The Challenge to Mental Health and the Law, Part 1 Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy
The Facts and the Future
The basic thesis of the psychoanalytic psychiatrist, and I am still one, is that in order to understand where you are going, you have to understand where you have been. Therefore, let me begin by giving you a very brief developmental history of law and psychiatry. Of course, like all psychoanalytic history, this one is constructed from the peculiar point of view of the analyst and you should feel free to impute to me counter transference, repression, denial, reaction formation, projection and egocentricity.
My history begins with the decade of the 1950s, when psychiatry and, particularly, psychoanalysis had reached the peak of their power and influence in the United States. It was acceptable even for judges to announce that they had been psychoanalyzed. Two such federal judges stood out: Judge Jerome Frank and Judge David Bazelon. Frank is less well known to psychiatrists...