Oliver Brachfeld

Oliver Brachfeld or Ferenç (Franz) Olivér Brachfeld (born February 18, 1908 in Budapest , † September 2, 1967 in Quito ) was a Hungarian psychologist and representative of individual psychology .

Life

Ferenç Olivér Brachfeld came from a Catholic-Jewish family. After graduating from the Lutheran Gymnasium in Budapest, he enrolled for a year at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Vienna , where he also attended medical lectures. Already in the second semester of his university studies he became a student of Alfred Adler , at the age of 20 he was one of his inner circle of employees and was a permanent employee of the International Journal for Individual Psychology (IZI).

After studying for two years in Paris , where he studied at the Sorbonne , the Institut de Psychologie and the Catholic University “Institut Catholique”, he returned to Budapest. There he did his doctorate after studying for two years at the university. In 1929 he went on a lecture tour to Spain, a. a. to the University of Madrid . In 1931 he moved to Barcelona and became a lecturer at the Philosophical Faculty, at the Pedagogical Seminar and at the "Instituto Psicotécnico". In Barcelona he maintained good contacts with Ortega y Gasset .

The Spanish Civil War forced him to study in France from 1931 to 1942. From January 1951 he was a professor at the "Instituto de Psicosíntesis y Relaciones Humanas" at the Universidad de Los Andes (ULA) (founded 1785) in Mérida (Venezuela) . In 1957 he returned to Barcelona, ​​where he married a Catalan woman. From there he developed a lively travel and teaching activity in Germany and at the universities of Bogotá and Quito. In 1960, Brachfeld was appointed honorary professor at the Psychological Institute in Münster by Wolfgang Metzger .

In 1962, together with Wolfgang Metzger, Johannes Neumann, Kurt Seelmann , Alfons Simon , Felix Scherke and Kurt Weinmann, he was a founding member of the German Alfred Adler Society (AAG), which was renamed the German Society for Individual Psychology in 1970 .

In 1966, Brachfeld re-published Adler’s book Knowledge of Human Beings (first edition 1927). After Brachfeld's early death, Wolfgang Metzger took over the jointly envisaged task of the German complete edition of Adlerscher Schriften and carried it on.

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Oliver Brachfeld was a psychologist with extensive knowledge of languages ​​(Hungarian, German, Spanish, Catalan), literature, art, philosophy, sociology and ethnology. He translated psychological and literary works into Spanish and Catalan.

With his 1937 Adler translation, he made individual psychology accessible to the Spanish-speaking world. He taught a large part of his life in South America, especially Venezuela. As an alternative to the often misunderstood “individual psychology” he preferred the term “psychosynthesis”.

In 1953 he also published his main work “ Inferiority feelings in the individual and in the community” in German (as a translation from English and French). It represents a comprehensive study of the concept of Adler's "feeling of inferiority" and was a first summary of Adler's ideas with regard to social and cultural psychological aspects. The concept of the feeling of inferiority and its compensation is of central importance for the entire depth psychology . Behind the phrases “I'm worthless!”, “I can't do that!”, “I don't look good, I'm too small, too fat!”, “My partner doesn't accept me!”, “I reject strangers ! "," We can't change the circumstances! "Feelings of inferiority hide. Such feelings of inferiority prevent the development of a free and healthy striving for self-worth. It is the task of every individual and the social community to deal with them sensibly. In addition Brachfeld:

“In the toddler we found that the profound feeling of insecurity caused by the mere fact of being a very imperfect specimen of the human species is something perfectly normal. If, however, the feeling of inferiority is too strong, a neurotic "life plan" is formed on the way to compensation, which leads from a real, but exaggerated inferiority to a more or less imagined superiority. The coexistence of these two opposing poles - "inferiority": felt to be disadvantageous with unusual intensity, and "superiority": longed for, but fictitious - causes first in the child, then in the adult, a certain inconsistency in his experiences of self-worth. "

Fonts

• Magyar vonatkozások a régi katalán irodalomban és a katalán népballadaban , Diss. Budapest 1930 (Hungary in Old Catalan Literature).
• Ortega y Gasset on Alfred Adler and individual psychology . In: International Journal of Individual Psychology , year 1931.
• Los sentimientos de inferioridad , Luis Miracle, Barcelona 1935.
• Individual Psychology in the Learning of Languages . In: International Journal of Individual Psychology , year 1936.
• Sexual Difficulties . In: International Journal of Individual Psychology , year 1936.
• Is Woman Less Intelligent Than Man? In: Individual Psychology Bulletin , year 1946.
• Feelings of inferiority in the individual and in the community . Klett-Verlag, Stuttgart 1953; New edition with an introduction by Gert Janssen: Quercus Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-935271-02-6 .

Translations

• Lajos Zilahy: Primavera mortal (Halászi tavasz). translated by Ferenc Oliver Brachfeld. Proa, Barcelona 1935.
• Alfred Adler: El sentido de la vida (The meaning of life). Translated by Oliver Brachfeld. Foreword by Ramón Sárro. Luis Miracle, Barcelona 1937.
• Carl Gustav Jung : La psique y sus problemas actuales . Translated by Oliver Brachfeld and Eugénio Imaz. Editorial Problet, Madrid Buenos Aires 1935.
• Carl Gustav Jung: Teoría del Psicoanálisis (attempt to present the psychoanalytic theory). Translation and preface: Franz Oliver Brachfeld. Editorial Apolo, Barcelona 1935.
• Carl Gustav Jung: Tipos psicológicos (Psychological types). Translated by Oliver Brachfeld and Ramón Gómez de la Serna . Editorial Sudamericana, Buenos Aires 1945.

literature

• René König : Oliver Brachfeld, February 18, 1908 - September 2, 1967 . In: Cologne journal for sociology and social psychology (KZfSS), vol. 20 (1968), pp. 195–197 (obituary).

Web links

• Literature by and about Oliver Brachfeld in the catalog of the German National Library

Footnotes

1. ↑ Oliver Brachfeld: Feelings of inferiority in the individual and in the community . Klett-Verlag, Stuttgart 1953, p. 163.