Paul springs

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Paul Federn (born October 13, 1871 in Vienna , † May 4, 1950 in New York ) was a Jewish Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst . He was one of Freud's first pupils. In spite of his great loyalty to Freud, Federn created an independent profile in later years through his contributions to the understanding of psychoses . A wide reception began posthumously .

Life

Paul Federn's ancestors came from Bohemia and South Moravia. His paternal grandparents were Elias and Esther Bunzl- (Bunzel-) Federn, who lived in Prague, while his grandfather Elias worked there as a businessman and secretary of the Prague Jewish community. His maternal grandparents were Benjamin Wolf and Jeanette Spitzer, who lived in Nikolsburg, and his grandfather was a wealthy textile merchant.

The son of the Bunzl-Federn family who moved from Prague to Vienna, Salomon Federn, the father of Paul Federn, married Ernestine Spitzer, the daughter of the Spitzer family , on January 27, 1867 in the Vienna City Temple in Seitenstättengasse. Salomon Federn settled in the center of Vienna as a general practitioner after completing his medical degree. He introduced bedside blood pressure measurement .

Paul Federn's siblings were the lawyer, historian, writer and translator Karl Federn (1868–1943), the economist and business journalist Walther Federn (1869–1949), the social worker Else Federn (born 1874), the bookseller and writer Robert Federn (1878 –1967?) As well as the writer, translator and Spain fighter Marietta Federn (1883–1951).

In 1902 Paul Federn opened his own doctor's practice. In 1903 he was introduced to Freud, who helped him against his depressive crises. Feder became a member of the Psychological Wednesday Society founded in 1902 . When the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association (WPV) emerged from this in 1908 , Federn took over the office of auditor. His analysands included Wilhelm Reich and August Aichhorn . In 1905 he married Wilma Bauer, the daughter of a Protestant lawyer, and the couple had three children: Anni (born 1905), Walter (born 1910) and Ernst Federn (1914–2007).

Springs repeatedly dealt with biological questions, e.g. B. with hormone therapy, which led to his friendship with Eugen Steinach in 1918 , whose method of vasectomy he recommended to Freud a few years later.

During the First World War , Federn served as a military doctor. In 1919 he published On the Psychology of the Revolution: The Fatherless Society , a purely psychological interpretation of the foundation of the Austrian republic and the revolutions since the end of the war. In the following years he turned to social democracy and campaigned for a psychoanalytic public education.

From 1924 to 1938, as a representative of Freud, Federn was Vice President of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association . Feder treated the seriously ill Viennese radiologist Guido Holzknecht until his death on October 31, 1931. Paul Federn and Guido Holzknecht were close friends. Holzknecht was also a member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association .

After the annexation of Austria in 1938, Federn had to emigrate to the USA. Here he became a member of the New York Psychoanalytical Society after renewed medical studies . He gained recognition by publishing his research, which made him an unorthodox co-founder of ego psychology . After the death of his wife and stressed by the long battle against a malignant tumor, Paul Federn committed suicide in 1950 by shooting himself in his study.

Paul Federn's son Ernst Federn also worked in the field of psychoanalysis.

position

In the mid-1920s, Federn began to work out his own position on the understanding of psychoses . Federn was concerned with the strength and quality of the sense of the ego he described, with changing ego boundaries and affective cathexes of the ego. As an ego feeling, he described a quality of experience through which the content of an experience is perceived as belonging to the ego and not to the environment. It can also be an inner psychological environment the environment - Freud's It and the superego .

According to Federn, life-affirming and destructive components are active in the experience of the ego, Freud's libido and death drive . Apart from their interplay, the ego experience can also be weakened overall if the ego boundaries are not sufficiently occupied by sensations which the ego understands as belonging to it and which define its continuity in space and time as well as its unity as an agent. According to Federn, a relative weakening of the ego regularly takes place in dreams, in which the ego boundaries become permeable to foreign things, including material from the unconscious . So in the dream z. B. the body - which more or less belongs to the ego in the waking state - is not felt, or body sensations become noticeable in a disturbing way and lead to awakening.

