“American Healing”: Primal therapy, rebirthing, and cathartic encounters in 1970s London (and beyond)

Abstract

In the early 1970s new ideas and practices from across the Atlantic changed British psychotherapy. Many methods were marked by a stress on the body, emotion, and catharsis, with some focused on ‘abreaction’. This tendency was influential enough to prompt R. D. Laing, the most important British psychiatrist of the day, to develop his own system of US-inspired ‘rebirthing’. Although hopes for the widespread adoption of American methods were soon dashed, many London-based practitioners carried the new therapeutic techniques into the wider world, expanding the transatlantic space of 1970s psychotherapy into a transnational one. This history reinforces Howard Malchow’s thesis that US influence was a dominant force in the British counterculture, but the relative failure of translating American practices into the new national environment indicates that the cultural and institutional differences between the two countries should not be underestimated.