Kurt Goldstein (neurologist)

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Kurt Goldstein (born November 6, 1878 in Katowice , † September 19, 1965 in New York ) was a German, later American neurologist and psychiatrist. He is considered a pioneer in neuropsychology and psychosomatics . Goldstein turned against an atomistic view of the human being, which focused on the cerebral localization of individual brain functions. Instead, Goldstein was interested in the compensatory reactions of the remaining brain in brain-injured patients and thus developed a "holistic neurology".

Life

Berlin memorial plaque on the house, Turmstrasse 21, in Berlin-Moabit

Kurt Goldstein was born the seventh of nine children of a Jewish family in Katowice, what was then Upper Silesia . His father was Abraham Goldstein (1836-1902), his mother Rosalie Cassirer (1845-1911), an aunt of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer . He obtained his maturity certificate in Kattowitz in 1898 and then studied medicine in Heidelberg (summer semester 1900) and Breslau . During his studies he dealt with neuroanatomy . In 1903 his first publication appeared in "Contributions to the history of the development of the human brain". In the same year he passed the state medical examination and received his doctorate from Carl Wernicke on “The composition of the rear strands. Anatomical Contributions and Critical Review ”.

After working as an assistant in various places, he worked in the psychiatric clinic in Königsberg from 1906 to 1914 . In 1907 Goldstein completed his habilitation there on a psychiatric topic (“On the reality judgment of hallucinatory perceptions”) and in 1912 received the title “Professor”.

At the end of 1914 Goldstein went to the neurological institute Ludwig Edingers in Frankfurt am Main as head of the pathology department , which had become part of the newly founded Frankfurt University . During the First World War Goldstein worked as a doctor in several hospitals in Frankfurt, especially the reserve hospital 214 especially for brain injured and nervous patients. Here Goldstein was able to pursue his interest in holistic care for brain-damaged soldiers . He worked intensively with the Gestalt psychologist Adhémar Gelb on the therapy and rehabilitation of patients.

This work led to the establishment of the Institute for Research into the Consequences of Brain Injuries in 1916 , which Goldstein headed until 1930. After Edinger's death in 1918, Goldstein took over the provisional management of the neurological institute. It was not until 1922 that he was appointed regular director of the Neurological Institute, having recently been awarded an associate professor in neurology. In 1923 he was appointed personal professor of neurology.

Goldstein advocated psychotherapy in the 1920s. Goldstein was a member of the board of directors of the General Medical Society for Psychotherapy and co-founded the International Society for Psychotherapy in 1927. His neurological findings and holistic approach influenced many students and employees who later became known. These included, for example, the philosophers Aron Gurwitsch and Max Horkheimer and the psychotherapists SH Foulkes , Fritz Perls and Frieda Fromm-Reichmann . His most important assistant in Frankfurt was the neurologist and psychiatrist Walther Riese .

Goldstein's theories became a fundamental part of Gestalt therapy through Fritz Perls , who worked for one year as an assistant doctor at Goldstein in 1926, and Perls' future wife Laura Perls , who did her doctorate in Gestalt psychology with Adhémar Gelb . Goldstein was also in intellectual exchange with his cousin, the philosopher Ernst Cassirer , and with the Protestant theologian and philosopher Paul Tillich .

Because he was not allowed to set up his own bed department due to limited urban funds and the preference of another university professor (the neurologist and psychiatrist Karl Kleist ), Goldstein moved to Berlin in 1930, where he was able to take over a newly opened neurological department at the Moabit Hospital .

After Hitler came to power in 1933, Goldstein was arrested by members of the SA , mistreated in the SA prison in Papestrasse and forced to emigrate. He fled by train to Zurich and after a short stay on to Amsterdam . The Rockefeller Foundation supported him for a year in Amsterdam, where he wrote his main work, The Structure of the Organism , which was published in German in 1934 (it appeared in English in 1939). In the period from the end of September to the beginning of October 1934, Goldstein emigrated to the USA (he took US citizenship in 1941). From 1936 he worked as a professor of clinical psychiatry (without salary) at Columbia University , New York and as head of the new neurophysiological laboratory at Montefiore Hospital. In 1938/39 he was visiting professor at Harvard University and from 1940 to 1945 he was clinical professor of neurology at Tufts College Medical School , Boston. From 1945 Goldstein was back in New York, opened a private practice and taught at various institutions. In 1959 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

In 1905 he married Ida Zuckermann and had three daughters with her. He divorced Ida in 1934 and married the psychologist and neurologist Eva Rothmann in August of the same year. Eva Rothmann committed suicide in 1960 after years of depressive illness.

Kurt Goldstein died in 1965 after suffering a stroke three weeks earlier.

Create

His main work is entitled The Structure of the Organism (1934). Since his early joint research work in Frankfurt and Berlin with the Gestalt psychologist Adhémar Gelb and the co-editor of the journal Psychologische Forschung (together with Max Wertheimer , Wolfgang Köhler and Kurt Koffka ), his life's work has been closely linked to Gestalt psychology and Gestalt theory . Goldstein was one of the founders of humanistic psychology and was co-editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology .

Goldstein was an early critic of an understanding of brain functions and spatially rigidly localized functional centers (e.g. language center ) based exclusively on topographical brain maps : he did not see pathological failures in the symptoms of the treated brain injuries, as usual, but also interpreted them as an attempt by the entire organism to find a new balance with reduced brain performance due to the lesion. Based on his assumption that the location of a brain lesion is not identical to the location of the brain function (he continued the findings of the brain researcher Constantin von Monakow ), completely new approaches to psychological analysis and the treatment of brain-injured people emerged. Ultimately, they made a decisive contribution to the establishment of neuropsychology as a new scientific discipline. The topicality of Goldstein's holistic approach is also documented by the new edition of his main work in English with an introduction by Oliver Sacks .

