Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: Freud

  • Book review: The Guru, the Bagman and the Sceptic: A story of science, sex and psychoanalysis

    Robert KaplanSydney, Australia As a cultural icon of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis has loomed large in the public imagination. What makes it unique is the focus on the central figure, who set up a movement to promote it while constantly proclaiming it a science. Sigmund Freud is inextricable from psychoanalysis, which bears his imprimatur to…

  • Wilson on the couch: How Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt, an American diplomat, came to analyze the American president

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In December 1966, Houghton Mifflin Company published Thomas Woodrow Wilson: Twenty-Eighth President of the United States, A Psychological Study by Sigmund Freud and William C. Bullitt. The curious fact that Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis, and a former American diplomat, William C. Bullitt, who served in both the…

  • “My dear neoplasm:” Sigmund Freud’s oral cancer

    James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United states When the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, died in London early on the morning of September 23, 1939, he succumbed to what he wryly referred to as “my dear old cancer with which I have been sharing my existence for sixteen years.” Freud had been discovered to have carcinoma…

  • Addiction a century ago

    “Addiction, mainly in the upper classes, was viewed with sympathy. It was not a criminal offense to buy or sell morphine. Freud for a time prescribed cocaine to some of his excitable patients, and we know that Sherlock Holmes, when he was bored, injected himself with a 7% solution. Soon after their accession, the tzar…

  • Theodor Meynert

    JMS PearceHull, England, United Kingdom Theodor Meynert (1833-1892) (Fig 1) was an eminent if eccentric neuropathologist and psychiatrist. His original work had an impact not just on medicine but on the philosophy of the mind and the “history of materialism.”1 Modern brain research attempts to unravel the intricacies of human brain-mind relationships, much of which…

  • Psychiatric care at the historical Athens Mental Health Facility

    Cherron PayneFarmington, Connecticut, United States When I was an undergraduate student at Ohio University in Athens, my friends and I would often hike to an intriguing place called the Ridges, overlooking the picturesque Hocking River and the Appalachian gem of Ohio University in Southeastern Ohio. The Ridges was not solely a picturesque hillside, but a…

  • Eugen Bleuler and schizophrenia

    JMS PearceEast Yorks, England, United Kingdom Paul Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) (Fig 1) was one of the most influential psychiatrists of his time, best known today for his introduction of the term schizophrenia to describe the disorder previously known as dementia praecox. In the second half of the nineteenth century, psychological medicine was in its infancy.…

  • Carl Gustav Jung

    Anne JacobsonOak Park, Illinois, United States In the autumn of 1913, Carl Gustav Jung was traveling alone by train through the rust and amber forest of the Swiss countryside. The thirty-eight-year-old psychiatrist had been lately troubled by strange dreams and a rising sense of tension, but the snow-capped peaks of his beloved Alps soothed him…

  • Dr. Sabina Spielrein: Consequences of feminism and love

    Irving RosenToronto, Ontario, Canada While all our lives are eventful, some people tend to experience situations that set them apart. Born in 1885 in Rostov, Czarist Russia, Sabina was the eldest child of prosperous intellectualized parents of Jewish origin. Academically and artistically gifted, by age eighteen she developed alarming behavior. She showed tics, grimaces, body…

  • The bedside manners of Ingmar Bergman’s celluloid physicians

    Eelco WijdicksRochester, Minnesota, United States The great humanitarian filmmaker and auteur Ingmar Bergman used physicians in his films much more frequently than his peers. Bergman’s full filmography, including two films (Thirst and Brink of Life) directed by but not written by Bergman, features sixteen physicians in thirteen films. Excluding the family doctor in Fanny and…