Erwin W. Straus

Erwin Walter Maximilian Straus (born November 11, 1891 in Frankfurt am Main , † May 20, 1975 in Lexington (Kentucky) ) was a German-American neurologist and psychiatrist , psychologist and philosopher . After starting a career as a psychiatrist in Berlin , he was forced to emigrate as a Jew in 1938.

Straus dealt critically with the epistemological foundations of Freudian psychoanalysis , behaviorism and the analysis of existence derived from Heidegger . He based his own analyzes on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl , but less on his descriptions of human acts of consciousness than on his later analyzes of the human lifeworld . Among other things, Straus examined the experience of space and time and its changes in mental illness.

Along with Karl Jaspers , Ludwig Binswanger , Victor-Emil von Gebsattel and Eugène Minkowski, Straus was one of the representatives of a humanities- based psychiatry that shaped the self-image of psychiatry in the Federal Republic of Germany after the Second World War and into the 1960s, but afterwards compared to psychoanalysis and biological approaches lost ground considerably.

Life

After studying medicine in Berlin, Zurich , Munich and Göttingen and completing his doctorate on the pathogenesis of chronic morphinism , Straus completed his specialist training at the Charité Psychiatric Clinic and the Berlin Polyclinic . His habilitation followed in 1927, and from 1931 to 1935 Straus was an associate professor at the University of Berlin . In 1928 he was one of the co-founders and until 1935 one of the editors of the journal Der Nervenarzt .

After emigrating to the USA, he first became a lecturer in philosophy and psychology at Black Mountain College in North Carolina . From 1944 to 1946 he obtained his medical license for the United States as a Research Fellow at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore . From 1946 to 1961 he was director of the Veterans Administration Hospital in Lexington (Kentucky) , until 1956 also lecturer at the University of Kentucky there.

After the war, he soon resumed contact with his colleagues in Germany and Switzerland. He met regularly with Victor-Emil von Gebsattel, Eugène Minkowski and Ludwig Binswanger at the holiday resort of Binswanger in Wengen , Switzerland. In 1953 he held a visiting professorship in Frankfurt am Main, and in 1961/62 in Würzburg .

Psychological theory

Straus sharply demarcates the sphere of mental experience from that of physical events. In his early book Geschehnis und Erlebnis (1930) he turns against both Freudian psychoanalysis , which speaks of quasi-physical “excitations”, their “quantity” and their “discharge”, as well as against behavioristic psychology with their explanation of human behavior from stimulus-response schemes.

According to Straus, mental experience is formed by “taking senses” during perception, which are indeed stimulated by the experienced situation, but which also require a prior understanding of this situation and an active, questioning relationship with it. As each experience is based on what has gone before, it becomes individual and results in a story of its own for each individual.

After Ludwig Binswanger in 1931 noted in a detailed review of the deficiencies in Straus' working out his own theory, put this in 1935 his great work On the Meaning of the senses before, in which he basically with the modern theory of knowledge and psychology since Descartes , Locke and Hume apart sets .

Here, too, he begins with a refutation of behaviorism by meticulously analyzing the framework conditions that Pavlov made in his famous dog experiments and highlighting the contradictions and puzzles in Pavlov's own interpretations of these experiments. Subsequently, he developed his own theory of animal and human, of the common sense and experience of animals and humans, which the epistemological theories that have been common since Descartes and that distinguish humans from animals through their world-detached consciousness cannot do justice.

According to Straus, theories that trace back perception and knowledge entirely to sensory stimuli do not even come to the establishment of the unity and wholeness of an object, since sensory data are only given selectively and nothing forces their connection in a purely receptive, absorbing consciousness.

Straus also denies that perception and experience take place in an organism: Their place is the world itself, in which people and animals behave and can thus also communicate in “sympathetic communication”.

The behavior of humans and animals primarily relates to “attracting” and “terrifying” and occurs as a union or separation. The experience is tied to the possibility of physical movement, both are differentiated in terms of life and individual history in constant interaction. On the basis of these findings, Straus then reconstructs the design of the experience of space and time.

In his late essay Psychiatry and Philosophy (1963), Straus criticizes Heidegger's analysis of existence for addressing the "running ahead to death" as a human possibility, but not the phenomena associated with the origin of life and its biological and family character can meet.

