Heinz Wiegmann

Heinz Wiegmann (1980)

Heinz Wiegmann (born March 6, 1915 in Berlin ; † June 25, 1981 there ) was a German doctor and the founder of the oldest still working psychosomatic clinic in Germany.

Family and education

Heinz Wiegmann was born on March 6, 1915 in Berlin near Alexanderplatz . His parents were merchants. In 1934, Heinz Wiegmann passed the Abitur. He then studied medicine at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin (today Humboldt University ). In 1939 Wiegmann received his license to practice medicine and in 1941 he received his doctorate .

In 1936 Wiegmann began training in psychoanalysis at the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy , which was also called the Reich Institute. Nazi rule forced the merger of psychoanalysts from the Freud , Jung and Adler directions, and Wiegmann familiarized himself with all the directions. However, the institute lacked many emigrated Jewish members who were already important at the time. Wiegmann completed his psychoanalytic training on June 1, 1942 . In the same year he became a member of the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy . After the war he became a member of the German Psychoanalytic Society . Wiegmann married in 1947 and had two sons in 1949 and 1950.

Employment until the clinic was founded

From 1941 to 1945 Wiegmann was a soldier in the Air Force . He was used as a military doctor and later became head of a sick bay. Finally there was a promotion to the medical officer . From 1944 to 1945 Wiegmann worked as a psychotherapist in a division of the Air Force for soldiers with psychogenic disorders. After the war, from May 1945 to December 1946, Wiegmann was the chief medical officer in the Berlin district of Charlottenburg .

The Wiegmann Clinic

As early as 1939 Wiegmann developed the idea of ​​founding a clinic for psychogenic diseases. When planning his clinic, Heinz Wiegmann could hardly rely on models from existing clinics for inpatient psychotherapy. The only older clinic, the Schloss Tegel sanatorium , only existed from 1927 to 1931. Its founder, Ernst Simmel, was Jewish and emigrated to the USA at the beginning of the National Socialist dictatorship. His notes were hardly accessible at the time. In the war and post-war years, Wiegmann also did not have the opportunity to look at the analytical clinics that were founded in America and England.

On November 1, 1948, Wiegmann opened his clinic in Berlin, at Halmstrasse No. 2 in Charlottenburg . It had 19 beds. However, the equipment was initially completely inadequate. In addition to Heinz Wiegmann, the medical staff initially consisted of only one assistant doctor. In 1949 the clinic moved to a larger house in Berlin-Grunewald at Höhmannstrasse 2. When it opened, the clinic now had 36 beds and the number of beds was gradually increased to 54 beds. From the outset, the clinic's treatment concept included individual and group therapy based on depth psychology, as well as autogenic training .

In 1968 Wiegmann published the experiences from the first 20 years of the clinic in his book “The Neurotic in the Clinic”. In 1976 the range of therapies at the clinic was expanded to include creative therapy and in 1983 to include concentrative movement therapy .

In 1981 Heinz Wiegmann died. Up until then, around 10,500 patients had been treated in the clinic. Heinz Wiegmann's wife, Clara Sibylla Wiegmann, was granted the license to continue operating the clinic. Dr. Horst Kallfass took over the medical management of the clinic and from 2001 Dr. Dorothee Kress chief physician. In 2004 the clinic was sold to the DRK Sisterhood in Berlin . In 2005 the clinic moved to the largest location of the DRK-Kliniken-Berlin in Westend . Here the Wiegmann Clinic continues to work essentially according to the Heinz Wiegmann concept.

Sources, literature and web links

• Heinz Wiegmann: The neurotic in the clinic . Vandenhoeck + Ruprecht, Göttingen 1968.
• Alfred Köhler: In Memoriam Heinz Wiegmann . In: Journal for Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychoanalysis . 28th year, No. 3, 1982.
• Sender Free Berlin, Berliner Abendschau from January 9th, 1969: Clinic for psychogenic disorders . (Length: 4:40 minutes, in the archive of Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg rbb).
• Angela Kijewski: 60 years of the Wiegmann Clinic