A new issue of PSN (Psychiatrie Sciences Humaines Neurosciences) has just been released online. Included in this issue are two pieces that may be of interest to h-madness readers. Titles, authors and abstracts listed below:

Les états anxieux dans l’histoire de la médecine Première partie: d’Hippocrate au « nervosisme », by T. Haustgen

The description of anxiety disorders, in their somatic and emotional components, depends on successive pathogenic theories since the antiquity. Evoked by Hippocrates and Galen among digestive illnesses, they are included into hypochondriasis in the 16th and 17th centuries. Sydenham compares this last entity with hysteria. In the 18th century, Blackmore and Cheyne at London, then Raulin and Pomme at Paris, describe the “vapours”, in the continuity of humoral theories. In 1765, Lorry in France and Whytt in Scotland (“nervous disorder”) describe on the contrary an injury of the nerve fibers, clearly differentiated for the first time from hysteria and from hypochondriasis by Whytt. Cullen introduces the term neurosis (1769), propagated by Pinel’s “Philosophical Nosography” (1798). At the beginning of the 19th century, appears the word neuropathy (Pougens, 1825; Cerise, 1841). The term anxiety is used by Cheyne (1733), Boissier de Sauvages, “the Panckoucke’s Dictionary” (1812), J.-P. Falret (1822), and occasionally by the first alienists in their manuscript observations, but as a symptom and not as a clinical entity. In 1822, E. Georget, a pupil of Esquirol working in the Salpêtrière hospital, isolates most symptoms of the later “panic attack,” in his picture of “cerebropathy” (i.e., hypochondriasis). During the 2nd half of the 19th century, several remarkable and synthetic descriptions of anxiety disorders are published separately in France by alienists (délires émotifs: Morel, 1866; “hypocondrie morale”: J. Falret, 1866; “vertige mental”: Lasègue, 1876) and by general practitioners (“état nerveux”: Sandras, 1851; “nervosisme”: Bouchut,1860; “cerebrocardiac neuropathy”: Krishaber, 1873).

L’introduction faussement simple du cognitivisme dans la thérapie comportementale, by D. Ravon

The conflicts within behavior therapy caused by the public advent of cognitive behavior therapy in America are examined. The origins of the latter are sought out within the behavioristic heritage itself (classical conditioning, operant conditioning, and social learning theory), as well as in the rest of the psychological and psychotherapeutical environment of the 1960s and 1970s. Two findings go against a simplificatory speech commonly heard in France. Firstly, the acceptance of cognitive frames of reference in the behavior therapy movement wasn’t and isn’t unanimous, since the Skinnerian radical behaviorists, still active today, dissociated themselves from it. Secondly, the therapy’s cognitive-behavioral integration didn’t happen with reference to the information processing model, but rather through a disparate process of internal and external borrowings in answer to anthropological questionings on the cognitive control of behavior.