Over the centuries the theories and practices concerning the mentally disturbed or the insane have been subject to continuous change. The determinants of these changes are predominantly to be found in social cultural developments, alterations in belief systems, or changes within the medical-psychiatric-psychological discourses. Changes in treatment, however, are not entirely the result of such influences. Alterations in behavior have also had effects on treatment and theory. The spread of melancholy, hypochondria, vapors, or spleen in the eighteenth century, for instance, contributed to a change in the treatment of the mentally disturbed and caused the therapist to turn professional (Foucault, 1961; Lepenies, 1972; Starobinski, 1960). The rise of hysteria at the end of the nineteenth century and the forms in which it found expression were also important determinants for transformations in psychiatry and psychology. Psychoanalysis as a theory, method of research, and technique of treatment largely owes its existence to such phenomena (Ellenberger, 1970). At the same time, in the genesis, spread, and disappearance of behavioral disturbances, socio-cultural conditions are also involved. After all, people are not homines clausi, individuals isolated from the outside world and, more particularly, from their social surroundings. They are social creatures from the cradle onward. Any form of human behavior, no matter whether it involves perception, motivation, learning, thinking, or emotionality, invariably is a form of social behavior at the same time.