In his main work Goldstein called for a holistic method of researching life processes and applied it to the organism himself. In doing so, u. a. the so-called organismic equilibrium and the criticism of the behavioristic reflex arc theory (the simple stimulus-response pattern), the focus of his work. He stated: “A closer observation teaches that the reaction that occurs to a stimulus can not only vary, but that the process is never exhausted in the isolated reaction, but that other areas, indeed the whole organism, are always involved in the reaction in different ways are involved . ”About the self-regulation of the organism in dealing with the environment, he said u. a .: For the organism it is necessary that "every change in the organism caused by the environmental stimuli is balanced out again in a certain time, so that the organism returns to that 'middle' state of excitation that corresponds to its being, this' is 'adequate'. "Of particular importance here is that Goldstein does not understand equilibrium as a return to a" zero point ", ie to a balance in the form of" relaxation ", but rather of a" medium "state of excitement as" normal " state goes out.

Goldstein is considered to be one of the pioneers of the concept of self-actualization. As early as 1934 he speaks of an endeavor of the organism to realize its individual character or to do justice to the tasks in its milieu that this poses to it. For him, “good shape” means the specific form of confrontation between the organism and the world in which the organism is best realized according to its essence. By “essence” Goldstein understands the peculiarities of the organism's individuality and the “maintenance of the relative constancy of the organism”. Later, in his English-language writings, this tendency was given the designation "self-actualization", adopted into German as "self-actualization" .

In exile, Goldstein took part in the multidisciplinary research into the authoritarian character initiated by Max Horkheimer and Erich Fromm .

Fonts

  • On the treatment of "monosymptomatic" hysteria in soldiers . In: Neurologisches Zentralblatt 35 (1916), pp. 842-852.
  • (with Adhémar Gelb as ed.): Psychological analyzes of brain pathological cases based on examinations of brain injuries . Vol. 1. Springer, Berlin 1918
  • The treatment, care and assessment of the brain injured (1919)
  • Selected Papers / Selected Writings . Edited by Aron Gurwitsch, Else M. Goldstein Haudek, William E. Haudek. With an introduction by Aron Gurwitsch. Nijhoff, The Hague 1971; contains u. a.
    • The symptom, its origin and significance for our conception of the structure and function of the nervous system (1925), pp. 126–153
    • About Aphasia (1927), pp. 154-230
    • On the problem of fear (1927), pp. 231-262
  • The structure of the organism. Introduction to biology with a special focus on experiences with sick people. Nijhoff, Den Haag 1934 (photomechanical reprint: Nijhoff, Den Haag 1963. New edition, edited by Thomas Hoffmann and Frank W. Stahnisch, with a foreword by Bernhard Waldenfels and an foreword by Anne Harrington. Fink Verlag, Paderborn 2014, ISBN 978- 3-7705-5281-8 . Translation into English: The organism. A holistic approach to biology derived from pathological data in man. Foreword by Karl S. Lashley, American Book Company, New York 1939. New edition with a foreword by Oliver Sacks. Zone Books, New York 1995, ISBN 0-942299-96-5 )
  • Human Nature in the Light of Psychopathology. Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1940 (2nd edition Schocken, New York 1947; new edition Scholar's Choice Edition 2015, ISBN 978-1-298-02405-3 )
  • with Martin Scheerer: Abstract and Concrete Behavior. An Experimental Study With Special Tests. In: Psychological Monographs , Volume 53, 1941, Issue 2, pp. 1–151
  • with Eugenia Hanfmann and M. Rickers-Ovsiankina: Case Lanuti: Extreme Concretization of Behavior Due to Damage of the Brain Cortex. In: Psychological Monographs , Vol. 57, 1944, Issue 4, pp. 1-72
  • with Martin Scheerer and Eva Rothmann: A Case of “Idiot Savant”: An Experimental Study of Personality Organization. In: Psychological Monographs , Vol. 58, 1945, Issue 4, pp. 1-63

literature

Web links

Commons : Kurt Goldstein  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Anne Harrington: The Search for Wholeness. The history of biological-psychological holistic teaching: From the German Empire to the New Age movement. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 2002, p. 294.
  2. ↑ Udo Benzenhöfer: Kurt Goldstein's holistic neurology . In: Research Frankfurt vol. 31 (2014), issue 1, p. 101.
  3. ↑ Bernd Bocian: Fritz Perls in Berlin 1893-1933: Expressionism - Psychoanalysis - Judaism . Peter Hammer Verlag, Wuppertal 2007, p. 190 ff. S. a .: A. Votsmeier: Gestalt therapy and the "organismic theory" - the influence of Kurt Goldstein . In: Gestalt therapy , 1, 1995, pp. 2-16.
  4. ↑ Udo Benzenhöfer, Gisela Hack-Molitor: On the emigration of the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. Münster / Ulm 2017, pp. 49–50, 77.
  5. ↑ Udo Benzenhöfer, Gisela Hack-Molitor: On the emigration of the neurologist Kurt Goldstein. Münster / Ulm 2017, pp. 34–39.
  6. ↑ Goldstein, 1934, p. 131
  7. ↑ Goldstein, 1934, p. 75
  8. ↑ Goldstein 1934, p. 265
  9. ↑ Goldstein 1934, p. 321
  10. ↑ Goldstein 1934, p. 220.
  11. ↑ Kurt Goldstein: Selected Papers / Selected Writings, The Hague 1971, p. 420
personal data
SURNAME Goldstein, Kurt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Neurologist and psychiatrist
DATE OF BIRTH November 6, 1878
PLACE OF BIRTH Katowice
DATE OF DEATH September 19, 1965
Place of death new York