Michael Winterhoff

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Michael Winterhoff (2010)

Michael Winterhoff (born January 3, 1955 in Bonn ) is a German child and youth psychiatrist , psychotherapist and author . His works achieve high editions and a correspondingly large media response, but in the professional world they are widely criticized.

Life

Michael Winterhoff grew up as the second of four siblings in Bonn. The parents ran a café and pastry shop on site. After primary school, he first attended secondary school, but switched to a secondary school at an early age, where he became the best in his class. He received decisive impulses for his later development as a participant and ultimately as an active leader of youth groups. During this time he wanted to study medicine. Accordingly, he then completed an upper school level in order to pass the Abitur.

From 1977 to 1983 he studied human medicine at the University of Bonn (PhD in 1984, dissertation topic: gastrin secretion in ulcer diathesis through Winkelbauer-Starlinger surgery on dogs ). Winterhoff's initial interest in pediatric surgery developed from general pediatrics to child psychiatry.

Since 1988 he has been working as a specialist in child and adolescent psychiatry in his own practice in Bonn. He primarily deals with psychological development disorders in children and adolescents from a depth psychological perspective.

Central theses

Child development

According to Winterhoff, a fundamental mistake in assessing the child is the assumption that child behavior is an expression of personality . Here, development-specific behaviors are misunderstood as individual characteristics, because, according to Winterhoff, children do not have a personality up to the age of 7. This development does not begin until the age of eight.

Winterhoff's reconstruction of child development refers to the psychoanalytic tradition. In free synopsis he combines the Freudian model of infantile sexual development with insights from Erik Erikson's step model . Up to the age of 6, children go through the oral (0–2 years), the anal (3–4 years) and the “ magic-oedipal ” phase ( 5–6 years of age). These phases are linked to corresponding “world views” in which the child's development-specific understanding of self and reality is presented. Only when the last phase has been completed is a child "[...] able to recognize that a self-reaction can trigger a counter-reaction in the other." It has learned to recognize self-components in conflicts and is therefore “ ready for school ” in the true sense ".

In order to be able to complete these developmental phases, the child needs a parental counterpart who behaves phase-specifically and thus ensures that these developmental steps can be completed. In contrast to this, according to Winterhoff, there is the widespread error that understands the development of the psyche as an autonomous, self-running process. This is where his criticism of the existing “basic consensus of society” begins, which gets bogged down in pedagogical debates without reflecting on the preconditions of attained psychological maturity.

Critical diagnosis

In his book Why Our Children Are Tyrants: Or: The Abolition of Childhood, Winterhoff advocates the thesis that the current educational climate is causing children's development to come to a standstill. As a child psychiatrist, Winterhoff finds the cause of the epidemic increase in behavioral problems in children in the psyche of adults. This deficiency is caused here by specific bad attitudes due to social development that hinder the maturation of the offspring:

  • Child as partner : the child is treated as an adult with equal rights. The adult is on a par with the child. He has been observing this trend since the early 1990s. Winterhoff opposes modern, “partnership-based” pedagogy, although he does not want his criticism to be understood as a contribution to the pedagogical debate.
  • Projection : Winterhoff calls the adult's need to be loved by the child, if this need corrupts the educational authority. The socially disappointed adult moves “in the projection ” on a level below the child in order to compensate for his need for love and recognition. For fear of losing love, the educator finds himself in a position of passive, diagnostic observation in order to then delegate educational problems to therapeutic authorities. The child psychiatrist has been observing this trend since the mid-1990s.
  • Symbiosis : the child becomes part of the adult as part of a psychological fusion ( symbiosis ). The symbiosis is at the same time the extreme form in the descending triad of bad postures, in which no mental demarcation is recognizable. This form of decay has been the end point of a devastating undesirable development since the turn of the millennium.

