Tag: Psychiatrist

On This Day … 16 May

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 1943 – Alfred Hoche, German psychiatrist and academic (b. 1865).

James Herndon

James Neil Herndon (born 16 May 1952) is a media psychologist. He received his Ph.D. in Educational Technology from Arizona State University.

His early experimental research focused on new methods of personalizing training materials. More recent work explores the use of media psychology research in digital public relations. His qualitative research tool, Affective Encryption Analysis, has received press notice as a trend analysis methodology.

He writes for LewRockwell.com, primarily on the topics of Ron Paul, United States presidential politics and the Federal Reserve System. He is co-author of the book, Ron Paul: A Life of Ideas (2008), where he explores Paul in the modern media landscape. He has also authored two books on depression (mood), which he views as primarily a media-driven phenomenon. His company is Media Psychology Affiliates.

Alfred Hoche

Alfred Erich Hoche (01 August 1865 to 16 May 1943) was a German psychiatrist well known for his writings about eugenics and euthanasia.

Hoche studied in Berlin and Heidelberg and became a psychiatrist in 1890. He moved to Strasbourg in 1891. From 1902 he was a professor in Freiburg im Breisgau and was the director of the psychiatric clinic there. He was a major opponent of the psychoanalysis theories of Sigmund Freud. Hoche’s body of work on the classification system of mental illness had great influence. He also published poetry under the pseudonym Alfred Erich.

According to Michael Burleigh’s book “Death and Deliverance”, he was married to a Jewish woman and left his post in Freiburg after National Socialists came to power. He was privately critical of the Nazis’ euthanasia programme after it claimed one of his relatives, despite its rationale being based on his own ideas. After losing his only son in 1915 he became increasingly taciturn and depressed and his death in 1943 was probably due to suicide.

On This Day … 06 May

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Events

  • 1757 – English poet Christopher Smart is admitted into St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in London, beginning his six-year confinement to mental asylums.

People (Births)

  • 1856 – Sigmund Freud, Austrian neurologist and psychoanalyst (d. 1939).
  • 1922 – Camille Laurin, Canadian psychiatrist and politician, 7th Deputy Premier of Quebec (d. 1999).

People (Deaths)

2012 – Jean Laplanche, French psychoanalyst and author (b. 1924).

Christopher Smart

The English poet Christopher Smart (1722-1771) was confined to mental asylums from May 1757 until January 1763. Smart was admitted into St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics, Upper Moorfields, London, on 06 May 1757. He was taken there by his father-in-law, John Newbery, although he may have been confined in a private madhouse before then. While in St Luke’s he wrote Jubilate Agno and A Song to David, the poems considered to be his greatest works. Although many of his contemporaries agreed that Smart was “mad”, accounts of his condition and its ramifications varied, and some felt that he had been committed unfairly.

Smart was diagnosed as “incurable” while at St Luke’s, and when they ran out of funds for his care he was moved to Mr. Potter’s asylum, Bethnal Green. All that is known of his years of confinement is that he wrote poetry. Smart’s isolation led him to abandon the poetic genres of the 18th century that had marked his earlier work and to write religious poetry such as Jubilate Agno (“Rejoice in the Lamb”). His asylum poetry reveals a desire for “unmediated revelation”, and it is possible that the self-evaluation found in his poetry represents an expression of evangelical Christianity.

Late 18th-century critics felt that Smart’s madness justified them in ignoring his A Song to David, but during the following century Robert Browning and his contemporaries considered his condition to be the source of his genius. It was not until the 20th century, with the rediscovery of Jubilate Agno (not published until 1939), that critics reconsidered Smart’s case and began to see him as a revolutionary poet, the possible target of a plot by his father-in-law, a publisher, to silence him.

Sigmund Freud

Sigmund Freud (born Sigismund Schlomo Freud; 06 May 1856 to 23 September 1939) was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst.

