Ernst Kretschmer

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Ernst Kretschmer

Ernst Kretschmer (born October 8, 1888 in Wüstenrot near Heilbronn , † February 8, 1964 in Tübingen ) was a German psychiatrist . He researched the human constitution and set up a theory of types. In 1929 he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine .

Life

Kretschmer was a student at the Cannstatter Gymnasium , a Latin school in Württemberg. From 1904 he attended Protestant seminars in Schöntal and Urach. From 1906 to 1912 he studied philosophy for two semesters at the Tübinger Stift and then switched to medicine at the University of Tübingen and the universities of Munich and Hamburg . He was a member of the Normannia Tübingen Association . From 1913, the year of his doctorate, he worked as an assistant to Robert Gaupp at the University Psychiatric Clinic in Tübingen, was able to do his habilitation with him in 1918 with Der sensitive relationship madness and then worked there as a senior physician. From 1926 to 1946 he headed the University Psychiatric Clinic in Marburg , then the one in Tübingen until his retirement .

He was a member of the founding committee of the first General Medical Congress for Psychotherapy , which was held in Germany in 1926, and of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy (AÄGP). Here he initially worked as a board member before he was elected its first chairman in 1930. As such, he acted with his predecessor Robert Sommer as the editor of their association body, which had been renamed the Zentralblatt für Psychotherapie under the editorship of Arthur Kronfeld and Johannes Heinrich Schultz .

On April 6, 1933, Ernst Kretschmer resigned from the chair for political reasons, but became a supporting member of the SS that same year . Likewise, on November 11, 1933, he signed the confession of the German professors to Adolf Hitler , but was not a member of the NSDAP . He became a judge at the Hereditary Health Court in Marburg and at the Hereditary Health Court in Kassel and, in 1934, advocated the sterilization of "feeble-minded people" in a contribution to Ernst Rüdin's anthology Hereditary Lore and Racial Hygiene . He was a member of the advisory board of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists , visited the Nazi killing center in Bernburg in 1940 and took part in a meeting of the advisory board for Aktion T4 in 1941 . In the same year he wrote in a foreword to Geniale Menschen : “What is essentially degenerate, we will be able to safely eliminate from inheritance.” On the other hand, he questioned the “disorder” of the German people propagated by Hans Günther by calling the A special genius density was ascribed to zones where the Nordic and Alpine “races” were mixed ( Swabia and Saxony ) . From November 1942 he was a member of the board of the German Society for Constitution Research . In addition, he was a senior field physician military psychiatrist for military district IX in Marburg. In 1943 he became dean of Marburg (as a non-party member of the NSDAP).

Kretschmer was appointed full professor at the Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen in 1946 and became director of the University Psychiatric Clinic in Tübingen. He held these offices until his retirement in 1959. From 1947 to 1954 Kretschmer was acting director of the Psychological Institute of the University of Tübingen. In 1955, as an appraiser in the reparation proceedings of a Nazi victim suffering from depression, he claimed that there were no persecution-related neuroses.

Ernst Kretschmer and Luise Pregizer (* 1892) married in October 1913. The couple had four children: Gisela (1916–1923), who died early from scarlet fever, Wolfgang Kretschmer (1918–1994), Professor of Psychiatry in Tübingen , his son Hans Dietrich Kretschmer (1921–1944) , who died in World War II Medical director of the Psychiatric State Hospital Weißenau Manfred Kretschmer (1927–2011).

Services

With his constitutional typology , Kretschmer introduced the distinction between the types of leptosomes , pycnics and athletes in 1921 . Based on this, Kretschmer developed a method for the differential diagnosis of schizophrenia and mania between 1915 and 1921 . For the normal temperament of the leptosome type, he coined the term " schizothyma " and a stronger tendency to schizophrenia as well as less susceptibility to manic-depressive disorders, and vice versa for the pycniac. The athletic type is more prone to epilepsy. Because of Kretschmer's correlation between body shape and susceptibility to mental disorders, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 1929.

As assistant to Robert Eugen Gaupp, Kretschmer represented the position of his Tübingen director in the 1914 appraisal of the mass murderer Ernst August Wagner . At that time, it was the first case in the legal history of Württemberg that was discontinued due to insanity . Kretschmer then published his habilitation thesis in 1918: The sensitive relationship delusion . This represents a psychogenic description and derivation of the paranoia based on the investigation by Wagner. Kretschmer was able to rely on Gaupp's work on paranoia . The psychodynamics of the sensitive delusional relationship, however, differs from that of the neuroses . The conflicts are not suppressed , but “cautiously” consciously. At about the same time as Gaupp and Kretschmer, Karl Jaspers and Sigmund Freud also tried to derive the madness from the patient's experience. As is well known, Freud dealt with the analysis of the Daniel Paul Schreber case . Since the symptoms of delusion have so far been understood as signs of an endogenous psychosis , the psychogenetic perspective appears as the first attempt at a multiconditional approach .

Kretschmer was involved in the journal for human inheritance and constitutional theory published by Günther Just and Karl Heinrich Bauer from 1935 onwards . In 1940 he was the first to describe the apallic syndrome ( vegetative state coma ).

Awards and honors

In 1936 Kretschmer was elected a member of the Leopoldina . In 1952 he received an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of Santiago de Chile (Dr. med. H. C.). He became an honorary member of the American Psychiatric Society in June 1949 .

