Werner Schwidder

Werner Schwidder (* 1917 in Berlin ; † September 2, 1970 in Madrid ) was a German psychoanalyst and psychosomaticist .

Life

Schwidder grew up in Berlin . While working as a doctor, he converted the Rasemühle Psychiatric Hospital near Göttingen into one of the most important modern psychoanalytical and psychosomatic clinics, the Tiefenbrunn State Hospital , which he ran from 1965 to 1970. From 1958 to 1970 he also headed the German Psychoanalytic Society (DPG) . He died on September 2nd, 1970 in Madrid, Spain while attending the International Forum for Psychoanalysis, very surprisingly of the consequences of a heart attack .

Schwidder expanded and specified Harald Schultz-Hencke's neo-analytical concepts to the extent that they provided the clinician with a useful and practicable orientation framework at an early stage for treating preoedipal, i.e. disorders from the first three years of life, even before Kohut's concepts and Kernbergs had become more widespread. In 1952 Werner Schwidder founded the magazine Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie with Annemarie Dührssen and in 1953 with Dührssen and Felix Boehm the still existing magazine for psychosomatic medicine and psychoanalysis . Thanks to his skillful and intensive professional policy efforts, together with Franz Rudolf Haarstrick and Annemarie Dührssen, in 1967 he was able to establish outpatient depth psychological treatments as a health insurance benefit . In the field of inpatient psychoanalytically oriented therapy, too, his work contributed significantly to the fact that such treatments were taken over by the health insurers at the end of the 1960s.

He is the author of numerous psychoanalytic articles and influential textbooks of his time, through which he can be classified in the tradition of Schultz-Hencke's neo-psychoanalysis. In his youth Werner Schwidder was a very successful decathlete, later in his free time he was a passionate rose grower and mushroom expert, where he also wrote and published his own little guide on the second topic.

Publications (selection)

• Schwidder, W. (1951): Depression, obsessional neurosis and hysteria as basic forms of mental illness. Berlin (Publishing House Psyche)
• Schwidder, W. (1958): On the practice of diagnosis and prognosis in clinical psychotherapy. Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychoanalysis 5, 43-49.
• Schwidder, W. (1965): Acta psychosomatica, Volume 7. Basel (Geigy).
• Schwidder, W. (1965): Psychosomatics and psychotherapy for disorders and diseases. Basel (Geigy).
• Schwidder, W. (1971): On schizoid neurosis: Clinical aspects and psychodynamic findings. Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine, 18, 11-21.
• Schwidder, W. (1972): Clinic of Neuroses. Reprint of the present research and practice, 2 volumes. Berlin (Springer).
• Schwidder, W. (1972): Neurosis and Psychoanalysis. Seven essays. Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).
• Schwidder, W. (1975): Writings on the psychoanalysis of neuroses and psychosomatic medicine. Göttingen (publishing house for medical psychology).
• Schwidder, W. (1975): The importance of early childhood for personality development. Göttingen (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht).

literature

• Chrzanowski, G. (1971): Dr. Werner Schwidder. Contemporary Psychoanalysis, 7: 218-219.
• Rüger, U. (2007): Forty Years of Guideline Psychotherapy in Germany. Psychotherapist 52, 102-111.