Alexander Mitscherlich

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Grave site of the psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich in the Frankfurt main cemetery

Alexander Harbord Mitscherlich (born on September 20, 1908 in Munich ; died on June 26, 1982 in Frankfurt am Main ) was a German doctor , psychoanalyst , university professor and writer .

origin

Alexander Harbord Mitscherlich is the son of the chemist Harbord Mitscherlich and his wife Clara Mitscherlich, née Heigenmooser. He is a grandson of the chemist Alexander Mitscherlich . Alexander Harbord Mitscherlich grew up in an upper class and authoritarian home.

education

Alexander Mitscherlich first studied history , art history and philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . However, he broke off his studies due to disputes over his dissertation , as his doctoral supervisor Paul Joachimsen , a baptized Jew, died in 1930 and his anti-Semitic successor Karl Alexander von Müller refused to supervise his predecessor's work.

Ernst Jünger motivated Mitscherlich to move to Berlin , where he joined the national revolutionary movement of Ernst Niekisch . As a bookseller in Berlin-Dahlem , he sold his writings and the magazine resistance. Journal for national revolutionary politics , which made him the target of the SA , which briefly imprisoned him in 1933.

Mitscherlich, who started studying medicine in Berlin in 1933, emigrated to Switzerland in 1935 and was now studying medicine there. In 1937, despite his experience with the Nazi regime, he went to Nuremberg and was imprisoned by the Gestapo for eight months . After his release, he stayed in Germany, continued his medical studies and married a second time. In 1939 he put his state examination , and received his doctorate in 1941 at the University of Heidelberg with a book on the subject to determine the nature of synaesthetic perception at Viktor von Weizsacker Dr. med. He then worked as his assistant in neurology at Heidelberg University Hospital. In 1946 Mitscherlich completed his habilitation with his work Vom Ursprung der Sucht and then worked at the medical outpatient clinic in Zurich until 1949. He was also a private lecturer at the University of Heidelberg.

Observation of the Nazi medical trials, 1946–47

After the end of the Second World War , the medical associations of the three western zones commissioned him in 1946 to head a commission to monitor the " Nazi medical trials " in Nuremberg. He was commissioned “to do everything possible to avert the concept of collective guilt from the medical profession in the press and in public”. In addition to Mitscherlich, the commission included five other people, including Alice von Platen-Hallermund and his colleague Fred Mielke (1922-1959). In March 1947 the process documentation Diktat der Menschenvernahm: The Nuremberg Doctor Trial and its Sources with a print run of 25,000 copies. In it Mitscherlich reported on the crimes of German medics in the concentration camps . The original plan to publish a report in the DMW ( German Medical Weekly ) had failed due to the rejection of the editors. The brochure Dictation of Human Contempt: The Nuremberg Medical Trial and its sources was not mentioned in the DMW or other medical journals. The brochure was hardly mentioned in the rest of the press either.

In 1949, the book Science Without Humanity: Medical and Eugenic Errwege under dictatorship, bureaucracy and war over the Nazi medical trials was published in an edition of 10,000 copies. "In 1960 Mitscherlich remembers: '[...] The book was known almost nowhere, [...] It was and remained a mystery - as if the book had never been published.' The fate of the book remains unclear to this day. Mitscherlich suspected that it had been 'bought up in toto' by the medical associations […], because all copies had 'disappeared from the bookstores' shortly after publication ””. “Since then, Alexander Mitscherlich has of course been excluded from the medical faculties in Germany; [...] he [was] never appointed to a medical school. When he was called, it was the Philosophical Faculty of Frankfurt University ”. In 1960 the process documentation from 1949 with the title Medicine Without Humanity appeared again. 119,000 copies of this had been printed by 1996, which were very well received. In the book Mitscherlich spoke of 350 medical criminals among 90,000 doctors in the Reich.

In order to process his shock philosophically, it took him 20 years until he and his wife Margarete published The Inability to Mourn in 1967 .

