Who are the aliens, the group that Sigmund Freud was a part of

The term was born in revolutionary France and lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century.

If you search for “alien” in a dictionary, you will find something like “expert in the study and treatment of mental illness”.

The beginning of this new medical specialty was the result of a different current of thought than madness whose expression appeared in several places on the Old Continent, but the term itself was born in France.

During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe, psychiatric patients were taking care of their families or wandering the countryside and cities begging, says Juan Carlos Staniaro in his file The Birth of Psychiatry: A European Movement.

But many were confined to hospitals set up by monarchies to remove those deemed “disturbed” by the social order.

In France, at the beginning of the reign of Louis XVI, the charitable movement – inspired by the ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau – revealed, among other complaints, the miserable conditions in which detainees in the kingdom’s public hospitals found themselves.

The pressures were so great that the king entrusted Jean Colombier, the inspector general of civil hospitals and prisons in the kingdom, and his assistant, François Debel, to prepare a report on the condition of the inmates.

(…) “Thousands of lunatics are held in prisons without anyone thinking of the slightest treatment‘ says an excerpt from the document.

“The mad half is confused with the lost madman, the angry with the peaceful madman: some are chained, others are left free in their prison.”

“In short, unless nature helps and cures them, the end of their ailments is the end of their days, and alas, until then, sickness only increases rather than decreases.”

Although reforms to improve the situation were temporarily halted by the revolution, the report had major repercussions in the country, which became a republic.

The new French authorities implemented the recommendations of Colombier and Doublet, and reformed the service for the outcast and from society, in accordance with the new human rights established by the Revolution.

Similar reforms occurred in other parts of the continent.

In 1808, in Germany, physician and anatomist Johann Christian Riel called for the creation of an independent medical specialty called psychiatry.

Both terms remain in use.

But studying, understanding, caring for and helping patients with “mental alienation” progressed — and the alienation slowed.

Carl Jung, the famous psychiatrist and psychotherapist, recalls his experience as a “young alien”, Freud’s closest collaborator, in 1952:

“Our training as aliens was closely related to the anatomy of the brain, but not to the human psyche.”

“Just the clinical observations – and then postmortem, when I used to look at a brain that didn’t show signs of abnormality – were not particularly enlightening.”

“Mental illness is a brain disease that ‘seek never told anyone anything’.”

Freud and Jung focused on the psychology of mental disorders rather than neuroscience or physiology, which profoundly influenced the way psychiatrists and psychotherapists (still called aliens in the early 20th century) conceptualized symptoms.

“Amazing,” psychosomatic and forensic psychologist Stephen A. Diamond notes in an article in Psychology Today.

“The historical pendulum has swung dramatically over the past 100 years, from the raw biology of early aliens to the insightful insights of depth psychology in the twentieth century, and now, sadly, back to our mostly biological and medical perceptions.”

Will the aliens return?

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