I have found that young psychologists do not know about Schultz’s autogenic training. They all know, today, that mindfulness exists, which has nothing negative about it, but they don’t know the history. They don’t know how mindfulness was arrived at.
I consider this reduced awareness a limitation, because we are, if you will allow me, at the invention of how to cut the broth.
Let me explain. Schultz, about 120 years ago, devised a system to improve self-control and learn to relax that he named autogenic training. It means that through a process of training you can learn to relax.
His purpose was to free people from the dependence of hypnotics, today we would say make them autonomous through learning a psychological skill.
Most young psychologists ignore this approach, whereas they should be making this mindfulness their own and then using it with the adaptations that 120 years later we are now able to propose.
Instead we have moved to mindfulness, which is certainly useful, but we have thrown away the knowledge of the past, probably because it is not fashionable and certainly not because it is useless.
What do you think?
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