Abreaction: systematic review of the literature

Abreaction, or the ‘drug interview', was a relatively common therapeutic intervention in psychiatry in the middle to late 20th century. It is far less commonly practiced now, though there has been little investigation or understanding of why this decline in practice occurred. Dr Norman Poole and colleagues investigated the published English language reports on the process as applied to conversion disorder, and found that the reasons for its declining use were certainly not due to lack of evidence for its effectiveness.