In his diagnosis of the current, societal upbringing climate, Winterhoff sees forms of excessive demands or emotional abuse of the child typical of the time. The increasing excessive demands of adults (example: liberalization of the telecommunications market) shift the natural power base in favor of the younger generation and ultimately lead, according to Winterhoff, to a complete reversal of power, which he describes as the tyranny of the child. Depending on general societal undesirable developments, the adults succeed less and less in being a supportive counterpart to the children. Society draws on a horde of child tyrants on an epidemic scale, the further development of which poses a threat to society as a whole.

Since 2008, according to Winterhoff, this development has been further strengthened by digitization . The overstimulation caused by information (keyword: smartphones ) leads to more and more adults in a state of depression, which he calls "catastrophe mode". In order to restore the lack of demarcation among those affected, Winterhoff recommends extended walks in the forest lasting several hours, following his own example, and a critical reflection on the ubiquitous concept of excessive demands (myth of excessive demands. What we gain when we behave as adults, 2015). Winterhoff predicts that without an early change in behavior “our society would hate its children!” The emotional abuse of children under the guise of a partnership endangers the cultural viability of society. He calls for the mental development of children to be the focus of education. Children are not little adults. Only if they are treated like children can they be enabled to become “viable in a positive sense”.

Media presence

Winterhoff's book Why Our Children Become Tyrants: Or: The Abolition of Childhood reached a circulation of 280,000 copies within a year, according to the publisher's advertising. The book landed in the 2008 annual bestseller list of the magazine Der Spiegel in fourth place among non-fiction books. This debut brought Winterhoff a considerable media presence as a guest on talk shows and in discussion forums. His successor Tyrants Don't Have to Be was briefly number 1 on the Spiegel bestseller list in January 2009 . In 2010 a third volume was published with the title Personalities instead of Tyrants, which, in collaboration with industrial psychologist Isabel Thielen, applies Winterhoff's findings to the training sector. For example, the insufficient maturity of many school leavers is explained, among other things, with the relationship disorders identified in the first volumes.

According to the publisher, the total sales of his publications in 2017 were 1.3 million copies. Above all, the theses of his debut sparked a controversial public debate, which found critical expression in scientific publications on the current education and training situation in Germany.

reception

Shortly after Winterhoff's first book was published, the pedagogue and family therapist Wolfgang Bergmann criticized the work. He accused him of aiming one-sidedly at obedience with his undifferentiated theses and recommendations and thus promoting a cold educational climate. According to Bergmann, obedience hinders the intelligence, development and freedom of a child.

In a review of the Spiegel bestseller lists in 2009, the literary critic Denis Scheck criticized the demagogic style of Winterhoff's debut Why Our Children Become Tyrants : In questions of upbringing, the unconditional primacy of form applies. Tyrants don't have to be for the author's second work , which was also on the bestseller list at the time, he found a similarly summarizing criticism: “People who are not grown up themselves, according to the general thesis of the youth psychiatrist Winterhoff, make bad parents. It may sound plausible anyway. Certainly, however, adult readers do not want to be addressed in the crudely manipulative tone of this non-fiction book. "

The journalist Doris Schneyink wrote in Stern about his book SOS Kinderseele : "Populist, without any empirical evidence."

During this time , the journalist Martin Spiewak contrasted Winterhoff's theses with more recent scientific investigations that would come to diametrically different results. Winterhoff relies exclusively on case reports from his own therapeutic practice, which he generalizes: "It's like a prison director writing a book about the morality of society and citing the criminal careers of his inmates as evidence." Spiewak referred in particular to the study by the psychologist Martin Dornes (see below) on the modernization of the soul from 2012.

