Changing Minds: The History of Psychotherapy as an Answer to Human Suffering (review)

Frank Tallis. Changing Minds: The History of Psychotherapy as an Answer to Human Suffering. London: Cassell, 1998. 172 pp. $49.95 (paperbound).

At his best, Frank Tallis, a clinical psychologist, writes engagingly for his audience of general readers. He subscribes to the idea that Copernicus, Darwin, and Freud deflated humanity's collective ego: "As the human race has undergone successive episodes of demotion, mental illness has been a stalwart companion on the downward journey. The trajectory of descent has taken mental illness from the ethereal realms of the supernatural to the pedestrian world of brain chemistry and disease" (p. 4).

The first two chapters of Changing Minds cover twenty-five centuries, from Buddha to Freud. The next six cover therapeutic systems associated with post-Freudians (Adler, Jung, Klein, Bowlby, Berne); behaviorism (Pavlov, Skinner, Wolpe); humanism (Frankl, Perls, Rogers, Kelly, Ellis); and cognitive therapy (Beck). In the final chapter Tallis concludes that psychotherapy, "a temporary, but meaningful attachment," is the opposite of the Buddhist solution to suffering, nonattachment: "The secular response to suffering is to use each other in the face of adversity. Intimacy is placed in the service of healing" (pp. 168-69). For his summary he draws heavily on Persuasion and Healing: A Comparative Study of Psychotherapy (3d ed., 1993) by psychiatrists Jerome D. Frank and Julia B. Frank, a book that will stand the test of time much better than this one.

The compression of so many important people and ideas in a small book is likely to overwhelm general readers as much as it annoys the specialists--while leaving out much that the latter group considers essential. For example, Tallis dismisses Jung as too metaphysical, touts Eric Berne as the only person in the psychoanalytic tradition after John Bowlby to achieve widespread influence, and regards Aaron Beck's impact on psychotherapy as the most important since Freud. While some might agree, others will miss any serious discussion of Rank, Ferenczi, Alexander, Anna Freud, Fromm, Sullivan, Horney, Karl Menninger, Clara Thompson, Erikson, Fairbairn, Winnicott, and Kohut, among others. Existentialists (Binswanger, Laing) are dismissed with scorn, while Lacan, whose revolutionary ideas are "so inaccessible as to beggar belief," is likely to have a "place in the pantheon of great thinkers" (p. 74).

Tallis seems to occupy two positions: one accepting psychoanalytic theory, the other dismissing its validity and saying it has survived mainly because it is so interesting that "the majority are prepared to forgive it for being mostly wrong" (p. 148). He credits Freud with establishing the mother as a nurturing figure and with having a lifelong interest in birth trauma in relation to anxiety--but these are hallmarks of the creative dissident Otto Rank. He does not understand major issues in the Freud-Breuer and Freud-Adler schisms, which, with many other more subtle aspects of Freud's life and work, are clarified in a fine new biography by psychoanalyst Louis Breger, Freud: Darkness in the Midst of Vision (2000).

Readers interested in the history of psychotherapy will find the cited books more readable, richer, and free of hyperbole and egregious errors. Also notable is a recent book that goes much deeper: Care of the Psyche: A History of Psychological Healing, by the late Stanley W. Jackson (1999) (reviewed in this Bulletin).

E. James Lieberman
George Washington University School of Medicine

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