The Decline and Fall of Dynamic Psychiatry

After psychiatry’s ascendancy during the two decades after World War II ended, the profession entered its most troubled period. From the emergence of the anti-psychiatry movement in the mid-1960s through the resurrection of a biomedical model in the DSM-III in 1980, the field endured a time of continual crisis. The general culture shed its earlier infatuation with analytic ideas and turned sharply against the discipline. The medical profession, biologically oriented psychiatrists, and third-party insurers, too, came to reject psychodynamic approaches. The National Institute of Mental Health as well discarded its initial psychosocial emphasis in favor of a strong biological focus. Another government agency, the Food and Drug Administration, forced drug companies to stop advertising their products as remedies for general distress and mandated that they show efficacy in treating specific diseases. The high pedestal that dynamic psychiatry rested on in the postwar period swiftly crumbled.