For Federn the weakness of the affective cathexis of the ego is the main characteristic of psychoses. In doing so, he clearly set himself apart from Freud, for whom the psychosis arises from an excess of “ narcissistic ego-libido”. - Instead of a reality test in which the inner psychic is differentiated from the extra- psychic (as described by Freud for normal psychic functioning), in psychosis there is only the distinction between that which belongs to the ego and that which does not belong to the ego - in the sense described above, so that the contents of experience alien to the ego, by which the ego is now inundated, are felt as "real" at the same time.

Feder assumes a great flexibility of ego-states. Overcome ego states are repressed , but can be updated again. For Federn, the aim of psychosis therapy is to strengthen the affective cathexis of the ego and the ego boundaries, to “save” energy for this cathexis; not the abolition of repressions, but the creation of new ones; and overall a supportive, helping approach by the therapist who dispenses with psychoanalytic interpretations .

Publications

  • On the Psychology of the Revolution: The Fatherless Society. Suschitzky, Leipzig 1919
  • The Psychoanalytic Folk Book. Soul science. Hygiene. Disease science. Cultural studies. Hippocrates, Stuttgart 1926 a. : Huber, Bern 1939
  • Hygiene of sex life for the man. Hippocrates, Stuttgart 1930
  • Until the doctor comes. Hippocrates, Stuttgart 1930
  • Health care for everyone. Issue 1–2. Hippocrates, Stuttgart 1930
  • Ego psychology and the psychoses. Huber, Bern / Stuttgart 1956
    • New edition: Ichpsychologie und die Psychosen. With an introduction by Edoardo Weiss. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1978, ISBN 3-518-07286-2

literature

  • Springs, Paul. In: Elisabeth Roudinesco , Michel Plon: Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Names, countries, works, terms. Springer, Vienna / New York 2004, pp. 236–238.
  • Josef Shaked : The name Federn in psychoanalysis. In: Werkblatt. Journal of Psychoanalysis and Social Criticism. H. 33, 1994/2, pp. 96-102 ( PDF ).
  • Springs, Paul. In: Lexicon of German-Jewish Authors . Volume 6: Dore – Fein. Edited by the Bibliographia Judaica archive. Saur, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-598-22686-1 , pp. 542-550.
  • Werner Röder; Herbert A. Strauss (Ed.): International Biographical Dictionary of Central European Emigrés 1933-1945 . Volume 2.1. Munich: Saur, 1983 ISBN 3-598-10089-2 , p. 283

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bernhard Kuschey: The exception of survival. Ernst and Hilde Federn. A biographical study and analysis of the internal structures of the concentration camp. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2003, ISBN 3-89806-173-6 , pp. 55-59.
  2. ↑ Bernhard Kuschey: The exception of survival. Ernst and Hilde Federn. A biographical study and analysis of the internal structures of the concentration camp. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2003, ISBN 3-89806-173-6 , pp. 59-60.
  3. ↑ See Helmut Wyklicky:  Federn, Josef (Salomon). In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 5, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1961, ISBN 3-428-00186-9 , p. 44 ( digitized version ).
  4. ↑ cf. Paul Federn on the WPV psyalpha.net page .
  5. ↑ Etta Federn in the database Women in Motion 1848–1938 of the Austrian National Library .
  6. ↑ Bernhard Kuschey: The exception of survival. Ernst and Hilde Federn. A biographical study and analysis of the internal structures of the concentration camp. Psychosozial-Verlag, Giessen 2003, ISBN 3-89806-173-6 , p. 65.
  7. ↑ psyalpha.net .
  8. ↑ psyalpha.net .
  9. ↑ Elke Mühlleitner (with the collaboration of Johannes Reichmayr ): Biographical Lexicon of Psychoanalysis. The members of the Psychological Wednesday Society and the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association 1902–1938, Edition Diskord Tübingen 1992, pp. 161–162.
  10. ↑ psyalpha.net .
personal data
SURNAME Springs, Paul
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian doctor and psychoanalyst
DATE OF BIRTH October 13, 1871
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH May 4th 1950
Place of death new York