted for EB by cdg.]

An excellent book on the subject is Eric Dean, Shook over Hell:Post-Traumatic Stress, Vietnam, and the Civil War,[Harvard University Press, 1997]

-- Ed Brown (edwardmbrown1@HOME.COM), September 21, 2001.