James Lewin

James Lewin (born October 28, 1887 in Berlin , † December 31, 1937 in Chelyabinsk , USSR ) was a German psychiatrist .

Life

James Lewin was the son of the merchant couple Nathan Lewin (1852–1909) and Agathe Lewin nee. Wedel (1853-1904), which originally came from Pomeranian Prussia. He was the third of five children. He graduated from the Sophien-Gymnasium in Berlin with the final examination. He then studied medicine and philosophy at the Friedrich Wilhelms University from the winter semester 1907/08. He studied for one semester in Leipzig, where he attended courses from Wilhelm Wundt and Wilhelm Wirth . Lewin received his PhD in philosophy on the theory of ideas of the French idealistic pantheist Nicolas Malebranche ; this work is still cited today in philosophical reference works. In October 1913 Lewin received his license to practice medicine with the grade "sufficient". He then worked as an assistant to Ernst Simmerling in the "Insane Clinic of the University of Kiel", but then moved to Leipzig. Here he became an assistant doctor to Paul Flechsig at the university psychiatric and nervous clinic, where he received his doctorate for the second time in 1917. In this work he wrote about situation psychoses : There are psychotic states both in freedom and in detention, which owe their origin to a so-to-speak accidental combination of internal and external moments and which represent only an episode in the life and fate of the personality. They therefore deserve to be summarized in a common group of situation psychoses, which, moreover, show different pictures of symptoms and pathogenesis, depending on the respective circumstances and individuality, even if the number of slightly degenerate predominates in general.

In the same year he married the soprano singer Clara Abramowitz, the marriage resulted in a son, Adolf Norbert Lewin. At this time he was drafted into the war, presumably in a medical unit. After the war he opened a private practice in Berlin-Schöneberg as a doctor for nervous and gynecological diseases. The marriage ended in divorce in 1924.

At the end of April 1933 he lost his health insurance license as a Jewish doctor and was finally forced to leave Germany. He was already on his way to Abyssinia , but decided to emigrate to France because of heart problems. In December 1933 he asked the German authorities to transfer his financial estate to France, at which point he was already in Paris. According to the interrogation files of the NKVD , he was given the choice of either deporting his family to a concentration camp or becoming a Gestapo agent in Berlin in September 1933 . On February 14, 1936, he arrived in Moscow on a Soviet work visa and received a position as senior researcher at the Scientific Research Institute for Psychiatry and Neuropathology Vasily V. Kramer. He tried to work seriously scientifically here. The last sign of life from James Lewin comes from October 10, 1936, when he attended the meeting of the Moscow Society for Neuropathology and Psychiatry, a comment by Lewin was recorded here. After that he was believed to be a victim of the Stalinist purges. On September 8, 1937, he was arrested in the course of the German operation of the NKVD and at the end of October he confessed to "anti-Soviet counter-revolutionary activities, espionage for the Gestapo and planning terrorist attacks". The interrogation files of the NKVD also indicate that he was supposed to have run an ornamental fish shop in Paris that was used for meetings of the Gestapo. He is said to have used his stay in Moscow to set up a production laboratory for chemical-bacteriological weapons. Lewin's confession was probably extorted under torture or coercion. On December 31, 1937, he was sentenced to death and executed. He was probably buried in a mass grave. On June 22, 2007 he was rehabilitated and exonerated by the Russian Federation.

Act

He was an active member of the Berlin Society for Psychiatry and Nervous Diseases and gave several lectures there. His publications include a monograph on Ludwig Klages ' philosophy. He wrote numerous psychiatric essays, which are characterized by an epistemological background. Based on Alfred Erich Hoches' theory of syndrome, he called in his writings to " adopt disease types instead of disease units ." "The guy takes the symptoms from one or the other constructed clinical picture, without being able to count with a certain disease unit with certainty." He called for a psychopathology that "phenomenologically describes the psychological structure of pathological experiences without considering clinical evaluations."

Web links

• James Lewin, Dr. Med. Et. Phil., 1887-1937 (English CV)
• Robin Pape: Biography of James Lewin In: Biographical Archives of Psychiatry (BIAPSY) , 2015.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} H. Steinberg, O. Somburg and GRB Boocock "The German-Jewish psychiatrist James Lewin - A victim that has been forgotten twice" . The neurologist 2010.
2. ↑ Lewin, L. (1917) About situation psychoses. A contribution to the transitory, especially adhesive psychotic disorders. Oh Psychiatr Nervenkr 58: 533-598.