The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918Various
History
The Unpopular Review, Number 19: July-December 1918
Various
American periodicals
It is the time element that perhaps most impresses and depresses the
student of the new prophylaxis. In a recent paper by a competent
psychiatrist the writer refers as follows to the impracticability of
studying a group of cases in a public hospital on the plan of getting
the patients to understand and explain their own difficulties:
At the rate at which the best of the psychoanalysts work, it
would not be possible properly to study in the course of the
year more than a dozen cases. Furthermore, the results of such
work are of importance purely for the individual, and no
generalization can be drawn therefrom.... Also, no
generalization being possible, it is a matter of piece work;
to study one hundred cases according to this method would
require the efforts of fifteen to twenty psychologists on full
time for many months.
In the opinion of the faithful, Freud, the inventor of psychoanalysis,
is to psychiatry what Darwin was to biology, but as Darwin's theory of
evolution required more aeons than the geologists were able to oblige
him with, so Freud's method requires more time than the calendar
affords. Darwin's theory of the variation of species had to be modified
by the theory of mutations or sports. Freud's methods, to be workable,
must be adapted in some way to the indisputable fact that there are only
twenty-four hours in the day, and only three hundred and sixty-five days
in the year.
A careful mathematical calculation of the number of hours required to
cure a psychosis by this new prophylaxis reveals an alarming
disproportion between the minute number of physicians available, and the
incalculable number of patients requiring their ministrations. One of
the most ardent devotees of the new method is a practitioner who,
according to the testimony of a confrère, enters upon his daily
endurance test at 9 A. M. and without any luncheon psychoanalyzes
continuously until 7 P. M. As the ordinary patient is supposed to
require three hours a week of this treatment, for about five months, the
doctor can, by working ten hours a day, treat twenty patients in one
week, or allowing him two months vacation in summer (and he will need
it) handle forty patients in one year. This, alas, is but a drop of
medicine in the bucket of disease, and unless, by some homeopathic
adaptation of the five-hundredth-dilution principle, we can make our
medicine go farther it is only a limited number of the rich and leisure
class who can ever be cured by these new methods. This is the
prostrating situation that confronts the humanitarian--a little group of
healers bravely but hopelessly taking up arms against a sea of mental
troubles.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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