The aim of this article is to reconstruct the history of psychotherapy for people with intellectual disabilities. The article is a review of the literature on psychotherapy with people with intellectual disabilities. In chronological order, it presents selected content from the most important texts relating to this area of psychotherapeutic practice. Leon Pierce Clark’s writings from the early 1930s are considered a pioneer in the field of psychotherapy with people with intellectual disabilities, but already in 1928, Polish psychiatrist Gustaw Bychowski appealed for including those patients in psychotherapy. In the 1970s, the first attempts were made to use behavioral techniques in the therapy of people with intellectual disabilities. Concerning the psychotherapy of people with intellectual disabilities, original psychotherapeutic approaches were developed, such as Prouty’s pre-therapy or Caton’s symbolic interaction therapy. In the 1980s, progress in the development of the concept of psychotherapy for people with intellectual disabilities in psychoanalysis was made thanks to the work of the workshop group of the London Tavistock Clinic. Since the 1990s, Nigel Beail has been developing a methodology for researching the effectiveness of psychodynamic psychotherapy with people with intellectual disabilities. Nowadays, there are still new reports being published on the effectiveness of psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioral, and systemic psychotherapy, as well as literature reviews and meta-analyses. Most works on the psychotherapy of people with intellectual disabilities refer to the poor literature on this subject and the ignorance of the psychotherapeutic mainstream. Despite an increasing number of theoretical studies and research on the effectiveness of psychotherapy for people with intellectual disabilities, it is still a topic marginalized by mainstream psychotherapeutic practice.