Freud was born to Galician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938, Freud left Austria to escape Nazi persecution. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

In founding psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, establishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud’s redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfilments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the underlying mechanisms of repression. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego. Freud postulated the existence of libido, a sexualised energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of compulsive repetition, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt. In his later works, Freud developed a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.

Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psychoanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psychotherapy, and across the humanities. It thus continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate with regard to its therapeutic efficacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or hinders the feminist cause. Nonetheless, Freud’s work has suffused contemporary Western thought and popular culture. W.H. Auden’s 1940 poetic tribute to Freud describes him as having created “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.”

Camille Laurin

Camille Laurin (06 May 1922 to 11 March 1999) was a psychiatrist and Parti Québécois (PQ) politician in the province of Quebec, Canada. MNA member for the riding of Bourget, he is considered the father of Quebec’s language law known informally as “Bill 101”.

Born in Charlemagne, Quebec, Laurin obtained a degree in psychiatry from the Université de Montréal where he came under the influence of the Roman Catholic priest, Lionel Groulx. After earning his degree, Laurin went to Boston, Massachusetts, where he worked at the Boston State Hospital. Following a stint in Paris, France, in 1957, he returned to practice in Quebec. In 1961, he authored the preface of the book Les fous crient au secours, which described the conditions of psychiatric hospitals of the time.

He was one of the early founders of the Quebec sovereignty movement. As a senior cabinet minister in the first PQ government elected in the 1976 Quebec election, he was the guiding force behind Bill 101, the legislation that placed restrictions on the use of English on public signs and in the workplace of large companies, and strengthened the position of French as the only official language in Quebec.

Laurin resigned from his cabinet position on 26 November 1984 because of a disagreement with Lévesque on the future of the sovereignty movement. He resigned from his seat in the National Assembly on 25 January 1985. He was elected once again to the Assembly on 12 September 1994 but did not run in the 1998 election for health reasons.

He died after a long battle with cancer.

Jean Laplanche

Jean Laplanche (21 June 1924 to 06 May 2012) was a French author, psychoanalyst and winemaker. Laplanche is best known for his work on psychosexual development and Sigmund Freud’s seduction theory, and wrote more than a dozen books on psychoanalytic theory. The journal Radical Philosophy described him as “the most original and philosophically informed psychoanalytic theorist of his day.”

From 1988 to his death, Laplanche was the scientific director of the German to French translation of Freud’s complete works (Oeuvres Complètes de Freud/Psychanalyse – OCF.P) in the Presses Universitaires de France, in association with André Bourguignon, Pierre Cotet and François Robert.

On This Day … 01 April

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People (Births)

  • 1851 – Laza Lazarević, Serbian psychiatrist and neurologist (d. 1891).

People (Deaths)

  • 2005 – Kenneth Clark, American psychologist and academic (b. 1914).

Laza Lazarevic

Lazar “Laza” Lazarević (Serbian Cyrillic: Лазаp Лаза Лазаревић, 13 May 1851 to 10 January 1891) was a Serbian physician writer, psychiatrist, and neurologist.

The primary interest of Lazarević throughout his short life was the science of medicine. In that field, he was one of the greatest figures of his time, pre-eminently distinguished and useful as a doctor, teacher, and writer on both medical issues as well as literary themes. To him, literature was an avocation; yet he was talented at it and thought of himself as a man of letters. He translated the works of Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Ivan Turgenev into Serbian.

Few writers have achieved fame with such a small opus as Lazarević, for it rests on nine stories; yet he is considered one of the best Serbian writers of the nineteenth century. He was often referred to as the Serbian Turgenev. During his brief life, “the less than prolific opus” enshrined him in Serbian literature as a writer who introduced the psychological story genre.

Kenneth Clark

Kenneth Bancroft Clark (14 July 1914 to 01 May 2005) and Mamie Phipps Clark (18 April 1917 to August 1983) were American psychologists who as a married team conducted research among children and were active in the Civil Rights Movement. They founded the Northside Centre for Child Development in Harlem and the organization Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU). Kenneth Clark was also an educator and professor at City College of New York, and first Black president of the American Psychological Association.

