In the latter half of the nineteenth century, the scientific community was eager to put the science of the mind on a sound experimental footing. Previously, psychology had been the province of highly subjective philosophers, and the treatment of the mentally ill had usually been in the hands of the legendarily incompetent early medical professionals (popular cures: transfusions of sheep's blood, trepanning, bleeding, half-drowning, stoning to death, etc.) Many students of the mind thought it was time to end these haphazard, trial-and-error attempts. It is therefore rather unsurprising that the major advances in psychology and psychotherapy in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came from neurologists - those who had actually bothered to study the functions of the structures of the brain were among the few who had any idea how to go about studying the mind in any kind of orderly manner.
Initial attempts at the methodical study of the mentally ill were so coldly analytical as to be somewhat disturbing. In order to put things on a "scientific" footing, patients were at first treated as experimental subjects rather than, say, human beings. (Sample experimental transcription - Patient: "Oh! Mother! Help me, I'm frightened!" Doctor: "The subject has made another vocalization.") Then one day, a clinical neurologist named Sigmund Freud had an idea that was, for the time, an unprecedented leap of brilliance - he had the idea that if you actually talked to mentally ill people, it might provide some insight into what was going on in their heads. And thus was psychotherapy born.
Freud's theories and successes were at first a history of maverick genius. He penetrating insight and willingness to experiment with unfashionable methodology (such as conversation, hypnosis, and cocaine) produced remarkable results, along with occasional astounding gaffes. After effecting several cures, and developing theories which showed real understanding of the human mind (or at least the minds of late-nineteenth century upper-class Viennese women), he attracted the finest minds of Europe as his disciples; to read a list of Freud's students is to read a list of practically everyone important in European psychology for decades to come. But his theories suffered from their subjective basis; the scientific community of the time demanded experimental proofs, and Freud's theories were noticeably lacking in them. For quite a while, this kept his ideas from gaining widespread popularity to go with their widespread notoriety.
It was widely expected that if such proof was to come, it would come out of Austria, just as Freud's theories had. Vienna prior to World War One was the center of scientific thought, it had a populace that tended to view insanity as a solvable medical problem, and it had a relaxed, cosmopolitan attitude which made it uniquely suited to the study of topics other nations were too straightlaced to examine with objectivity (Freud's work benefited and suffered from being a child of this era; it allowed him to begin and progress with the work of studying the complete human psyche, but it straightjacketed him into seeing things through the eyes of Viennese culture, and brought about his eventual downfall as a theorist when he began to encounter things even Vienna was unable to accept - more on that later.) So, with all eyes on the Viennese neurologists, it was much to everyone's surprise when the history-making experiments which would rock the world of psychology for generations to come came from (of course) Russia.
While Freud and his gang of rowdy young psychoanalysts were having wild adventures learning all about transference with the pretty young lunatics of Vienna, Russian neurologists (admittedly mostly trained in Vienna) such as Sechenov, Bechterev, and von Monokow were quietly studying mental processes and brain structures in a formal, experimental manner. At the beginning of the twentieth century, a Russian neurologist from this tradition named Ivan Pavlov performed an experiment; after ringing a bell for a group of dogs when it was their dinner time, he proved that eventually, they salivated merely at the sound of the bell, even if there was no food to be had.
While this sounds fairly minor on the face of it, it was the first time the workings of a mental process had been formally demonstrated; it was proof that reflexes could be acquired and the mind could make new associations. The news spread with astounding rapidity across the psychological world, with very different results in Europe and America.
In Europe, the discovery seemed to at last add scientific credence to Freud's theories; much of his work was based on the idea that there was an "unconscious" part of the mind that formed new and strange associations under certain circumstances, leading to irrational behavior in the "conscious" mind. Pavlov's work seemed to validate these ideas, and Freud's work began to gain general acceptance in educated European society. When World War One made "shell shock" an international problem, psychotherapeutic ideas spread rapidly, and the "talking cure" began to experience, in Europe, a brief golden age.
In America, where Freud's theories were almost entirely unknown, the results of Pavlov's experiments were very different. American scientists were by this time so sick of the nonscientific nonsense which pervaded mental studies that they were on the verge of declaring that the mind wasn't a fit topic for scientific study at all. When news of Pavlov's dogs reached their shores, they did just that. Led by Watson, American scientists focused on the aspect of Pavlov's experiments which showed that behavior could be conditioned. They worked with the theory that perhaps all behavior was conditioned, and were therefore called behaviorists. Behaviorism would dominate American psychology for decades.
Behaviorism rapidly became more and more extreme. Soon it was declared that all behavior was conditioned, and that internal processes were completely irrelevant to external actions. Soon after that, American scientists declared that there were no internal processes at all, and the "mind" did not exist. European-trained psychoanalysts (such as Dr. Huston almost certainly was, based on his notes) were universally viewed with disdain by the American psychological establishment - it is less than surprising that Huston's work was considered unscientific nonsense in America.
Obviously, total belief in a theory as extreme and incomplete as behaviorism generally requires an almost willful disregard of evidence contrary to your beliefs, and a fairly obnoxious idea of the superiority of your ideas to all others, which may be why every dogmatic behaviorist I have ever met (and there are still a few of them around) has been a complete jerk. Many people apparently shared this view, because cracks in the monolith of belief in behaviorism began to show as early as 1925, when Kohler began to publish his work on learning strategies and problem solving. The rebellion against behavioral science in America would eventually lead to the development of cognitive psychology, the science of what we experience and how we process it.
However, behaviorism wouldn't truly face a threat in America until World War Two, when psychologists were told that unless they could come up with something more useful for war purposes they would be sent to the front, and even after that it remained the dominant theory is the US until about 1960.
Behaviorism did make some useful contributions to the field of cures for the mentally ill (it isn't a bad theory, just an incomplete one.) In particular, behavior-based cures such as aversion therapy were shown to be effective in the treatment of phobic disorders, some forms of obsessive-compulsive disorder, drug addiction, etc. But treatment in America was often left to the medical profession - as it often was in Europe, as well, especially among the poorer classes of society (psychotherapy was merely one of many competing theories; it was simply one of the popular ones.)
In America, one medical-based practice was removal of body parts. Picking up the notion that insanity was a solvable medical problem, some American doctors decided that it was a function of infected body parts, which, if removed, would effect a cure. In general, they started on the teeth, and if that didn't work, they moved on to the internal organs. Europe, meanwhile, was in the throes of an electroshock therapy craze. Electroshock had been shown to work on certain forms of depression, and was therefore immediately applied to every other mental illness. Memory loss and loss of mental function were almost inevitable results of this widespread prescription. And, of course, the situation outside of Europe and America, where treatment of insanity was still often in a medieval stage, was even worse.
All in all, our heroes should definitely enjoy the benefits of 1920's psychotherapy while it still exists. In a decade or so, Freud will repudiate his own theories and develop new ones which will cause him to be hated by feminists and sensible psychotherapists for generations to come; at a certain point, he realized that if he believed what his patients were saying, upper-class Viennese gentlemen were raping their daughters, locking them in closets, and beating them nearly to death in astounding numbers. Culturally unable to accept this, he decided that his patients were delusional and set out to convince them of this. In reality, of course, what was going on was that upper-class Viennese gentlemen were raping their daughters, locking them in closets, and beating them nearly to death in astounding numbers. In Europe, psychotherapy will collapse; in America and the rest of the world, it never gained a foothold. Treatment of the mentally ill will fall completely into the hands of the medical theorists, who in the mid-nineteen thirties will come up with a new universally applicable treatment which they will use on the mentally ill whether they need it or not: lobotomy.
Pleasant dreams.
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