EHE Book Reviews

Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Parapsychology Record Type: Review ID: 1277
The History of Psychotherapy: From Healing Magic to Encounter Ehrenwald, Jan (Ed.).
The editor, a psychiatrist long associated with para-psychology, calls this massive volume a "guided tour through the history of psychotherapy" (p. 6). The format consists of chronologically arranged excerpts from the basic texts on mental healing from magic to encounter, each one being introduced by Ehrenwald. Having immersed himself in this intensive, as well as vast, array of source materials, Ehrenwald concludes: "if there is a lesson to be learned, here and now, from the past, it is that man is the most important therapeutic agent for man, and that psychotherapy is the time-tested accretion and codification of a social expedient to meet universal human needs" (p. 5). This book is included here because many selections and even whole sections are relevant to parapsychology. Unorthodox healing and miraculous cures are considered in several chapters and one chapter devoted to parapsychology covers Freud, Servadio, Ehrenwald, Eisenbud, and Ullman. Of special interest are Ehrenwald's comments on the personality and role of the healer and on what he has called "doctrinal compliance," which may at least partially be psi-mediated.
Publisher Information:	New York: Jason Aronson, 1976. 589p. Bibliography: 577-583; Index: 585-589; 1 table

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The History of Psychotherapy: From Healing Magic to Encounter