Unseen Erickson P.6
FROM THE ARCHIVES OF THE ERICKSON FOUNDATION
Archives Location: U198
ERICKSON AT ELOISE – PART 2 -RESEARCH AND WRITINGS
by Joyce Bavlinka, m.ed., lisac
Sarah Clinebell, who has been working on the Erickson archives since June 2022, has supplied us with archival box U98 containing writings from the time Erickson was at Eloise.
According to “An Epic Life 2” by Jeffrey Zeig, Ph. D., Erickson served as director of psychiatric research and training at Eloise from 1934 - 1948. From 1938 – 1942, he also served as instructor, assistant and associate professor in the psychiatry department of Wayne University College of Medicine in Detroit, Michigan. From 1942 – 1948, he was a full professor at the Graduate School.
Wayne State University, April 1965
Psychiatric Staff at Wayne Co General Hospital and Infirmary, 1946. Erickson is front row, third from the right.
While at Eloise, Erickson wrote clinical papers explaining some of his theory and experience with hypnosis. He also conducted research. This article focuses on his papers dealing with research and discusses one of the papers he presented during his time at Eloise.
“A TEACHING PROGRAM FOR COMMISSIONED RESERVE MEDICAL OFFICERS”
Reprinted from “Diseases of the Nervous System, Vol. V, No. 4, April 1944
Erickson in 1942
Erickson discusses the importance of including psychiatry in the training of reserve medical officers. Erickson maintains that the experience of World War I, and the need for doctors in the current world war demonstrated the need for doctors who are currently in training as reserve medical officers to prepare for the psychiatric as well as the physical needs of the troops.
Erickson states that the medical school curriculum is rather thin on psychiatry. “Teaching is often limited to a restricted number of didactic lectures and an insufficient amount of clinical work, usually with frankly psychotic patients who represent only a limited section of the field of psychiatry.” Nor does the curriculum “permit the student to acquire an adequate knowledge of what is psychologically normal or abnormal.”
To address those needs, Erickson works with the medical school at Wayne University, where he is a professor, to observe screening sessions at the induction center one or two days per week.
“There, under the tutelage of qualified psychiatrists interested in teaching, the students sit in on regular psychiatric examinations of selectees and recruits. In this situation they are given the opportunity to observe intensively and repetitiously, actual clinical conditions, literally every variety of psychiatric problem, and to make direct and immediate contrasts between the normal and the abnormal, an item of paramount importance in teaching psychiatry. “
Erickson states the benefit of the program is that the student begins to see the “never-ending reality of neurotic complaints reflected against personality maladjustments and social, intellectual and economic inadequacy and incompetency.” Another benefit of the program came from a student who had believed that the army would make a man out of an inductee that had neuroses. He came to believe that “just putting a man into the army will not make a man out of him but will serve only to make him a hospitalized psychiatric patient.”
“OPORTUNTUNITIES FOR PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN MENTAL HOSPITALS”
Based on the chairman’s address before the American Psychological Association
round table discussion on Research in Mental Hospitals at Ann Arbor, September 4, 1935
Copyright 1936, The Medical Journal on Research & Record Publishing Company, Inc.
Erickson discusses trends in psychiatry, progress in psychiatric research, psychological techniques, the definition of psychological concepts, and the correlation of psychological and psychiatric concepts.”
Erickson noted:
Erickson streetside, no cane, in 1936.
“…the investigation of psychiatric problems ceased to be simply a matter of clinical or laboratory study of somatic or neural pathology, or study of isolated dysfunctions of various physiological processes. Instead, psychiatric problems were found also to have an origin in the innumerable interrelationships existing between the psyche and the soma as such, between the individual and the external world and especially between the many varying and conflicting aspects of the personality.”
Other influential trends included the introduction of Freud’s concepts into the “mechanisms and manifestations of psychological process,” long term studies of personality, and studying the past, the present, and the future, and defining psychological and psychiatric concepts.
He advocates for conducting more research in mental hospitals through the “establishment of affiliations between mental hospitals and psychology departments which would be conducive to active instruction and original investigational work.”
“CORNERING INADEQUACIES IN THE LEGAL RECOGNITION AND HANDLING OF THE MENTALLY ILL”
Reprinted from Diseases of the Nervous System, Vol. VII, No. 4, April 1946
Erickson sees the “need for the lay and professional public to acknowledge that the welfare and the future of mentally ill patients need more legal recognition and protection than is possible under existing legal procedures.”
He sees a need for psychiatry to be given:
“… an equal rating as a medical specialty along with internal medicine, cardiology, dermatology, and other branches of medicine, and should not remain an undefined field in which legal technicalities, lay judgement, and inexperienced medical opinion is allowed to determine the welfare and the future of mentally ill patients.”
Erickson found that there were commitments that were initiated by physicians without training or experience in psychiatry and diagnosis. Patients committed by general practitioners with inaccurate diagnoses could be discharged without needed treatment. He states, “how frequently psychiatry as a medical specialty requiring definite training, skill and experience has been overlooked.”
Erickson maintains:
“untrained, inexperienced and unqualified medical men are called upon, under existing legal procedures, to assume responsibilities not rightly theirs. …. in many instances the fate of the individual and even of his family has been tragically resolved on the basis of untrained medical advice when there was available better qualified advice and understanding. In the practice of medicine it is the obligation of every practitioner, if he cannot do good, at least to avoid doing harm.
Erickson cites 11 cases examples of case studies where untrained medical staff failed to make appropriate diagnoses of patients.
Comments? Please run them by me.
Email: joyce@erickson-foundation.org
