Eugen Kahn

Eugen Kahn (born May 20, 1887 in Stuttgart , † January 19, 1973 in Houston ) was a German-American psychiatrist . He mainly worked on the genetics of schizophrenia and psychopathology . He was called to the United States in 1930, where he worked at Yale and various other hospitals.

life and work

Kahn studied medicine in Heidelberg , Berlin and Munich . He received his doctorate in 1911 and then worked as a medical intern at Emil Kraepelin's psychiatric clinic in Munich. A year later he became Kraepelin's assistant. Together with Kraepelin and Ernst Rüdin , he examined the leaders of the Munich Soviet Republic in 1919 , including Ernst Toller , Erich Mühsam and Rudolf Eglhofer , all of whom he certified as having psychopathy. Toller is a “enthusiast”, Mühsam “uncritical, fanatical, stubborn” and Eglhofer prototype of the “antisocial, psychopathic criminal”. According to Kahn, this differentiates the revolutionaries from the “real leader”, who is characterized by “outstanding creative and critical intelligence, indomitable, imperturbable and pure will and perfect mastery of affects”.

Kahn completed his habilitation on the hereditary nature of schizophrenia with Kraepelin and Ernst Rüdin. In 1921 he became senior physician and temporarily headed the Munich clinic for two years after Kraepelin had retired in 1922. Kahn remained senior physician under the new director, Oswald Bumke . In 1927 he was appointed associate professor . In 1930 Yale University appointed him to a chair at their psychiatric clinic, which was founded with the support of the Rockefeller Foundation , to advance psychiatric and psycho-hygienic research. His work at Yale is considered a prerequisite for Yale to later become a center of social psychiatry .

In 1946, Kahn left Yale and worked at New Haven Hospital in New Haven . After traveling through Europe, he became a professor of psychiatry at Baylor University College of Medicine in Houston in 1951 . He also worked there for a long time as an independent doctor at the Veterans Administration Hospital .

Kahn mainly worked on the psychopathology of psychoses and personality disorders . Together with Rüdin he developed a concept for the inheritance of schizophrenic psychoses, according to which the schizoid reaction type is dominantly hereditary and a disposition to process psychosis is recessive.

Fonts (selection)

• Some Observations on Color Differentiation in Children. Müller & Steinicke, Munich 1911 (dissertation, University of Munich, 1911).
• Schizoid and schizophrenia in inheritance. Contribution to the hereditary relations of schizophrenia and schizoid with special consideration of the progeny of schizophrenic married couples. Springer, Berlin 1923.
• Hereditary biology introduction. Deuticke, Leipzig 1925.
• The psychopathic personalities. In: Oswald Bumke (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Geisteskrankheiten. Vol. 5, Springer, Berlin 1928, pp. 227-486.
• On the problem in today's psychiatry. Washington 1930.
• Psychopathic Personalities. Yale University Press, New Haven 1931.

literature

• Hanns Hippius: The University Department of Psychiatry in Munich. From Kraepelin and his Predecessors to Molecular Psychiatry. Springer, Berlin 2007.
• Volker Roelcke: Psychiatry in Munich and Yale, approx. 1920-1935. Mutual Perceptions and Relations, and the Case of Eugen Kahn (1887–1973). In: Volker Roelcke, Paul Weindling , Louise Westwood (eds.): International Relations in Psychiatry. Britain, America, and Germany to World War II. University of Rochester Press, Rochester / NY 2010, pp. 156–178.

Web links

• Literature by and about Eugen Kahn in the bibliographic database WorldCat

Individual evidence

1. ^ Martin Geyer: Inverted world. Revolution, inflation and modernity: Munich 1914–1924. Göttingen 1998, p. 99.