Professional career 1947–1976

From 1947 Mitscherlich published the journal Psyche and in 1950 founded the Clinic for Psychosomatic Medicine at Heidelberg University, which he directed until 1967 . He also took an active part in the attempt to come to terms with the involvement of German doctors in National Socialist crimes.

The Sigmund Freud lectures organized by Max Horkheimer and Mitscherlich in the summer of 1956 in Frankfurt and Heidelberg became a high point of intellectual activity .

From 1960 to 1976 Mitscherlich headed the Sigmund Freud Institute he founded in Frankfurt am Main . From 1973 to 1976 he was a professor at the University of Frankfurt . Mitscherlich's chair for “ Psychology, especially psychoanalysis and social psychology ” at the University of Frankfurt / M. was converted into an " Institute for Psychoanalysis " with three university professorships, the first of which was exclusively devoted to psychoanalysis. Peter Kutter , a companion of the Heidelberg psychosomatic specialist Wolfgang Rapp, was appointed to this position .

Mitscherlich was an atheist and in 1961 a co-founder and longstanding member of the civil rights organization Humanist Union .

Mitscherlich could be won for the concerns of the nursing school of the University of Heidelberg and enabled the nurses to work in the psychosomatic department of the hospital.

Private life

Mitscherlich met the medical student Melitta Mitscherlich , née Behr, of the same age while on a train trip to Prague in 1929 . After getting married in 1932, they had two daughters, Monika Seifert and Barbara. He separated from his wife in 1933 after the birth of their second daughter and divorced in 1936. His second marriage was to Georgia Wiedemann; they had a son: Thomas Mitscherlich . In 1955 he finally married Margarete Mitscherlich, née Nielsen, with whom he had a child in 1949. A total of seven children were born from Mitscherlich's marriages.

Honors

Publications (selection)

  • with Alfred Weber : Free Socialism . Lambert Schneider 1946. (Quote: "We are socialists ourselves, but socialists who want freedom above all in socialism and through socialism.")
  • with Fred Mielke: The dictate of human contempt. The Nuremberg Medical Trial and its Sources. Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1947.
  • with Fred Mielke: Science without humanity: Medical and eugenic aberrations under dictatorship, bureaucracy and war . Lambert Schneider, Heidelberg 1949.
  • with Fred Mielke: Medicine without humanity. Documents of the Nuremberg Doctors' Trial. New edition of the above work Science Without Humanity as a paperback, Frankfurt am Main 1960, ISBN 3-596-22003-3 . (Annotated documents from the Nuremberg Medical Trial)
  • On the way to a fatherless society. Social Psychology Ideas. 1963.
  • The inhospitableness of our cities. Incitement to strife . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt 1965. (Criticism of the destruction of grown structures in urban development in the post-war period)
  • Illness as a conflict (= studies on psychosomatic medicine. Part 1). Edition Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1966.
  • with Margarete Mitscherlich: The inability to mourn. Basics of collective behavior. 1967; 2004-18. A. ISBN 3-492-20168-7 .
  • as editor: Up to here and no further. Is Human Aggression Unsatisfactory? 1969, Munich. (Examination of Konrad Lorenz's hypotheses. Contributions by AM Becker, H. Lincke, PC Kuiper, A. Mitscherlich, P. Heimann, H. Stierlin, FC Redlich, RA Spitz, T. Brocher, E. Buxbaum, P. Parin , F. Morgenthaler, H. Kunz)
  • with Margarete Mitscherlich: The idea of ​​peace and human aggressiveness. Four attempts. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969.
  • with Margarete Mitscherlich: A German way of loving. 1970.
  • Try to face the world better. Five pleadings on psychoanalysis. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970.
  • Sigmund Freud. Try to face the world better. Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970.
  • Mass psychology without resentment: social psychological considerations. 1972.
  • Tolerance - checking a term. 1974.
  • The struggle for memory. 1975. (Examination of psychoanalysis since Freud)
  • The me and the many. Part of a psychoanalyst. 1978.
  • A life for psychoanalysis. 1980. (autobiography)
  • Collected Writings 1–10 . Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-57646-1 .
  • Understand being sick. A reader . Timo Hoyer (Ed.), Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010.

