HISTORY OF DIRECT PSYCHOANALYSIS IN MENTAL HEALTH

John N. Rosen says,”Direct Psychoanalysis began in 1939 with my personal analysis. From my world of internal medicine and pathology my attention was increasingly directed toward psychosomatic medicine, and finally to full-time work in a state hospital and the world of deep psychosis. There I was taught shock treatment and drugs, which were ineffectual and cruel. I heard about a patient with acute catatonic excitement who died and was about to be autopsied. I went to the morgue where the autopsy was performed and was astonished to discover that there was no anatomic cause of death. Death came about from the agonies in the patient’s mind. It was said there were other such patients in the hospital that it was just a question of time before they died, and that nothing could be done about it.I went to the wards where these patients were kept and I was surprised to find that they were not out of contact in the sense that I could understand what they said. I treated these patients and they did not die, but recovered. From this initial discovery, that what a patient said made a certain kind of sense, I began to listen over the decades to hundreds of patients and almost invariably I was able to understand the peculiar language of the neurotic and the psychotic.To this body of knowledge, both theoretic and clinical, Paul Federn gave the name Direct Psychoanalysis in order to distinguish it from orthodox and indirect psychoanalysis. Freud said that since the psychosis is like a dream and since we awaken in the morning from a dream, it was his hope that one day a method would be discovered that would awaken the psychotic fromhis relentless nightmare. Many colleagues report that Direct Psychoanalysis offers the possibility of doing just that.”