The diving duck (quote)

“At every step in psychology and psychopathology one encounters a behavior of researchers that could be compared to that of diving ducks. Just as it disappears underwater with every sign of impending danger, so psychologists like to seek refuge beneath the surface of biology when psychological problems arise. "

Fonts

• On the pathogenesis of chronic morphinism. S. Karger , Berlin 1919. (reprinted in: Psychology of the human world. Pp. 1–16)
• Nature and process of suggestion. S. Karger, Berlin 1925. (reprinted in: Psychologie der Menschen Welt. Pp. 17–70)
• Electro-diagnostics on healthy people. G. Stilke, Berlin 1926.
• The problem of individuality. In: Theodor Brugsch , Fritz H. Lewy (Hrsg.): The biology of the person. Volume I: General part of personnel theory. Urban and Schwarzenberg, Berlin / Vienna 1926, pp. 25–134.
• Event and experience: at the same time a historiological interpretation of the psychological trauma and the pension neurosis. Springer, Berlin 1930. (Reprint: Springer, Berlin / New York 1978, ISBN 3-540-08805-9 )
• From the sense of the senses. A contribution to the foundation of psychology. J. Springer, Berlin 1935. (Reprint of the 2nd edition Göttingen 1956: 1978, ISBN 3-540-08804-0 )
• A contribution to the pathology of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in the monthly for psychiatry and neurology. Volume 98, Issue 2, 1938.
• On Obsession: A Clinical and Methodological Study. (= Nervous And Mental Disease Monographs. No. 73). Coolidge Foundation, New York 1948. (Reprinted 1968, ISBN 0-384-58630-9 )
• Psychology of the human world. Collected Writings. Springer, Berlin / Göttingen / Heidelberg 1960, ISBN 3-540-02607-X .

In addition to the above, it contains the important essays:

• The experience of time in the endogenous depression and in the psychopathic mood. 1928, pp. 126-140.
• The forms of the spatial. Their importance for motor skills and perception. 1930, pp. 141-178.
• Shame as a historiological problem. 1933, pp. 179-186.
• The upright posture. An anthropological study. 1949, pp. 224-235.

• Psychiatry and philosophy (= basic philosophical questions in psychiatry. 2). In: Hans W. Gruhle, Richard Jung, Wilhelm Mayer-Gross, Max Müller (eds.): Psychiatry of the present. Monographs from the entire field of neurology and psychiatry. Volume I / 2: Fundamentals and methods of clinical psychiatry. Springer, Göttingen / Berlin / Heidelberg 1963, pp. 926-994.
• with Jürg Zutt with the participation of Hans Sattes (Ed.): Die Wahnwelten (Endogene Psychosen). Academic Publishing Company, Frankfurt am Main 1963.
• as Ed .: Phenomenology: Pure and Applied. The First Lexington Conference. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1965.
• with Richard M. Griffith (Ed.): Phenomenology of Will and Action: The Second Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1967.
• with Richard M. Griffith (Ed.): Phenomenology of Memory: The Third Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1970.
• with Richard M. Griffith (Ed.): Aisthesis and Aesthetics: The Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1970.
• as editor: Phenomenology, Pure and Applied: Language and Language Disturbances. Duquesne University Press, Pittsburgh 1974, ISBN 0-391-00333-X .

literature

• W. Ritter v. Baeyer, RM Griffith (Ed.): Conditio Humana - Erwin W. Straus on his 75th birthday. Springer Verlag, Berlin 1966.
• Ludwig Binswanger: incident and experience. To the font of the same name by Erwin Straus. 1931. In: Selected lectures and essays, Volume II: On the problems of psychiatric research and on the problem of psychiatry. Francke, Bern 1955, pp. 147-173.
• Franz Bossong: On the life and work of Erwin Walter Maximilian Straus with outlooks on its importance for medical psychology. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 1991, ISBN 3-88479-590-2 . (Contains the most extensive bibliography of Straus' writings to date on pp. 89–98.)
• Gerhard Danzer : Erwin Straus. In: Who are we? In search of the human formula. Anthropology for the 21st Century. Medicines, philosophers and their theories, ideas and concepts. Springer, Heidelberg / Berlin / New York 2011, pp. 283-294, ISBN 978-3-642-16992-2 .
• Torsten Passie: Phenomenological-anthropological psychiatry and psychology. A study about the “Wengener Kreis”: Binswanger - Minkowski - von Gebsattel - Straus. Guido Pressler, Hürtgenwald 1995, ISBN 3-87646-079-4 . (Arranges Straus in a differentiated manner in the psychiatric historical and philosophical context.)
• Josef Rattner : Erwin W. Straus. In: J. Rattner: Classics of Psychoanalysis. 2nd Edition. Beltz - Psychologie VerlagsUnion, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-621-27285-2 , pp. 677-699.
• E. Wiesenhütter (Ed.): Becoming and acting - commemorative publication for the 80th birthday of VE von Gebsattel . Hippocrates, Stuttgart 1963.

Web links

• Literature by and about Erwin Straus in the catalog of the German National Library
• Erwin Straus at mythosandlogos.com: photography and brief description
• ... and some critical voices from his students at Black Mountain College. ( Memento from July 6, 2008 in the Internet Archive )

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Erwin Straus: event and experience: at the same time a historiological interpretation of the psychological trauma and the pension neurosis. Springer, Berlin 1930. (Reprint: Springer, Berlin / New York 1978, p. 6