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| Authors | James Hillman Michael Ventura |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Subject | Psychotherapy |
| Publisher | HarperCollins |
Publication date | 1992 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover and Paperback) |
| Pages | 242 |
| ISBN | 0-06-250409-6 |
| OCLC | 24952969 |
| 150/.1 20 | |
| LC Class | RC437.5 .H55 1992 |
We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – And the World's Getting Worse is a 1992 book by American psychologist James Hillman and American writer and commentator Michael Ventura. [1]
A psychologist studies normal and abnormal mental states, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior by observing, interpreting, and recording how individuals relate to one another and to their environments. To become a psychologist, a person often completes a graduate university degree in psychology, but in most jurisdictions, members of other behavioral professions can also evaluate, diagnose, treat, and study mental processes.
James Hillman was an American psychologist. He studied at, and then guided studies for, the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich. He founded a movement toward archetypal psychology and retired into private practice, writing and traveling to lecture, until his death at his home in Connecticut.
Michael Ventura is an American novelist, screenwriter, film director, essayist and cultural critic.
The book has a three-part structure. The first section is in the form of a free-floating dialog between Hillman and Ventura. The second section consists of lengthier essays written by the two authors to each other. The third section returns to the dialog format of the first.
Dialogue, in fiction, is a verbal exchange between two or more characters. If there is only one character talking aloud, it is a monologue.
The two authors agree that psychotherapy as it is currently conceived is inadequate to deal with modern anxieties and neuroses.
Psychotherapy is the use of psychological methods, particularly when based on regular personal interaction, to help a person change behavior and overcome problems in desired ways. Psychotherapy aims to improve an individual's well-being and mental health, to resolve or mitigate troublesome behaviors, beliefs, compulsions, thoughts, or emotions, and to improve relationships and social skills. Certain psychotherapies are considered evidence-based for treating some diagnosed mental disorders. Others have been criticized as pseudoscience.
Anxiety is an emotion characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil, often accompanied by nervous behaviour such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination. It is the subjectively unpleasant feelings of dread over anticipated events, such as the feeling of imminent death. Anxiety is not the same as fear, which is a response to a real or perceived immediate threat, whereas anxiety involves the expectation of future threat. Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry, usually generalized and unfocused as an overreaction to a situation that is only subjectively seen as menacing. It is often accompanied by muscular tension, restlessness, fatigue and problems in concentration. Anxiety can be appropriate, but when experienced regularly the individual may suffer from an anxiety disorder.
Neurosis is a class of functional mental disorders involving chronic distress but neither delusions nor hallucinations. The term is no longer used by the professional psychiatric community in the United States, having been eliminated from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1980 with the publication of DSM III. It is still used in the ICD-10 Chapter V F40–48.