In 1943 he received the Golden Medal (Josef Schneider Prize) from the University of Würzburg, in spring 1956 the Golden Kraepelin Medal , and in 1958 the Great Federal Cross of Merit . In the Weingartshof district of Ravensburg , a street is named after Ernst Kretschmer.

Publications (selection)

  • Delusion and manic-depressive symptom complexes . Berlin 1914 (dissertation)
  • The sensitive relationship mania . Springer, Berlin 1918 (habilitation paper)
  • Build and character. Investigations into the constitution problem and the doctrine of temperaments. Springer, Berlin 1921. 25th edition 1967, edited by Wolfgang Kretschmer.
  • Medical psychology . Thieme, Leipzig 1922
  • Hysteria, reflex and instinct . Thieme, Leipzig 1923
  • Ernst Kretschmer, Ferdinand Adalbert Kehrer : The disposition to mental disorders . Springer, Berlin 1924.
  • Disturbances of the emotional life, temperaments . Handbook of Mental Illnesses. Volume 1. Springer, Berlin 1928.
  • Brilliant people . Springer Berlin, 1929
  • The apallic syndrome . Journal for the whole of neurology and psychiatry, Volume 169 (1940), p. 579
  • Psychotherapeutic studies . Thieme, Stuttgart 1949.
  • In memoriam Günther Just. In: Journal for human inheritance and constitution. Volume 30, 1950/1951, pp. 293-298 (commemorative speech given at the funeral service of the University of Tübingen)
  • Robert Gaupp in memory . German Medical Weekly , Stuttgart 78: 1713; 1953.
  • Graduated active hypnosis - two- pronged standard method . In: Frankl, VE, Vv Gebsattel and JH Schultz (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Neurosenlehre und Psychotherapie. Volume IV, pp. 130-141. Urban & Schwarzenberg Munich-Berlin, 1959.
  • Forms and thoughts. Adventures. Thieme, Stuttgart 1963.

literature

  • Martin Priwitzer: Ernst Kretschmer and the delusional problem. Dissertation, Tübingen 2004 ( full text )
  • Eduard Seidler:  Kretschmer, Ernst. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 13, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1982, ISBN 3-428-00194-X , p. 15 ( digitized version ).
  • Björn Weyand: Farewell to the last reserve of individualism. The medical perspective of the modern age in Ernst Kretschmer's “Build and Character” (1921). In: Moritz Baßler , Arne Klawitter (ed.): The human is not given. To represent the subject in modern times. Reich, Rostock 2005, ISBN 3-86167-142-5 , pp. 145-163.
  • Wolfgang Kretschmer (Ed.), Man and Reason for Life. Collected Essays. Tübingen, Rainer Wunderlich, 1966.
  • Helmut Siefert : Kretschmer, Ernst. In: Werner E. Gerabek , Bernhard D. Haage, Gundolf Keil , Wolfgang Wegner (eds.): Enzyklopädie Medizingeschichte. De Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2005, ISBN 3-11-015714-4 , p. 806.

Web links

Commons : Ernst Kretschmer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Nomination Database for the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, 1901–1951 . Retrieved December 27, 2010.
  2. ↑ On the history of the Zentralblatt, originally General Medical Journal for Psychotherapy
  3. ^ History of psychotherapy, laws and ordinances in Germany
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Ernst Klee : The personal dictionary for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945 . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Second updated edition, Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 339.
  5. ↑ Quoting from Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich , Fischer Taschenbuch 2005, p. 339.
  6. ↑ Jutta Person: The pathographic look. Physiognomics, theories of atavism and cultural criticism 1870–1930. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-3135-0 , p. 235 ff.
  7. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1995, ISBN 3-88479-932-0 (= Würzburg medical-historical research. Supplement 3.) - At the same time: Dissertation Würzburg 1995), p. 178.
  8. ^ Hans H. Lauer : The medicine in Marburg during the time of National Socialism. In: "Until the long-awaited change finally came ...". On the responsibility of medicine under National Socialism. Edited by the medical student council of the Philipps University of Marburg ad L., Marburg 1991, pp. 155, 159 and 163.
  9. ^ Eckhard Schäfer: The Psychological Institute of the University of Tübingen in the post-war period (1945–1954) . In: Eckhard Schäfer (Ed.): Disability and Understanding Helping: Traces of Tübingen Psychology in Reutlingen Special Education (Festschrift for Elfriede Höhn on his 80th birthday) , VWB, Berlin 1995, pp. 250–307
  10. ↑ Martin Priwitzer: Ernst Kretschmer and the delusional problem . Dissertation, Tübingen 2004, pp. 78–82
  11. ↑ Nomination for Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. Nomination Database ". Nobelprize.org. Nobel Media AB 2014., accessed May 5, 2015 .
  12. ^ Tölle, Rainer : Psychiatrie . Child and adolescent psychiatric treatment by Reinhart Lempp . Springer, Berlin 7 1985, ISBN 3-540-15853-7 ; Pages 16, 174 f.
  13. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1995, ISBN 3-88479-932-0 (= Würzburg medical-historical research. Supplement 3.) - At the same time: Dissertation Würzburg 1995), pp. 176 and 178.
  14. ↑ Inhabitants 2000 Ravensburg Weingarten , p. 191
  15. ↑ Ute Felbor: Racial Biology and Hereditary Science in the Medical Faculty of the University of Würzburg 1937–1945. 1995, p. 186 f.
personal data
SURNAME Kretschmer, Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH October 8, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Desert red
DATE OF DEATH February 8, 1964
Place of death Tübingen