Psychology Today | 06.06.2026 01:00
When most people think of psychoanalysis, they probably imagine a patient lying on a couch in a private office. Yet for much of the twentieth century, some of the most influential psychoanalytic work occurred not in outpatient practice but within psychiatric hospitals. These institutions attempted something that now seems almost unimaginable: the treatment of severe mental illness through long-term therapeutic relationships, intensive psychotherapy, and carefully constructed therapeutic communities.
