"Up until the late Forties the brain had been conceptualized as a complex electrical system...But then, beginning with nor-adrenaline in 1946, a class of chemical messengers were discovered that served as transmission devices ['neurotransmitters'], carrying impulses from cell to cell...The existence of the chemical brain raised some interesting questions. Might not madness, psychosis, etc. be the result of a metabolic malfunction? Wasn't it possible that these pathological states could be caused by an overabundance or a depletion of one of these chemicals...
The fact of the chemical brain had important ramifications in a corollary and hotly debated area of psychology, namely the use of drugs in therapy. This had become an issue back in the Thirties, when a Viennese psychiatrist name Sakel began treating schizophrenics with insulin...The psychological community had barely digested this piece of news than word came that a Hungarian doctor was successfully treating schizophrenia by inducing epileptic fits with another drug, cardiozol, a technique that he later expanded to include depressives.
Classical analysts, with their carefully articulated schemes of repression, neurosis, and abreaction, greeted this work with derision. In 1939 an English psychiatrist named William Sargant attended the American Psychiatric Association's convention in St. Louis. His description of the debates, the rancors, the partisan posturing reads like a cross between a Marxist cell meeting and the Harvard-Yale game....
Sensing a lucrative market, the pharmaceutical companies began
an aggressive search for mind drugs. Thorazine, the first major
tranquilizer, appeared in 1954, the sedative Miltown a year later,
to be followed by Stellazine, Mellaril, Valium, Librium, Elavil,
Tofranil--a miscellany that was destined to change the face of
psychology by giving it a technology that could control, if not
actually cure, most mental illness."