The 'American' psychoanalytic hospital in the making.

摘要

Sheppard and Enoch Pratt Hospital, a private mental hospital in Towson, Maryland, occupies a unique place in the history of psychiatry. As one of the earliest hospitals in the United States to integrate a psychoanalytic approach into psychiatric practice-in the 1920s and 1930s-it nurtured the first generation of American analysts who became leading figures in psychiatry in the decades after World War II, the era that historian Nathan Hale Jr. called the "golden age" of psychoanalysis.1 What made Sheppard-Pratt unique, however, was the radical approach to mental illness that took shape in practice there, linked to the spirit of social reform in the 1920s. Hidden behind the hospital's apparent synchronization with the mainstream were physicians and patients who, often in idiosyncratic ways, grappled with the cultural ferment of the 1920s.