The Weird History of Psychotherapy Part 4: Empty, Dull, Thud, The Satanic Panic and the Scientific Method

How therapy became a computer program and lost its soul

1973: A researcher walks into a psychiatric hospital claiming to hear voices saying "empty, hollow, thud." He's immediately diagnosed with schizophrenia and held for weeks. The twist? He's perfectly sane. It's all an experiment to prove psychiatric diagnosis is fiction.

Those three words - empty, hollow, thud - would become the perfect description of what American therapy was about to become.

This episode exposes how Cognitive Behavioral Therapy conquered psychology by promising scientific precision while secretly throwing out everything that makes therapy work. The computer metaphor for mind created treatments that were measurable, billable, and completely ineffective.

 

https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-weird-history-of-psychotherapy-part-4-empty-hollow-thud-or-cbt-and-the-satanic-panic/

 

You'll discover:

• How Aaron Beck's computer metaphor reduced humans to software
• Why the "evidence-based" revolution was built on falsified research
• The hidden truth: effective CBT therapists are doing depth work in disguise
• How the Satanic Panic destroyed trust in memory and trauma
• Why America's most "rational" era believed in underground demon cults
• The replication crisis that proved the "gold standard" was fool's gold

📚 Essential Reading from Taproot Therapy Collective: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/science-or-science-flavored-capitalism-deconstructing-the-evidence-based-practice-paradigm/

https://gettherapybirmingham.com/the-limits-of-behaviorism-rediscovering-the-soul-in-psychotherapy/

https://gettherapybirmingham.com/a-history-of-psychotherapy-and-how-it-got-here/

https://gettherapybirmingham.com/theodore-m-porter-and-the-critique-of-quantification/

https://gettherapybirmingham.com/when-evidence-based-practice-goes-wrong/

 

The tragic irony: While hunting for evidence-based treatments, we lost the evidence for what actually heals - relationship, depth, time, and the mysterious process of being truly seen.