They were known for their 1940s experiments using dolls to study children’s attitudes about race. The Clarks testified as expert witnesses in Briggs v. Elliott (1952), one of five cases combined into Brown v. Board of Education (1954). The Clarks’ work contributed to the ruling of the US Supreme Court in which it determined that de jure racial segregation in public education was unconstitutional. Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in the Brown v. Board of Education opinion, “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their race generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone.”

Early Life and Education

Kenneth Clark was born in the Panama Canal Zone to Arthur Bancroft Clark and Miriam Hanson Clark. His father worked as an agent for the United Fruit Company. When he was five, his parents separated and his mother took him and his younger sister Beulah to the US to live in Harlem in New York City. She worked as a seamstress in a sweatshop, where she later organized a union and became a shop steward for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. Clark moved to New York City while the ethnic diversity of Harlem was disappearing, and his school was predominantly black. Clark was trained to learn a trade, as were most black students at this time. Miriam wanted more for her son and transferred him to George Washington High School in Upper Manhattan. Clark graduated from high school in 1931 (Jones & Pettigrew, 2005).

Clark attended Howard University, a historically black university, where he first studied political science with professors including Ralph Johnson Bunche. During his years at Howard University, he worked under the influence of mentor Francis Cecil Sumner, the first African American to receive a doctorate in psychology. He returned in 1935 for a master’s in psychology. Clark was a distinguished member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. After earning his master’s degree, Sumner directed Clark to Columbia University to work with another influential mentor, Otto Klineberg (Jones & Pettigrew, 2005).

While studying psychology for his doctorate at Columbia University, Clark did research in support of the study of race relations by Swedish economist Gunnar Myrdal, who wrote An American Dilemma. In 1940, Clark was the first African American to earn a Ph.D. in psychology from Columbia University.

Career

During the summer of 1941, after Clark was already asked to teach a summer session at City College of New York, the Dean of Hampton Institute asked Clark to start a department of psychology there. In 1942 Kenneth Clark became the first African-American tenured full professor at the City College of New York. Clark also started a psychology department at Hampton Institute in 1942 and taught a few courses within the department. In 1966 he was the first African American appointed to the New York State Board of Regents and the first African American to be president of the American Psychological Association.

Much of Clark’s work came as a response to his involvement in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education US Supreme Court desegregation decision. Lawyers Jack Greenberg and Robert L. Carter, with resources and funding from the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Topeka Jewish Community Relations Bureau, hired Clark to present his work on the effects of segregation on children. After the Brown v. Board of Education case, Clark was still dissatisfied by the lack of progress in school desegregation in New York City. In a 1964 interview with Robert Penn Warren for the book Who Speaks for the Negro?, Clark expressed his doubts about the efficacy of certain busing programs in desegregating the public schools. Clark also felt very discouraged by the lack of social welfare organizations to address race and poverty issues. Clark argued that a new approach had to be developed to involve poor blacks, in order to gain the political and economic power needed to solve their problems. Clark called his new approach “internal colonialism”, with hope that the Kennedy-Johnson administration’s War on Poverty would address problems of increasing social isolation, economic dependence and declining municipal services for many African Americans (Freeman, 2008).

Clark in 1962 was among the founders of Harlem Youth Opportunities Unlimited (HARYOU), an organisation devoted to developing educational and job opportunities. With HARYOU, Clark conducted an extensive sociological study of Harlem. He measured IQ scores, crime frequency, age frequency of the population, drop-out rates, church and school locations, quality of housing, family incomes, drugs, STD rates, homicides, and a number of other areas. It recruited educational experts to help to reorganize Harlem schools, create preschool classes, tutor older students after school, and job opportunities for youth who dropped out. The Johnson administration earmarked more than $100 million for the organisation. When it was placed under the administration of a pet project of Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in 1964, the two men clashed over appointment of a director and its direction.

Clark used HARYOU to press for changes to the educational system to help improve black children’s performance. While he at first supported decentralisation of city schools, after a decade of experience, Clark believed that this option had not been able to make an appreciable difference and described the experiment as a “disaster.”