In this survey based on empirical findings, Martin Dornes critically discussed the current topoi of the debate on education. Winterhoff, according to Dornes, set his own accent by diagnosing the supposed increase in cases of illness in children as the actual increase in developmental disorders caused by deficient upbringing (renouncing upbringing). He advocates a "modified parentification thesis " on which his "disaster diagnosis" is based. Reliable statistics and serious assessments of the social relevance of the phenomena described cannot be found with the author. In fact, the number of faulty, symptom-prone children in the late 1950s was higher than it is today. Dornes distrusts Winterhoff's dating information (change in the concept of upbringing in the 1990s) and finds the conjured decline scenario of a coming social collapse "exalted". He criticizes the "inappropriately negative assessment" of the modern style of upbringing and considers the phenomena of parenthood incapable of raising children to be a minority problem, the actual occurrence of which, based on empirical evidence, is likely to be 7.5 to 10%. The thesis of the narcissistic tyrant, according to Dornes, is “old hat”, the unnamed forerunners of which can be found in the educational literature of the 50s and 70s. In particular, Winterhoff's “projection” had already been presented as a critique of narcissism (adults in need of narcissism produce narcissistically fixed children) in Thomas Ziehe's study on the new type of socialization (puberty and narcissism, 1975).

The historian Miriam Gebhardt drew attention to the fact that the talk of “childish tyrants” is typically German, the roots of which lie in the authoritarian pedagogy of the Nazi era, such as the relevant educational guides of Johanna Haarer .

The curative educator Henning Köhler , on the other hand, found the roots of this view in the broader tradition of black pedagogy . He devoted a detailed review of Winterhoff's theses, in which, among other things, the scientific claim with which the child psychiatrist appears. He uses an outdated narcissism term from classical psychoanalysis , which gives the obsolete pattern for the standard diagnosis of “early childhood narcissistic disorder” or fixation, namely Winterhoff's talk about standing still at the level of a 10 to 16 month old child. Citing recent research by Martin Dornes , for example, knowledge of the subjectivity of the other, the ability to empathize and communicate in infants, is innate “core knowledge” and not the child's fantasy of omnipotence of tyrannical control over people as objects. As the alleged “savior” in the “childhood crisis area”, Winterhoff agitated “completely inappropriate restorative propaganda”, while profound contributions to the debate on education remained largely unheard of.

The journalist Alex Rühle held against Winterhoff in 2019, in his new work Germany dumbfounded "with the flat tank through the theoretical ground (to thunder)" and spread "roaring end-time rhetoric". This is a “shame” in view of the relevant core thesis: “The so-called 'open lessons' far too often leave students and teachers alone. When teachers become 'learning guides', it runs counter to the children's need for orientation and attachment. ”Winterhoff's socio-psychological thesis of a political stability at risk, which“ does not bode well for all of our future ”, Rühle described as“ rather under-complex to questionable ”. . In his critical double review, he presented Winterhoff with the work Is school too stupid for our children? of the FAZ editor Jürgen Kaube opposite. From this he took a similar critical attitude as Winterhoff (“The school of the present is a faulty construction”) and partly the same points of criticism, for example a “digitization of schools in far too early years”. However, this happens "in a completely different tone (...) for the sake of simplicity one could call it intelligent". Instead of Winterhoff's dramatization and distortion "into the apocalyptic", Kaube comes across as "funny, competent and saturated with empirical data and facts" and shows "idealistic emphasis".

Works

Until 2013, i.e. in his first publications, Winterhoff worked with Carsten Tergast as a co-author.

  • Why our children become tyrants: Or: The abolition of childhood. Gütersloher Verlagshaus , Gütersloh 2008, ISBN 978-3-579-06980-7 .
  • Tyrants don't have to be: Why education isn't enough - ways out. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2009, ISBN 978-3-579-06899-2 .
  • Personalities instead of tyrants: Or: How young people arrive in life and work. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2010, ISBN 978-3-579-06867-1 .
  • Let children be children again! Or: the return to intuition. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2011, ISBN 978-3-579-06750-6 .
  • Modern developmental disorders in children and adolescents Analysis - challenges and tasks - ways out. A lecture on DVD by Michael Winterhoff. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2011, ISBN 978-3-579-07636-2 .
  • SOS children's soul. What endangers the emotional and social development of our children - and what we can do about it. C. Bertelsmann, Munich 2013, ISBN 978-3-570-10172-8 .
  • The myth of being overwhelmed. What we gain when we act as adults. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2015, ISBN 978-3-579-06620-2 .
  • The rediscovery of childhood. How we make our children happy and fit for life. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2017, ISBN 978-3-579-08662-0 .
  • Germany dumbs down: How the education system is blocking the future of our children. Gütersloher Verlagshaus, Gütersloh 2019, ISBN 978-3-579-01468-5 .

