American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the United States
Jonathan Engel
Gotham Books. 351 pp. ISBN 978-1-592-4038-06

Jonathan Engel begins his history of therapy in the United States with an anecdote. His purpose is to highlight the refusal of American therapy "consumers" to be bullied by the weighty-sounding pronouncements of psychoanalytic theory. He tells of an analyst who offered a young woman his "first grand insight into her condition" after three months of listening to her dreams and free associations. What was her response? "Who are you to tell me that I have penis envy?" she sniffed, getting up from his couch, never to return.

The story of American therapy, according to Engel, is the triumph of American pragmatism over the intellectual mystique of Freud's theories. From the perspective of today's marketplace, it may be hard to accept that until 1980, psychoanalysis dominated most departments of psychiatry in the nation's medical schools. It was then that a growing awareness of the practical limitations of psychoanalysis took over: analysis took too long, was too expensive, and despite its snobbish, top-dog position in the field, had failed to produce a body of empirical studies to show that it worked better than anything else.

On the back cover, the publishers extol Engel's book as the "first comprehensive history of American psychotherapy from Freud to Zoloft." It's hardly that, but it does offer a…