Following race riots in the summer of 1967, US President Lyndon Johnson appointed the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission). The Commission called Clark among the first experts to testify on urban issues. In 1973, Clark testified in the trial of Ruchell Magee.

Clark retired from City College in 1975, but remained an active advocate for integration throughout his life, serving on the board of the New York Civil Rights Coalition, of which he was Chairman Emeritus until his death. He opposed separatists and argued for high standards in education, continuing to work for children’s benefit. He consulted to city school systems across the country, and argued that all children should learn to use Standard English in school.

On This Day … 30 April

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People (Births)

  • 1857 – Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist (d. 1940).
  • 1878 – Władysław Witwicki, Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist (d. 1948).
  • 1930 – Félix Guattari, French psychotherapist and philosopher (d. 1992).

Eugen Bleuler

Paul Eugen Bleuler (30 April 1857 to 15 July 1939) was a Swiss psychiatrist and eugenicist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness.

He coined many psychiatric terms, such as “schizophrenia”, “schizoid”, “autism”, depth psychology and what Sigmund Freud called “Bleuler’s happily chosen term ambivalence”.

Bleuler studied medicine in Zürich. He trained for his psychiatric residency at Waldau Hospital under Gottileb Burckhardt, a Swiss psychiatrist, from 1881-1884. He left his job in 1884 and spent one year on medical study trips with Jean-Martin Charcot, a French neurologist in Paris, Bernhard von Gudden, a German psychiatrist in Munich, and to London. After these trips, he returned to Zürich to briefly work as assistant to Auguste Forel while completing his psychiatric residency at the Burghölzli, a university hospital.

Bleuler became the director of a psychiatric clinic in Rheinau, a hospital located in an old monastery on an island in the Rhine. At the time, the clinic was known for being functionally backward and largely ineffective. Because of this, Bleuler set about improving conditions for the patients residing there.

In the year 1898, Bleuler returned to the Burghölzli and became a psychiatry professor at Burghölzli, the same university hospital he completed his residency. He was also appointed director of the mental asylum in Rheinau. He served as the director from the years 1898 to 1927. While working at this asylum, Bleuler cared for long-term psychiatric patients. He also implemented both psychoanalytic treatment and research, and was influenced by Sigmund Freud.

During his time as the director of psychiatry at Burghölzli, Bleuler made great contributions to the field of psychiatry and psychology that made him known today. Because of these findings, Bleuler has been described as one of the most influential Swiss psychiatrists.

Wladyslaw Witwicki

Władysław Witwicki (30 April 1878 to 21 December 1948)] was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist. He is seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland.

Witwicki was also the creator of the theory of cratism, theory of feelings, and he dealt with the issues of the psychology of religion, and the creation of secular ethics. He was one of the initiators and co-founders of Polish Philosophical Society. He is one of the thinkers associated with the Lwów-Warsaw school.

Witwicki is the author of the first Polish textbooks on psychology. He also collaborated with other philosophers. For instance, he worked with Bronisław Bandrowski to develop a model of psychology based on Franz Brentano’s theory on phenomenology. It included an analysis of Edmund Husserl’s Theory of Content and the Phenomenon of Thinking.

In the comments to his own translation of the Gospels of Matthew and Mark – Dobra Nowina według Mateusza i Marka (The Good News according to Matthew and Mark) – Witwicki challenges the mental health of Jesus. He attributed to Jesus subjectivism, increased sense of his own power and superiority over others, egocentrism and the tendency to subjugate other people, as well as difficulties communicating with the outside world and multiple personality disorder, which made him a schizothymic or even schizophrenic type (according to the Ernst Kretschmer’s typology).

Felix Guattari

Pierre-Félix Guattari (30 April 1930 to 29 August 1992) was a French psychotherapist, philosopher, semiologist, activist and screenwriter.

He founded both schizoanalysis and ecosophy, and is best known for his intellectual collaborations with Gilles Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

On This Day … 28 April

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Milan N. Popović, Serbian psychiatrist and author (b. 1924).

