Ernst Simmel

Ernst Simmel (born April 4, 1882 in Breslau , † November 11, 1947 in Los Angeles , USA ) was a German psychoanalyst .

Memorial plaque from the series With Freud in Berlin on Simmel's former home at Eichenallee 23 in Berlin-Westend

Live and act

Simmel comes from an assimilated Jewish family. Even during his medical studies he was self-taught in the subject of Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, which was still in its infancy . He received his doctorate in 1908 in Rostock with a thesis on the " Etiology of Dementia praecox " as a Dr. med.

After obtaining his license to practice medicine, he settled in a working-class district of Berlin, founded the Social Democratic Medical Association with Karl Kollwitz and Ignaz Zadek and became one of the pioneers of social medicine . During the First World War , Simmel gained experience as a military doctor in the treatment of war neuroses with psychoanalytic methods, which is how Freud became aware of him. On his advice, Simmel completed a training analysis with Karl Abraham after the war .

In 1920 he founded the Berlin Psychoanalytical Association with Max Eitingon and in 1922 the world's first psychoanalytic polyclinic in Berlin . In 1927 he founded the sanatorium Schloss Tegel , where Freud was his guest at several Berlin visits. In addition, Simmel was chairman of the Association of Socialist Doctors, but kept his distance from his Freudo - Marxist psychoanalysts Otto Fenichel , Erich Fromm and Wilhelm Reich , who were also active in Berlin around 1930 . In 1934 Simmel emigrated to the USA.

Simmel is considered to be one of the discoverers of the "war neuroses". With his studies he played a part in the fact that the psychoanalytic theory formation of the twenties and thirties extended beyond individual clinical pictures to cultural facts and social situations.

Anti-Semitism Study

Simmel is known to this day because of the anthology he published in 1946, “ Anti-Semitism - a social disease ” (German: Antisemitismus, 1993), which makes a significant contribution to research on anti-Semitism . It is a collaborative effort between psychoanalysts and social theorists. The volume reproduces the contributions to a symposium that took place in San Francisco in 1944. The employees are Theodor W. Adorno , Bernhard Berliner , Otto Fenichel , Else Frenkel-Brunswik and R. Nevitt Sanford , Max Horkheimer , Douglass W. Orr and Simmel himself.

In his own contribution (“Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology”) he interprets anti-Semitism based on Freud's myth-critical method in his book “ The Man Moses and the Monotheistic Religion ” (1939). The anti-Semitic complex is therefore based on irrational action impulses from individuals and groups that serve to overcome pathological disorders. Simmel sees this as a relapse into infantile stages of development , primarily dominated by the instinct for destruction , while denying external reality. He develops the model of a mass psychosis , which enables the individual to compensate for psychological deficits and - in contrast to the isolated psychotic person - to remain psychologically intact and socially integrated.

Works

• Critical contribution to the etiology of dementia praecox , Rostock: Adler, 1908.
• War neuroses and “psychological trauma” , Munich and Leipzig: Otto Nemnich , 1918.
• On the psychology of the sexes , in: Psychoanalytischebewegung, 1933, vol. V, pp. 285–301.
• [Ed.]: Anti-Semitism - a social disease. With a preface by Gordon Allport . New York: International Universities Press, 1946.
  • Anti-semitism . With contributions by Theodor W. Adorno u. a. German edition ed. by Elisabeth Dahmer-Kloss, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1993 (reprint: 2002; new edition responsible for Helmut Dahmer , Münster 2017, ISBN 978-3-89691-109-4 ).
• War neurosis , in: Psychoanalysis today. Edited by Sándor Lorand, London: Allen & Unwin, 1948, pp. 227–248.
• Psychoanalysis and its Applications . Selected Writings. Edited by Ludger M. Hermanns and Ulrich Schultz-Venrath, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag: Frankfurt am Main 1993.

Journal articles (selection)

In: The Socialist Doctor

• The socialist doctor. Volume I (1925), Issue 1 (March), pp. 2-5 digitized
• Basic information on the fight against § 218. Volume I (1925), Issue 4 (December), p. 27
• To the red health week. Volume II (1926), Issue 1 (April), pp. 1-4 digitized
• Folk medicine. Volume II (1926), Issue 2–3 (November), pp. 11–15 digitized
• Discussion contribution to: Siegfried Bernfeld . Socialism and psychoanalysis. Volume II (1926), Issue 2-3 (November), pp. 28-35 digitized
• Police hour and socialist doctors. Volume II (1926), Issue 2-3 (November), pp. 47-48 digitized
• Raphael Silberstein †. Volume II (1926), Issue 2-3 (November), p. 51 digitized
• Ignaz Zadek on his 70th birthday. Volume III (1928), Issue 4 (April), pp. 43-47 digitized
• Discussion remarks on the Götz presentation (sexual miserable forms ...). Volume IV (1928), Issue 3-4 (December), pp. 17-22 digitized
• Thoughts on the international union of socialist doctors. Volume VII (1931), Issue 5-6 (May-June), pp. 135-140 digitized
• National Socialism and Public Health. Volume VIII (1932), Issue 9-10 (October), pp. 162-172 digitized

literature

• Franz Alexander (ed.): Psychoanalytic pioneers. Basic Books, New York 1966; New edition: Transaction Publications, New Brunswick 1995.
• Max Horkheimer : Ernst Simmel and the Freudian Philosophy (1948). In: Psyche . 1978, pp. 483-491.
• Sebastian Möhle: The First Generation of German Psychosomatics - Early Psychoanalytic Approaches and Developments. Kovač, Hamburg 2010, ISBN 978-3-8300-5329-3 .

Web links

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

• Literature by and about Ernst Simmel in the catalog of the German National Library
• Detlev Claussen: Analysis of the Unheimlichen (on: Antisemitism, 1993), in: The time of July 9, 1993.