Posts in Category: english

Maria Montessori Biography

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori

Maria Montessori Biography

Maria Montessori (1870-1952) was an intelligent feminist, psychiatrist and Italian pedagogue, who stood out especially in she studied medicinethe field of Pedagogy, and not so much in that of Psychiatry. The most important contribution in Psychiatry was his classification of mental illnesses, curiously realized shortly after Sigmund Freud, the creator of Psychoanalysis, made his famous Classification of Neuroses.

Maria Montessori was born in Chiaraballe, a village in Ancona, (Italy) and died in Noordwjek (Holland). Montessori was the first woman to graduate as a doctor in Italy. María Montessori was the daughter of Alessandro Montessori, a conservative soldier, who initially opposed she studied medicine, and Renilde Stoppani.

Before studying Medicine, María Montessori studied Engineering. Subsequently he also studied Philosophy at the University of Rome, Experimental Psychology, Anthropology, etc. With regard to the latter  subject She even became a professor at the Faculty of Anthropology, and also wrote a book entitled “Pedagogical Anthropology“.

After the unification of Italy, Maria Montessori, a deeply Catholic woman, became interested in the problems of women and children. In 1898 Montessori attended a Pedagogical Congress in Turin In that congress she affirmed that the child with intellectual delay could be

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What do you need to be happy?

happiness

happiness

What do you need to be happy?

According to a recent study conducted in the United Kingdom, safety, good humor and leisure is what it takes to be happy.

British researchers conducted an investigation in 1938 to find out what makes people happy. In that year an ad was placed in a local newspaper asking its readers “What is happiness?“. Responded 226 people, who said that security, knowledge and religion was the most important thing to be happy.

Recently, the same study has been carried out in the same city. The psychologists Sandie McHugh and Jerome Carson, directors of the study, say that currently, although safety is at the top, good humor and leisure are in a better position in this new survey. Religion is considered in the current study as one of the least important factors to be happy.

They were also asked if they were happier in the city they lived in (Bolton, United Kingdom) or, on the contrary, far from it. In the old survey the majority of the subjects affirmed that he was happier in Bolton, whereas the current study 63% affirmed that he was happier far from his city.

They were also asked if they thought that the luck factor was important for happiness. In this case the results were similar in both surveys, 40%.

Regarding the question of whether they considered that money was important for happiness, in both surveys most people answered negatively.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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The Future of Psychoanalysis

Eric Kandel

Eric Kandel

Did you know…..

Eric Kandel, Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine, published in The American Journal of Psychiatry an interesting article entitled “Biology and the future of psychoanalysis: A new intellectual framework for psychiatry revisited”?

In that article he said, among other things, the following:

1- Psychoanalysis still represents the most coherent and intellectually satisfying vision of the mind.

2- Freud taught us to listen carefully to patients and in a new way, in a way that nobody had used before.

3- Sigmund Freud and his students made important contributions to the knowledge of unconscious mental processes and motivations.

4- Freud is the great modern thinker on human motivations.

5- The twentieth century has been marked by Freud’s deep understanding of the psychological problems that have historically occupied the Western mind.

– The strengths of psychoanalysis are its scope and the complexity of the issues it addresses.

Eric R. Kandel was born in Austria in 1929, but has developed his entire career in the United States of America where he has been a professor at the Universities of Columbia and New York. Kandel is a neuropsychiatrist who has made important contributions to the knowledge of the Physiology of memory and learning.

Among his numerous publications, it is worth quoting “Neuroscience Principles” and “Psychiatry, Psychoanalysis and the New Biology of the Mind“.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Sigmund Freud Biograghy

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud

Who is Sigmund Freud?

Sigmund Freud, the father of Psychoanalysis, was born on May 6, 1856 in a middle class family in Freiburg (Moravia). When Freud was 4 years old his family moved to Víena.

In 1865 Freud began his secondary studies, which curiously began a year earlier than it was the usual age at that time, and ended with an excellent rating (Summa Cum Laude). Then he began Medicine at the University of Víena.