Mike Brearley

John Michael Brearley OBE (born 28 April 1942) is a retired English first-class cricketer who captained Cambridge University, Middlesex, and England.

He captained the international side in 31 of his 39 Test matches, winning 17 and losing only 4. He was the President of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in 2007-2008. Since his retirement from professional cricket he has pursued a career as a writer and psychoanalyst, serving as President of the British Psychoanalytical Society 2008-2010.

He is married to Mana Sarabhai who is from India and they have two children together.

Milan N. Popovic

Milan Popović (1924 to 28 April 2012) was a renowned Serbian psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, a full professor of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy.

Biography

He was born in 1924 in Belgrade, Serbia. He graduated from the University of Belgrade School of Medicine, specialized neuropsychiatry and was awarded a doctor’s degree with the theme “Group psychotherapy of the schizophrenic in hospital conditions”. He was elected associate professor of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University in 1972 and full professor in 1980.

Education

Milan Popović is a pioneer in developing the group psychiatry in Serbia and opening psychiatric departments towards the society. He is a founder of “Psychoanalytical psychotherapy school” at post graduated studies of the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade.

He is a teacher of many generations of psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists in Serbia. He has given an important contribution to the development of psychiatry in the country, especially the development of psychotherapy and social psychiatry, truthfully representing domestic achievements abroad.

Scientific and Professional Functions

He was attending professional courses from analytical psychotherapy at Tavistock Clinic in London, the Centre for mental health of 13th Arrondissement in Paris and University of California in Los Angeles, altogether for two years.

As one of the founders of the Institute of Mental Health (Belgrade), he has been leading the first Open department, mostly for psychosis since 1963. The degree of Primarius was given to him in 1968. From 1979 till he retired, he was the chief of the Centre for psychotherapy and sociotherapy, mostly doing educational and scientific activity. He has been working as a director of the Institute for mental health for a year and a half.

At the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University he has been teaching Social Pathology (Sociology of mental disorders) and General psychopathology. He was the chief of sociology department, the director of the Department for philosophy and sociology, and from 1987 till 1989 the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University.

At the Faculty of Medicine of Belgrade University he was one of the organizers of postgraduate lectures from psychotherapy and social therapy. He was also the president of committee for passing the sub specialized exam from psychotherapy. He is a founder and the first leader of Psychological counselling service for students of Belgrade University.

As a visiting professor he held lectures at Centre for Rehabilitation of psychiatric patients La Verriere in Paris, University of California in Los Angeles and Boston University. In June 1990 he became Affiliate Teacher of Institute of Group Analysis in London.

He has been also working as a consultant of the Centre for victims of war trauma, affiliated department of International Red Cross and Red Crescent Federation (Serbia and Montenegro).

He has been doing medical ethics. He was the president of Ethical committee of Serbian doctors’ society from 1992 till 1997. At the end of 1992 Milan Popović was elected president of the Association of Serbian physicians for peace, the branch of International association of physicians for the prevention of nuclear war. This international association was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace.

He was the president of the section for psychotherapy of Serbian medical association.

Milan Popović has showed great interests in culture too. He was also, among the rest, the President of programmed Council of Cvijeta Zuzoric art gallery. After the invitation, he has been the member of European association of culture with the seat in Venice since 1989.

On This Day … 25 April

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People (Births)

  • 1902 – Werner Heyde, German psychiatrist and academic (d. 1964).

Werner Heyde

Werner Heyde (aka Fritz Sawade) (25 April 1902 to 13 February 1964) was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organisers of Nazi Germany’s T-4 Euthanasia Programme.

Early Life

Heyde was born in Forst (Lausitz), on 25 May 1902, and completed his Abitur in 1920. From 1922-1925, he studied medicine in Berlin, Freiburg, Marburg, Rostock and Würzburg and after short placements at the General Hospital in Cottbus and the sanatorium Berlin-Wittenau became assistant doctor at the Universitätsnervenklinik (university psychiatric hospital) in Würzburg. He obtained his licence to practice medicine in 1926, having completed all courses throughout his studies with top marks.

