American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States

From Freud to Zoloft, the first comprehensive history of American psychotherapy

Although fifty percent of Americans will undergo some form of psychotherapy in their lifetimes, patients rarely know the origins of the field. Yet the story of psychotherapy in America brims with colorful characters, intriguing experimental treatments, and intense debates.

American Therapy begins, as psychotherapy itself does, with Sigmund Freud. He brought the nascent movement over from Europe in 1910, leaving terms like Oedipus complex and Freudian slip embedded in our everyday conversation. Engel paints a broad picture of mental health care in America, from the emergence of group therapy to bizarre experimental therapies such as rebirthing and primal scream therapy, ending in the modern world of psychopharmacology and cognitive-behavioral therapy.

For a counseled nation that freely uses terms such as emotional baggage and no longer stigmatizes mental health care,...