Already as a student, Sigmund Freud entered the physiological laboratory of Bruecke where he began his research career, centered in those early years in Neurology. Parallely Freud began their publications.

In 1884, Sigmund Freud investigated the anesthetic properties of the cocaine, substance that at that time in Europe was little known. At the same time his friend Carl Koller demonstrated the anesthetic properties of cocaine in Ophthalmology.
Shortly after (1884) Freud entered like professor in University of Víena.
In 1885 he received a scholarship to go to Paris to study with the famous Jean Martin Charcot at the “Hospital de la Salpêtrière“. At that time this French doctor studied the possibilities of hypnosis as a treatment of Hysteria.

After returning from France, Sigmund Freud marched to the Kassowitz Institute in Berlin where he studied the cerebral palsies of children.

Later on, in 1889, Sigmund Freud traveled to Nancy (France) to see how Liébault M.D. and Bernheim M.D. used hypnotic suggestion as a therapeutic technique, not only for Hysteria but also for other neurotic disorders.

His biographer Ernest Jones tells us that Sigmund Freud was a family man, a lover of his profession and a tireless worker.
Freud was a very cultured man who spoke French and English perfectly, as well as Spanish,  which he had learned reading “Don Quixote” in the language of Cervantes. During his youth he also translated several works by Charcot and Bernheim into German.
Sigmund Freud was a great lover of the work of Goethe and Shakespeare, as well as the Greco-Roman culture.

When he reached fame and glory, he was diagnosed with cancer of the jaw and palate against which he fought for 16 years, in the course of which Dr. Pichler performed a total of thirty-three operations under local anesthesia, in addition to radiation. The last ones were so bloody that he agreed, at the insistence of hes doctor, to administer an analgesic called Novocaine. He had previously refused to take painkillers, despite the intense pains he suffered. One of those operations was so drastic that the nasal cavity was communicated with his mouth, so he had to use a jaw and palate prosthesis.
Ernest Jones says in his biography that “he was a perfect patient … Whatever the degree of suffering, there was never a hint of irritability or annoyance in him“.

The University of Clark in the United States invited Sigmund Freud to

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Anna Freud Biograghy

Anna Freud

Anna Freud

Who is Anna Freud ?

Anna Freud (1895-1982) was born in Víena (Austria). She was the youngest of Sigmund Freud‘s six children. Anna studied pedagogy and worked as a teacher, but later on she became psychoanalyst and dedicated herself to the Psychoanalysis of children, being a pioneer in this field.

Anna Freud theories on the analysis of children were published in a small work entitled “Introduction to the technique of psychoanalysis of children“, where she raised a criticism of the theories of Melanie Klein, disagreement that lasted forever.

In 1936 she published his most important work entitled “The Ego and defense mechanisms“.

During the Second World War, already exiled in London, Anna Freud founded the Hampstead nurseries where she studied children separated from their families; The result of these studies were hers two works “War and children” and “Infants without families“, written together with Dorothy Burlingham and in which she talks about the emotional impact of mother-child separation.

Other publications of Anna Freud are:

1 “On the fact of losing and being lost“,

2- “Normality and pathology in childhood“.

In 1950, Anna Freud traveled to Clark University, where his father had also been invited years before, where he gave a lecture entitled “The Contribution of Psychoanalysis to Genetic Psychology“, and she was honored as Doctor Honoris Causa.
The honors and recognitions continued in subsequent years, and thus she also received the title of Doctor Honoris Causa for the Universities of Víena, Columbia, Harvard and Frankfurt.

Anna Freud death was on October 9, 1982 in London, the city where she lived since her departure from Vienna because of the persecution of Nazism.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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Stanley Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram Experiment

Stanley Milgram Experiment

Did you know…..

recently it has been seen that the conclusions of the famous experiment of Stanley Milgram, researcher of the prestigious Yale University, are not valid due to the multiple irregularities that occurred in its realization?

The Milgran experiment has been taught for decades in Psychology Faculties throughout the world, and is present in most of the books of Experimental Psychology and Social Psychology.