Career until 1945

In 1933, Heyde made the acquaintance of Theodor Eicke, and became a member of the NSDAP. One year later, he was appointed director of the polyclinic in Würzburg. In 1935, he entered the SS as medical officer with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, and became commander of the medical unit in the SS-Totenkopfverbände. There he was responsible for establishing a system of psychiatric and eugenic examinations and research in concentration camps, and for the organisation of the T-4 Euthanasia Programme. Additionally, he also worked as a psychiatric consultant for the Gestapo. He also was leader of the Rassenpolitisches Amt in Würzburg, Seelbergstraße 8, 97080 Würzburg. Later he was accompanied by his Rassenpolitisches Amt assistant, Mr. Johannes Riedmiller aka Kurt Riethmüller aka Hans Riedmüller/Hans Riedmiller.

In 1938, he was appointed chief of staff of the medical department in the SS-Hauptamt (headquarters); in 1939, he became professor for psychiatry and neurology at the University of Würzburg, and from 1940 on he also was director of the psychiatric hospital.

He was replaced as head of the T4 program by Paul Nitsche in 1941, but continued his involvement as member of the “department Brack” (after the end of World War II, it was never found out what his role there was).

He worked at Buchenwald, Dachau concentration camp and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

In 1944, he was awarded the SS-Totenkopfring, and before the end of the war reached the rank of SS-Standartenführer (Colonel).

Life after 1945

After World War II, Heyde was interned and imprisoned, but escaped in 1947. He went underground using the alias Fritz Sawade and continued practicing as a sports physician and psychiatrist in Flensburg. Many friends and associates knew about his real identity, but remained silent even as he was an expert witness in court cases.

His true identity was revealed in the course of a private quarrel, and on 11 November 1959 Heyde surrendered to police in Frankfurt after 13 years as a fugitive. On 13 February 1964, five days before his trial was to start, Heyde hanged himself at the prison in Butzbach.

In Popular Culture

  • Literature:
    • Klee, Ernst, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. S. Fischer Verlag 2003. ISBN 3-10-039309-0
    • Godau-Schüttke, Klaus-Detlev, Die Heyde/Sawade-Affäre. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft 1998. ISBN 3-7890-5717-7.
  • Films:
    • 1963 (GDR): The Heyde-Sawade Affair (Category: biography/drama) (Produced in the DEFA-studios for movies, Potsdam, Babelsberg/Eastern Germany. Produced by Bernhard Gelbe; script by Wolfgang Luderer, Walter Jupé and Friedrich Karl Kaul and directed by Wolfgang Luderer. Available via the Foundation German TV and Broadcast Arkhive Babelsberg. Arkhive-No. IDNR 03581. Length: 101 minutes, First run: 3 June 1963 in the television programme No. 1 of the German Democratic Republic).
  • Paintings:
    • In 1965, German artist Gerhard Richter painted Herr Heyde,[4] based on a photo of Heyde’s 1959 arrest.

On This Day … 24 April

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 1924 – G. Stanley Hall, American psychologist and academic (b. 1844).
  • 1983 – Erol Güngör, Turkish sociologist, psychologist, and academic (b. 1938).

Eliana Gil

Eliana Gil RPT-S, ATR (born 24 April 1948), is a lecturer, writer, and clinician of marriage, family and child. She is on the board of a number of professional counselling organisations that use play and art therapies, and she is the former president of the Association for Play Therapy (APT).

Dr. Gil is the senior partner of the Gil Institute for Trauma Recovery and Education in Fairfax, Virginia. She is also the director of Starbright Training Institute for Child and Family Play Therapy based in northern Virginia.

G. Stanley Hall

Granville Stanley Hall (01 February 1846 to 24 April 1924) was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory.

Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University.

Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.

Erol Gungor

Erol Güngör (25 November 1938 to 24 April 1983) was a Turkish sociologist, psychologist, and writer.

