A Global History of Psychotherapy

469 nodes, 51 documented migrations, from 1500 BCE to the present.

This globe plots the places where the practices we now call psychotherapy were made — and, just as importantly, the routes along which they travelled. It is drawn from a research corpus assembled across three maps: a Western lineage running through Vienna, a East and South Asian lineage that was never downstream of it, and a global layer covering Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean, Oceania, the Islamic world and Indigenous traditions.

How to read it

Points are specific, verified locations — a building, a hospital, a campus.
Region markers are larger and softer because they are centroids. A single point for the Gangetic plain or for a nationwide reform campaign would be false precision, so the marker deliberately reads as approximate.
Unsited traditions — 53 of them — have no coordinates at all. Ayurveda, Chan/Zen transmission, ngoma, talking circles, curanderismo and others have no meaningful single locus, and inventing one would misrepresent them. They are listed in the right-hand panel with the reasoning, not hidden.
Arcs run origin → destination for the 51 migrations with recorded origin coordinates: vipassana Burma → Massachusetts, Klein and Anna Freud Vienna → London, Indra Devi Riga → Mysore, the 1930s émigré wave out of Central Europe. A further 9 named migrations have no geocoded origin and are identified in their node badges rather than silently dropped.
A ◆ contested badge marks the 114 nodes where scholarship genuinely disputes the dating. The Yoga Sutras are the sharpest case: estimates span the 2nd century BCE to the 5th century CE.
The Core history layer preserves the original chronology. Additive layers contain only reviewed records: Institutions changed training, authority, access, or transmission, while Interpretive practices maps historically consequential practices that should not be misrepresented as modern clinics or schools. Dense city markers retain shared coordinates instead of scattering unverified addresses.

Significance, references and evidence

Selecting a node shows a short account of why the place matters, followed by its supporting citations and substantive source notes. Coordinate records, OpenStreetMap identifiers, licensing attribution and curator audit notes remain available in a collapsed Provenance section. All of it is drawn from the research corpus — nothing here is written to fill space, and where the corpus marks a claim narrowed, corrected or unsupported, the blurb says so rather than presenting it flatly.

Each record also carries an evidence grade, because treating every node as equally attested would misrepresent the underlying data:

strong — well attested in the scholarly literature.
moderate — attested, with limits the corpus states.
weak — thin or absent outcome evidence, often for a widely adopted practice.
contested — the claim itself is disputed. The Moreno and behaviour-therapy origin stories are here.
organizational — rests entirely on an institution's own account of itself. Defensible when a conferring authority describes an act it performed, but not scholarship: the geshema degree and the Mind and Life Institute are the cases this grade exists for.
repudiated — drawn deliberately as a refuted branch rather than quietly omitted.

The corpus also keeps named negatives — claims explicitly marked unsupported and left visible. Manas roga is the clearest: the 2017 Indian statute recognising it is a primary source, the classical Ayurvedic specialty of the same name is unsupported, and the two are deliberately not connected, since nothing sources continuity between them and the shared term makes conflation easy.

Sound

Every tone on this page is synthesised in the browser from oscillators and envelopes; no audio file is downloaded, and the page remains one portable document. It starts muted — unexpected audio on load is hostile, and browsers block it before a gesture anyway — with a switch in the top bar that remembers your answer. Pitch is not decoration: the scale degree is the world region and the octave is roughly the era.

Time

The two handles select a start and end year. A record appears when its documented era intersects that window. The scale is deliberately non-linear: two thirds of the corpus falls after 1850, so an even scale would compress the modern period into a sliver. Years before the common era are handled as negative numbers internally and shown as 500 BCE. Cumulative includes everything begun by the end of the window. Play moves the selected window from past to present without changing its width.

What the map does not claim

Many coordinates are explicitly approximate — a city centroid standing in for a person's working life, or a campus point where the specific 1924 building is unidentified. The provenance block for each node keeps that reasoning available without making it the first thing a visitor has to read. Where several nodes share one generic coordinate, the globe shows a single larger marker and groups its occupants, instead of scattering them into positions nobody verified.

Sources

Derived from the frozen therapy_maps_geocoords.csv, the reviewed additive therapy_globe_expansion.csv, and the three research maps that back them (therapy_singularity_map.md, eastern_therapy_map.md, global_therapy_map.md). Coastlines are Natural Earth 1:110m via world-atlas, public domain. The clearly marked illustrative-future state uses NASA Earth Observatory's cloud-free Blue Marble land, ocean and sea-ice composite; it is not a future photograph or forecast. Rendering by globe.gl (MIT) on Three.js (MIT).

Built 2026-09-28.