The methodological errors of the experiment have been detected by Australian researchers from the University of Melbourne, Nick Haslam, Steve Loughnan and Gina Perry, when reviewing the files of the experiment that are kept at Yale. This review has been published in the scientific journal PLOS ONE.

These researchers say that the study of Milgram has been considered as the most emblematic experiment in the history of Psychology, and that in the fifty years since it took place there has been much debate about whether Milgram demonstrated the ability of ordinary people to do the evil and the roots of the Jewish Holocaust, but nobody until now had reviewed it.

The experiment that Stanley Milgram conducted in 1961 consisted of alleged students responding to a memory test, and when they failed a teacher should give him an electric shock, a discharge that increased in intensity as they gave more errors, even reaching a discharge that could be mortal Actually the device did not produce any discharge, but the student pretended to receive it. Well, according to the Milgram, some teachers gave painful discharges to students who failed in their answers, even knowing the great pain they produced.

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Biography of Abraham Maslow

Maslow Pyramid

Maslow Pyramid

Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) was an American psychologist famous for advocating what was called “The Third Force in Psychology“.  This third force proposed a Psychology based on a humanistic approach, the so-called Humanistic Psychology. It was called third force since it came to occupy the third place, after the other prevailing psychologies, which were those of dynamic orientation (Psychoanalysis), and the Behaviorist.

Maslow received his doctorate in Philosophy in 1934. He also studied Watson’s Behaviorism and researched in the area of animal behavior. Later on he was appointed Professor of Psychology at Brandeis University (USA: US), and held the position of President of the American Psychological Association for several years

Furthermore this american psychologist affirmed that Psychology had taken too much care to the study of Psychopathology, that is to say to the sick “psyche“, and had forgotten the healthy or Eusychic mind. From the above he concluded that Psychology, having emphasized the pathological or “sick”, had obtained a partial image of the human being and a pessimistic vision of its potentialities.

In his studies on healthy people Maslow highlighted the value of spontaneity, self-acceptance, impulsive awareness, naturalness and liberation as agents that oppose destructive tendencies. He also highlighted the scope of the inherent potentialities of humanity.

Abraham Maslow affirmed that the human being has certain basic needs. These needs are:

1.- The necessities necessary for the maintenance of life, which would be, on the one hand, hunger and thirst, and on the other the gratification of the impulses of affection and self-esteem. He called these needs D or Deficiency needs.

2.- Needs B or “Meta-needs”. They are what drive a person to self-realization, such as impulses to freedom, beauty, goodness, unity and justice.

Abraham Maslow said: “The restriction of the basic needs can lead the person to neurotic needs that, being really impossible to satisfy, give how to waste human potentiality and exhaust human energy. And this is the fundamental tragedy of mental illness development outcome“.

All the above was captured in a graphic way in his famous pyramid, the “Maslow Pyramid” as it is known

Maslow with his “Psychology of the Third Force” advocated a “Self-Realizing Creativity” that would lead to health and growth. And he added that real people who accept themselves and others are self-realizing. These people would be spontaneous, creative and independent subjects.

In his last studies he talks about “Maximum Experiences” to refer to mystical or self-transcendental experiences.

Most of Maslow theories were exposed in his book “Towards a Psychology of Being“.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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William Tuke and the York Retreat

William Tuke

William Tuke

Did you know…..

William Tuke (1732-1822) was the founder of a psychiatric hospital called the “York Retreat“?

William’s great-grandson, psychiatrist Daniel Hack Tuke, described El Retiro as a refuge or oasis of tranquility in which the mentally ill were treated in a more humane way and could recover. The treatment carried out in that insane asylum was later called “the moral treatment of madness“.

William Tuke was a great philanthropist who dedicated part of his fortune and his time, until he was eighty-eight years old, to the management of the York Retreat. Tuke belonged to “The Society of Friends“, popularly known as the Quakers.

Tuke later influenced John Conolly, a pioneer in the treatment of non-restriction of the mentally ill. William Tuke was contemporary Philippe Pinel, French doctor who unchained the mad or alienated Bicêtre asylum in 1793.

(Edited by Dr. María Moya Guirao, MD)

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