literature

Movie

  • Film by Thomas Mitscherlich: Father and Son , 1984 Barefoot Film Distribution

Web links

Commons : Alexander Mitscherlich  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: Alexander Mitscherlich  - Quotes
Wikiversity: Mitscherlich, Alexander: Freedom and bondage in illness. The Image of Man in Psychotherapy  - Course Materials

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Helmut Siefert : Alexander Mitscherlich . In: Wolfgang U. Eckart , Christoph Gradmann: Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the present . 1st edition. CH Beck'sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, Munich 1995. 2nd edition 2001, 3rd edition 2006 each Springer Verlag Heidelberg / Berlin / New York, ub.uni-heidelberg.de
  2. ↑ taken from the tabular curriculum vitae of Alexander Mitscherlich
  3. ↑ Tobias Freimüller: Physicians: Operation Volkskörper . In: Norbert Frei : Hitler's Elites after 1945 . Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-423-34045-8 , pp. 17-25.
  4. ↑ Quotation from Jürgen Peter: The Nuremberg Doctor Trial ... ; Münster, 1994, p. 65 (2nd edition 1998, p. 68). Tobias Freimüller: Hitler's elites after 1945 . Munich, 2003, p. 27
  5. ↑ Wolfgang U. Eckart : Illustrated history of medicine. From the French Revolution to the present . 1st + 2nd Output. Springer Verlag, Berlin / Heidelberg 2011, p. 340, ub.uni-heidelberg.de
  6. ↑ Wolfgang Rapp: Heritage, transition and paradigm. Paul Christian and Heidelberg Medicine in Motion , in: Wolfgang Eich (Ed.): Bipersonalität Psychophysiologie und Anthropologische Medizin , Contributions to Medical Anthropology, Volume 8, on behalf of the Viktor von Weizsäcker Society, Königshausen & Neumann 2014, on Alexander Mitscherlich p. 91. ISBN 978-3-8260-4971-2 .
  7. ↑ Wolfgang U. Eckart : Bar every morality. The unholy alliance of healing and killing , with summaries in English. Language. In: Ruperto Carola , 2, University of Heidelberg 2013, pp. 95–101, on Alexander Mitscherlich, p. 99, ub.uni-heidelberg.de
  8. ^ Oskar Negt : The political man. Democracy as a way of life , Steidl Verlag, Göttingen, 2010, p. 302
  9. ^ History of Psychosomatics in Heidelberg. Retrieved March 24, 2018 .
  10. ↑ https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/vor-125-jahren-geboren-sozialphilosoph-der-frankfurter.871.de.html?dram:article_id=470185
  11. ^ Uni-Frankfurt: Archives last accessed on January 25, 2009
  12. ↑ Website Peter Kutter: Universität , accessed on January 8, 2017.
  13. ↑ hpd.de
  14. ↑ humanistische-union.de
  15. ↑ Christine R. Auer, Antje Grauhan , Wolfgang Rapp: The expansion of the bipersonal to a tripersonal situation “patient-doctor-nurse” presented us with new challenges. On the history of the sister school of Heidelberg University after 1945 , for Sabine Bartholomeyczik the Federal Cross of Merit 2015. Heidelberg 2015.
  16. ↑ friedenspreis-des-deutschen-buchhandels.de (PDF)
  17. ^ Anne Frederiksen in Zeit Online: memorial ade, film review by Th. Mitscherlich , accessed on December 24, 2016
  18. ↑ Helmut Siefert : Alexander Mitscherlich , in: Wolfgang U. Eckart and Christoph Gradmann (eds.): Ärztelexikon. From antiquity to the 20th century , 1st edition CH Beck Munich 1995, p. 255 b .
personal data
SURNAME Mitscherlich, Alexander
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mitscherlich, Alexander Harbord (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychoanalyst and writer
DATE OF BIRTH September 20, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Munich
DATE OF DEATH June 26, 1982
Place of death Frankfurt am Main