Inferiority and bereavement: Implicit psychological commitments in the cultural history of Scottish psychotherapy

Abstract

The author has argued that psychoanalytic psychotherapy was seen in Scotland as a way to purify Christianity of supernaturalism and moralism, and to propel the faith in a scientifically rational and socially progressive direction. In making this historiographic claim, certain disciplinary protocols are followed, such as the symmetry postulate and a deprecation of reductive psychohistorical explanation. Nonetheless, the contemporary historian of psychotherapy is a psychologized subject whose historical practice rests upon a complex, prereflective background of psychological presuppositions.