Jewish Invention Myths: Psychotherapy

Returning to jewish inventions myths that are occasionally bandied about we have the claim that jews – and specifically Sigmund Freud – created psychotherapy which they often confuse with psychoanalysis which Freud did invent albeit stealing large amounts of the basic idea from his jewish mentor Josef Breuer. (1)

Now let’s be clear: jews did not invent psychotherapy at all but rather it was created as a concept and a practice by non-jewish English, French and German doctors and proto-psychiatrists in the mid-late nineteenth century years before Freud began to use the term in his own writings. (2) One of those intimately involved in the creation of the term and concept of psychotherapy was one of the greatest psychologists of the Victorian age; (3) the Englishman Daniel Hack Tuke who was using the term ‘psychotherapy’ in at least in the 1870s a decade or so before Freud. (4)

It is simply nonsense to claim that jews created the term and concept of psychopathy was it was actually non-jews like Daniel Hack Tuke!

References

(1) On this see: Louis Breger, 2009, ‘A Dream of Undying Fame: How Freud Betrayed His Mentor and Invented Psychoanalysis’, 1^st Edition, Basic Books: New York

(2) Cf. Sonu Shamdasani, 2005, ‘‘Psychotherapy’: The Invention of a Word’, History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp. 1-22

(3) https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/docs/default-source/about-us/library-archives/archives/madness-to-mental-illness-online-archive/people/daniel-hack-tuke-1817-1895.pdf?sfvrsn=6ebaf836_6

(4) Cf. Sarah Marks, 2017, ‘Psychotherapy in Historical Perspective’, History of the Human Sciences, Vol. 30, No. 2, pp. 3-16