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Sigmund Freud, whose work drew in part from the clinical work of Josef Breuer and others, founded the field in the early 1890s. Up until his passing in 1939, Freud developed and improved psychoanalysis's theory and methods.
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The theories of Sigmund Freud formed the basis of psychodynamic therapy. But compared to the model from the 19th century, it has changed significantly. Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, and Anna Freud were among the early thought leaders in the field who contributed to the creation of this strategy.
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The American psychologist B.F. Skinner, who worked with mentally ill patients in a Massachusetts state hospital, is credited with popularizing behavior therapy. Skinner discovered that the manner in which reinforcers, or rewards, are given can affect the establishment and extinction (elimination) of responses in animals.
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Humanistic psychology, which first appeared in the late 1950s, was a reaction against the two schools of thought that then dominated American psychology. Humanists believed that behaviorism's insistence on using physical science methods to study human behavior led adherents to overlook important subjective data.
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When Aaron Beck noticed that his depressed patients frequently expressed thoughts that lacked validity and identified defining "cognitive distortions" in their thinking, the idea for creating this type of psychotherapy took root.
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IPT was first created in 1969 at Yale University as a component of a study designed by Gerald Klerman, Myrna Weissman, and colleagues to examine the effectiveness of an antidepressant with and without psychotherapy as a maintenance treatment for depression. IPT was originally known as "high contact" therapy.
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Psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud's "talking cure," was the precursor to psychotherapy. Soon after, new theories about psychological functioning and change were introduced by theorists like Alfred Adler and Carl Jung.