Abstract
In 1825, the great English essayist William Hazlitt published The Spirit of the Age [1]. His accounts of twenty five of the leading figures of his time and of some of their debates succeeded in capturing the defining features of his epoch. Among them, the great poets Wordsworth and Coleridge had been responsible for introducing the ideas of German literature and philosophy into the Anglophone world (see [2]). These insights were based upon the way the human imagination continually projects on to, continually colors, the natural world we observe around us. In terms of the history of ideas, these were amongst the antecedents of psychoanalysis. However, personal loss and disappointment with the turn taken by the French Revolution had led one of them, Wordsworth, famously to lose his early hope in revolutionary progress. For him, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive but to be young was very heaven” had given way to membership of the Establishment. Hazlitt, a contentious man, fiercely rebuked another of his subjects, Malthus, for his scientific and logical argument that a geometric growth leading to population “surplus” would outpace food supplies, which could only increase arithmetically. Famine, pestilence, or one of the other Apocalyptic horsemen would then cull that excess. In opposition to progressive or humane opinion, social conservatives used this Malthusian prediction to welcome war and to legitimize the withholding of food, warmth, and shelter from the poor and ill-fed.
* The author wishes to thank Royal College of Psychiatrists for their permission to publish this chapter, which is an updated and expanded version of material previously published in Psychoanalytic and psychodynamic therapies for depression: the evidence base. Advances in Psychiatric Treatment 2008; 14(6): 401–13.
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- 1.
Mercifully, there is no generally accepted convention about the terminology to be employed for treatment length or intensity. Abbass et al. [ 44 ] categorize all treatments of less than 40 weeks as short term (STPP), whereas others reserve this term for treatments of less than 20 sessions. Likewise, there are different usages concerning the actual length of treatments to which the designations “medium” and “long” term should apply and also what is meant by “intensive.”
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Taylor, D. (2012). Psychoanalytic and Psychodynamic Therapies for Depression: The Evidence Base. In: Levy, R., Ablon, J., Kächele, H. (eds) Psychodynamic Psychotherapy Research. Current Clinical Psychiatry. Humana Press, Totowa, NJ. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-60761-792-1_6
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