Research Paper on:
Evolution of Psychological Therapy

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
Psychological therapy can be a mixed blessing. While sometimes a therapist is able to achieve trememdously positive results in regard  to the mental well-being of their patient, other times the therapeutic environment can not only be characterized by failure but can even be counterproductive. The therapeutic environment can, in  fact, be characterized by the phrase "for better or for worse". Fortunately, however, modern psychological therapy has progressed tremendously in just the last few years. One of the  most obvious advacements it the move toward clearly defined and recorded diagnostic criteria and therapeutic approaches. Both the successes and the failures of  psychiatric therapy have captivated public interest since the earliest history of the field. This captivation, and the contrast between the successes and failures which were wrought, is even a  predominant theme in many of our movies and books. So too is the contrast between modern therapeutic methods and antiquated methods of the past, methods which sometimes come closer  in resemblance to barbarism than they do to modern therapy. Consequently, it becomes instrumental to illustrate the theme of "therapy for better or worse" utilizing a comparison between the  protrayals of therapy in movies and books and contemporary psychiatric therapy. Our societal interpretation of mental illness and how we deal with the  mentally ill has changed considerably over time. During the earlier part of the Twentieth Century mental illness was the subject of considerable theorization. Psychoanalyst like Sigmund Freud, for  example, was convinced that abnormal mental manifestations such as neurosis, psychosis, and even dreams were the key to mental function. Freud views dreams as a sort of wish fulfillment