Felix Boehm (psychoanalyst)

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Felix Boehm (born June 25, 1881 in Riga ; † December 20, 1958 in Berlin ) was a Baltic German psychoanalyst and doctor, who was chairman of the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) from 1933 until his impeachment in 1938 and from 1950 to 1958 .

Life

Until 1933

After finishing secondary school, Felix Boehm first studied mechanical engineering at the Riga Polytechnic , where he became a member of the Corps Rubonia . In 1902 he went to Munich. He passed his Abitur in 1906 in Bern and at the Düren secondary school . The psychoanalysis learned Boehm 1906-1907 by Sigmund Freud's signature The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (1901) know. Until 1912 he studied medicine at the University of Geneva , the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg and the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich . In Munich as an assistant to Emil Kraepelin and Richard Cassirer , it specialized in psychiatry and neurologist.

In 1914 Boehm first asked Sigmund Freud to be able to complete a training analysis, but then decided to resume his analysis with Eugenie Sokolnicka . He married Adeline Baronesse von Tiesenhausen in Munich in 1904, got divorced and married Marie Elsbeth Welsch in 1914. He had two daughters, whom he later gave to Melanie Klein for child analysis. In the First World War he volunteered in 1914 and was a Bavarian medical officer and psychiatric expert at the court martial in Germersheim until 1918 .

From 1919 he practiced in Berlin in his own practice as a neurologist and completed his psychoanalytic training with Karl Abraham at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute (BPI) founded in 1920 . From 1920 he began to publish a multi-part series of articles "Contributions to the Psychology of Homosexuality" in the International Journal for Psychoanalysis .

In 1922 he received his doctorate in Kiel on "Two cases of arteriosclerotic insanity" and in 1923 became a lecturer at the BPI. As the administrator of the local scholarship fund, he embezzled funds in order to invest them, which led to a bottleneck in the payment of the scholarships.

From 1928 he studied ethnology at the Berlin University, whereupon he held seminars in this subject together with Eckardt von Sydow .

From 1933 to 1945

After the National Socialists came to power in 1933, in the course of the persecution of the Jews, the executive board of the DPG, chaired by Max Eitingon, was replaced. Boehm became the new chairman, with Carl Müller-Braunschweig as his deputy. In 1936 the DPG was renamed "Working Group A" in the "German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy", at which Boehm became a lecturer and secretary. In the course of the disempowerment of Müller-Braunschweig in 1938, Boehm's permission to carry out training analyzes was also withdrawn, whereby the old case of his financial embezzlement from the 1920s played a role again. Boehm remained head of the "catamnesis" department at the institute's polyclinic and, from 1939, a research group on homosexuality. Between 1941 and 1945 he was a medical officer in the Wehrmacht as a medical officer in the Second World War to assess so-called Wehrkraftzersetzern, simulants and homosexuals, and often made decisions about the fate of those affected.

From 1945

At the Institute for Psychopathology and Psychotherapy (IPP) founded by Harald Schultz-Hencke and Werner Kemper in 1945, Boehm became head of the teaching department and from 1949 developed a course in psychagogics . After the re-establishment of the German Psychoanalytical Association (DPV), Boehm became chairman of the DPG again in 1950 and remained so until the end of his life.

Statements by Boehm on homosexuality

Boehm saw the homosexual instincts in humans based on polygamous tendencies and the heterosexual instincts in monogamous inclinations, which he generalized to whole peoples and classes of the population and postulated as a fundamental principle. For him, homosexuality is a disintegration of morals from monogamy to polygamy. He summarized:

“The homosexual man associates with another man with the help of a polygamous woman; in the end with the help of the mother with the father. The homosexual woman has intercourse with another woman with the help of a polygamous man; in the end with the help of the father with the mother. "

In connection with the case of a homosexual who had dreamed of coiting into another large penis, Boehm describes the, in his opinion, pathological notion that occurs in men that a large, dangerous penis is hidden in a woman's vagina. Boehm suspects in this idea an oedipal desire to reach the father's penis in the mother's vagina. He did not consider homosexuality to be a constitutional phenomenon, but a purely “psychological problem” which was “curable”, but only by uncovering the development of a normal and an inverted Oedipus complex. In the case of homosexuals, he differentiated between those on an " anal sadistic " and those on a " narcissistic " stage of development.

Works

  • Two cases of arteriosclerotic insanity , medical dissertation, Kiel 1922
  • with Otto Fenichel and Wilhelm Reich : About the Oedipus complex: 3 psychoanalytic studies. Internationaler Psychoanalytischer Verlag, Vienna 1931 ( digitized version ; from International Journal for Psychoanalysis , Vol. 17, 1931).
  • Inhibited ability to love: A developmental psychological study , Psyche, Berlin-Zehlendorf 1949 (from: Der Mensch. Series of publications for psychology and psychotherapy )
  • Deutsche Psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (Ed.): Writings on psychoanalysis , Ölschläger, 1st edition Munich 1978, ISBN 3-88295-014-5

literature

  • Erhard Köllner : Homosexuality as an anthropological challenge: conception of a homosexual anthropology , Julius Klinkhardt Verlag, Bad Heilbrunn 2001, ISBN 3-78151-138-3 , pages 168–170.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Contributions to the Pathology of Homosexuality I: Homosexuality and Polygamie, in: Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse , 6, 1920, p. 319, quoted from E. Köllner: Homosexualität als Anthropologische Challenge , 2001, p. 169
  2. ↑ a b quoted from E. Köllner: Homosexuality as an anthropological challenge , 2001, page 169
  3. ↑ E. Köllner: Homosexuality as an anthropological challenge , 2001, pp. 168–170
personal data
SURNAME Boehm, Felix
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German doctor, psychoanalyst and functionary
DATE OF BIRTH June 25, 1881
PLACE OF BIRTH Riga
DATE OF DEATH December 20, 1958
Place of death Berlin