Article
Rivers, W. H. R. (1864–1922) By Hemmings, Robert
Article
A pre-eminent British neurologist, psychologist, ethnologist and anthropologist, William Halse Rivers Rivers worked as a psychiatrist in British military hospitals, most famously Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh where he adapted Freudian methods to treat World War I officers suffering from traumatic war neuroses. Rivers advocated ‘autognosis’, a method of acquiring self-knowledge by accounting for conscious and unconscious motivations and the environmental conditions that have shaped one’s state of mind, and ‘re-education’, a process by which patients learn to utilize in a pragmatic way their newly acquired self-knowledge (‘Psycho-therapeutics’ 440).