Fritz Redl

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Fritz Redl (born September 9, 1902 in Klaus bei Schladming , Styria, † February 9, 1988 in North Adams , Massachusetts) was a reform pedagogue and child psychoanalyst . He was best known for his work with children with behavioral problems and for the differentiation of the ego psychology , the collaboration on the concept of milieu therapy and the development of the life space interview.

Life

Fritz Redl was born in 1902 as the son of a station master in Styria. Three months after his birth, his mother had an accident, as a half-orphan , Redl spent most of his childhood and youth in Vienna, where he was influenced in his youth by the educational reform movement of the Wandervogel . He first studied philosophy, but also psychology, English and German and did his doctorate on the epistemological foundations in Kant's ethics . In 1926 Redl started teaching as a high school teacher. However, he was always more interested in educational issues than didactic ones and led his students like a youth group.

In 1928 Redl entered the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute, where he received his training as a psychoanalyst and later became an active employee. In 1930 he also worked in a rural education center and from 1934 to 1936, in close cooperation with August Aichhorn, he headed the educational advice centers of the Vienna People's Education Department . The psychoanalytic insights that Redl gained deepened his understanding of the personal problems of his students, of the group psychological processes in the school class and of his role as a teacher. The main subject of his interest, however, was not so much the disturbances, undesirable developments and diseases of the soul, but rather the problems that occurred even with normal psychological development. In 1936 Redl left Vienna and accepted an invitation from the Rockefeller Foundation to come to the USA, where he took part in various research projects.

In 1941 Redl was appointed professor of social work at Wayne State University in Detroit , where he set up facilities for socio-pedagogical-therapeutic work with extremely socially conspicuous children through group therapy procedures. He was also able to realize such a concept in 1946 in Pioneer House , a correctional home in the middle of the slums of Detroit. This experiment had to be stopped after two years because of a lack of financial resources. From this work, the world-famous books "Children Who Hate" (Eng. "Children who hate") and "Controls from Within" emerged.

In 1953 Redl was given the opportunity to set up and manage a children's ward for children with psychiatric problems in a hospital in Bethesda near Washington, where he worked out the concepts of the therapeutic milieu or milieu therapy , the life space interview and group psychological contagion. In 1959 he was appointed Distinguished Professor of Behavioral Sciences at Wayne State University. In 1988 Fritz Redl died.

plant

Redl took up the approaches of the ego psychology of Anna Freud and differentiated them. While it was previously only assumed that children with behavioral problems were weak, Redl discovered an amazing strength of the ego in these children, only that it served the wrong cause. Such children developed various defense mechanisms to avoid feelings of guilt in delinquent behavior. Based on these considerations and his observations, he defined the four ego functions (cognitive function, power function, selection function, synthetic function) that are disturbed in children with behavioral problems.

In the concept of milieu therapy , which Redl developed in parallel with Bruno Bettelheim , these ego disorders are to be eliminated by using all the factors in the world of a disturbed child to serve the pedagogical-therapeutic goal. At the same time, the therapeutic effect should continue throughout the day and not just be limited to the 50 minutes that the child spends in the therapy session. Thus, the actual therapeutic event is shifted back into the child's natural interpersonal and situational life context.

A special technique that is closely related to the concept of the therapeutic milieu is that of the "Life Space Interview". This technique addresses the problems that children face as they update themselves in a given situation. An adult caregiver immediately picks up on an incident or conflict from the child's current life context and works it through with him. The emphasis in this conversation is less on the awareness of past psychological events, but rather on the current behavioral processes and psychodynamic mechanisms that have led to the conflict, and on what the child unconsciously wanted to achieve with his conflictual behavior. Through this procedure, the child is given "immediate emotional help", and more realistic behaviors are shown to him and the only sparse existing values ​​are activated and built up.

Fonts (selection)

  • Parenting problems - parenting advice. Essays. Edited and introduced by Reinhard Fatke. Munich 1971, ISBN 3-492-00473-3 .
  • Raising Difficult Children. Contributions to a psychotherapy-oriented pedagogy. Edited and edited by Reinhard Fatke. Piper, Munich 1971, ISBN 3-492-01916-1 .
  • with David Wineman: Controlling aggressive behavior in children. Edited and with an introduction by Reinhard Fatke. Piper, Munich 1976, ISBN 3-492-10129-1 .
  • with David Wineman: Children who hate. Dissolution and breakdown of self-control. Edited and with an afterword by Reinhard Fatke. Piper, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-492-02452-1 .

literature

  • Albert E. Trieschmann among others: Education in a therapeutic milieu. A model. Lambertus, Freiburg im Breisgau 1975, ISBN 3-7841-0097-X .
  • Reinhard Fatke: Fritz Redl (1902–1988). In: Reinhard Fatke, Horst Scarbath (Ed.): Pioneers of Psychoanalytic Pedagogy. Lang, Bern / Frankfurt am Main 1995, ISBN 3-631-48334-1 , pp. 83-105.
  • Marc Rothballer: Children who hate and psychoanalysts who educate: on the life and work of Fritz Redl (1902–1988) . In: youth welfare . tape 57 , no. 2 , 2019, p. 121-128 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Marc Rothballer: Children who hate and psychoanalysts who educate: on the life and work of Fritz Redl (1902–1988) . In: youth welfare . tape 57 , no. 2 , 2019, p. 121–128, here: p. 122 .
personal data
SURNAME Redl, Fritz
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian psychoanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1902
PLACE OF BIRTH Schladming , Styria
DATE OF DEATH February 9, 1988
Place of death North Adams , Massachusetts