Werner Muensterberger

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Werner Muensterberger (or Münsterberger ; born April 15, 1913 in Hörde (now Dortmund ); † March 6, 2011 in New York City ) was a German ethnologist , psychoanalyst , art collector and author.

Life

Muensterberger - son of a German factory owner and a Dutch woman - spent a large part of his childhood with his grandmother in Haarlem , the Netherlands , so that he grew up bilingual with German and Dutch . Together with Klaus Mann , son of Thomas Mann , Muensterberger also attended the Odenwald School in Germany for a few years .

Muensterberger began studying medicine at the University of Heidelberg , but he moved to a semester at the University of Berlin , around there anthropology to study. He also completed training at the Psychoanalytical Institute at Berlin University.

The art collector Eduard von der Heydt , a distant relative of his mother, introduced him to ethnographic, African art. Muensterberger dedicated his 1955 work Sculpture of Primitive Man to him as a thank you . Through von der Heydt, Muensterberger met the ethnologist Eckart von Sydow , with whom he later attended lectures, the banker Hjalmar Schacht , the dancer Mary Wigman and later the sculptor Constantin Brancusi .

In the mid-1930s, Muensterberger emigrated to the Netherlands , lived mainly in Amsterdam and Haarlem, fought underground from 1941, and from 1943 until the end of the war was hidden in an attic by his girlfriend, later actress Elisabeth Andersen , because the Gestapo were looking for him. In Holland he also continued his ethnology studies at the University of Leiden . At the University of Basel he received his doctorate on Indonesian creation myths in 1939 under Felix Speiser and Walter Baumgartner . Muensterberger did another doctorate in the field of art history.

From 1947 to 1951 he was a lecturer in ethnopsychoanalysis at New York's Columbia University . He was then appointed professor of ethno-psychiatry at New York State University .

In 1974 he moved to London , where he wanted to spend his retirement. In 1984, however, he moved back to New York City and opened a private practice on the Upper East Side as an analyst, which he operated until shortly before his death.

His patients as psychoanalysts included James Dean , Danny Kaye , Laurence Olivier, and Marlon Brando , among others .

Muensterberger was married three times.

Publications

Monographs
  • Ethnological studies on Indonesian creation myths. A contribution to the cultural analysis of Southeast Asia. Martinus Nijhoff, Haag 1939 (dissertation, University of Basel, 1939).
  • Collect . An irrepressible passion. Psychological Perspectives. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999.
Editing

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Ingeborg Wiensowski: The man with the masks. In: Spiegel Online , October 1, 2013.
  2. Lisa Zeitz: He knew James Dean's dreams. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , March 9, 2011.