Demanding characteristics: Psychiatry, psychology and the social sciences in Martin T. Orne’s therapy of Anne Sexton

This article uses Anne Sexton’s therapy by Martin T. Orne as a frame for investigating and contextualising the unusual therapeutic rationale that lay behind her treatment. The rationale had three sources: the results of Orne’s experimental psychological research, particularly the ‘demand characteristics of social psychology experiments’; the functional sociology of Robert Merton and Talcott Parsons; and the influence of Jerome D. Frank’s concept of ‘effective hope’. Unpacking this story builds on the work of a number of historians who have destabilised one of the major binaries that has shaped historiographical interpretations of post-war psychiatry (i.e. biological psychiatry vs Freudianism), opens up a space for further investigations of interdisciplinarity in psychiatry, while providing a better understanding of why Orne treated Sexton the way he did.