literature

  • Olaf Link: Education and information. A help to understand the function of Super-Nanny, Bernhard Bueb and Michael Winterhoff in the historical-social context . Kid Verlag, Bonn 2011, ISBN 978-3-929386-31-8 .

Web links

Commons : Michael Winterhoff  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Let the children have their childhood. Michael Winterhoff in conversation with Katrin Heise, Deutschlandfunk Kultur , August 31, 2017, audio (36:05), accessed on September 5, 2017.
  2. ↑ Winterhoff (2008), p. 28.
  3. ↑ Winterhoff expressly refrains from entering into a detailed technical debate at this point. See Winterhoff (2008), p. 35.
  4. ↑ Winterhoff (2008), p. 36.
  5. ↑ cf. on this and the following: Winterhoff (2008) and "Auf dem Stand eines Zwei -jahres" Michael Winterhoff in an interview, Spiegel online, May 4, 2010, accessed on March 17, 2017.
  6. ↑ For the precise dating of this three-stage climax , however, the author provides different information. It only seems clear that until the mid-1990s, according to Winterhoff, children had normal mental development and, in contrast to the current situation, the upbringing of the 50s produced adults who were “fit for life”, “capable of working and relational”. Winterhoff justifies this development with the independence of the child's maturation process from the respective style of upbringing and the apparently epidemic decline of "self-contained" adults in the last two decades. See: Michael Winterhoff (2017): His Majesty the Baby: How parenting makes you narcissistic. Lecture at the RPP Institute in Vienna , May 6, 2017, video, 62 min.
  7. ↑ To validate his observations see: “Four to five hours in the forest.” Moritz Rosenkranz in an interview with Michael Winterhoff, General-Anzeiger Bonn, October 12, 2016, accessed on March 17, 2017
  8. ↑ Annual bestseller list 2008 at buchreport.de ( Memento from April 25, 2009 in the Internet Archive ).
  9. ↑ To hell with discipline . Interview with Wolfgang Bergmann, SZ, February 20, 2009, accessed July 11, 2019
  10. ↑ Best seller review: Ugly is reliable . In: Der Tagesspiegel , May 3, 2009, accessed on March 19, 2017.
  11. ↑ Stern, October 17, 2013, p. IIIB / 2.
  12. ↑ Martin Spiewak: We are not problem children! In: The time. dated September 11, 2014, p. 15.
  13. ↑ Martin Dornes: The modernization of the soul. Frankfurt am Main, 2012, p. 309.
  14. ↑ Martin Dornes: The modernization of the soul. Frankfurt am Main, 2012; to Winterhoff here chap. Sick or uneducated? P. 414 ff.
  15. ↑ The eternal fear of the little tyrant. Berliner Morgenpost, January 16, 2010, accessed on November 16, 2016 ; as well as upbringing yesterday ( memento from January 8, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), lecture at the Evangelical Academy Tutzing , (PDF 43.4 kB).
  16. ↑ Henning Köhler: Dressage Education? No thanks! The individual educational answer to Michael Winterhoff and Bernhard Bueb. PDF, 437 kB, accessed on November 21, 2016.
  17. ↑ Alex Rühle : The school as a waiting room. Chargeable. SZ , May 23, 2019, accessed on May 24, 2019 .
  18. ↑ zeit.de June 1, 2019 / Martin Spiewak : Review
personal data
SURNAME Winterhoff, Michael
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German child and youth psychiatrist, psychotherapist and author
DATE OF BIRTH January 3, 1955
PLACE OF BIRTH Bonn