After spending a period in the Faculty of Law, Güngör graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1961. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 with a thesis titled “Kelâmî (Verbal) Yapılarda Estetik Organizasyon”. Kenneth Hammond invited him to visit the University of Colorado. He became an associate professor with his thesis titled “Şahıslar arası Ihtilafların Çözümünde Lisanın Rolü” in 1970. He became an academic in the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1975. He eventually became the president of Selçuk University in 1982.

He mostly studied culture, personality, customs, people and religion. He focused on the identity and cultural problems which Turkish people have faced in the last 150 years.

On This Day … 20 April

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People (Births)

  • 1745 – Philippe Pinel, French physician and psychiatrist (d. 1826).
  • 1915 – Joseph Wolpe, South African psychotherapist and physician (d. 1997).
  • 1920 – Frances Ames, South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist (d. 2002).

Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel (20 April 1745 to 25 October 1826) was a French physician who was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy. He also made notable contributions to the classification of mental disorders and has been described by some as “the father of modern psychiatry”.

An 1809 description of a case that Pinel recorded in the second edition of his textbook on insanity is regarded by some as the earliest evidence for the existence of the form of mental disorder later known as dementia praecox or schizophrenia, although Emil Kraepelin is generally accredited with its first conceptualisation.

Joseph Wolpe

Joseph Wolpe (20 April 1915 to 04 December 1997 in Los Angeles) was a South African psychiatrist and one of the most influential figures in behaviour therapy.

Wolpe grew up in South Africa, attending Parktown Boys’ High School and obtaining his MD from the University of the Witwatersrand.

In 1956 Wolpe was awarded a Ford Fellowship and spent a year at Stanford University in the Center for Behavioral Sciences, subsequently returning to South Africa but permanently moving to the United States in 1960 when he accepted a position at the University of Virginia.

In 1965 Wolpe accepted a position at Temple University.

One of the most influential experiences in Wolpe’s life was when he enlisted in the South African army as a medical officer. Wolpe was entrusted to treat soldiers who were diagnosed with what was then called “war neurosis” but today is known as post traumatic stress disorder. The mainstream treatment of the time for soldiers was based on psychoanalytic theory, and involved exploring the trauma while taking a hypnotic agent – so-called narcotherapy. It was believed that having the soldiers talk about their repressed experiences openly would effectively cure their neurosis. However, this was not the case. It was this lack of successful treatment outcomes that forced Wolpe, once a dedicated follower of Freud, to question psychoanalytic therapy and search for more effective treatment options. Wolpe is most well known for his reciprocal inhibition techniques, particularly systematic desensitisation, which revolutionised behavioural therapy.

A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Wolpe as the 53rd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, an impressive accomplishment accentuated by the fact that Wolpe was a psychiatrist.

Frances Ames

Frances Rix Ames (20 April 1920 to 11 November 2002) was a South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist, best known for leading the medical ethics inquiry into the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died from medical neglect after being tortured in police custody. When the South African Medical and Dental Council (SAMDC) declined to discipline the chief district surgeon and his assistant who treated Biko, Ames and a group of five academics and physicians raised funds and fought an eight-year legal battle against the medical establishment. Ames risked her personal safety and academic career in her pursuit of justice, taking the dispute to the South African Supreme Court, where she eventually won the case in 1985.

Born in Pretoria and raised in poverty in Cape Town, Ames became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Cape Town in 1964. Ames studied the effects of cannabis on the brain and published several articles on the subject. Seeing the therapeutic benefits of cannabis on patients in her own hospital, she became an early proponent of legalisation for medicinal use. She headed the neurology department at Groote Schuur Hospital before retiring in 1985, but continued to lecture at Valkenberg and Alexandra Hospital. After apartheid was dismantled in 1994, Ames testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about her work on the “Biko doctors” medical ethics inquiry. In 1999, Nelson Mandela awarded Ames the Star of South Africa, the country’s highest civilian award, in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights.

On This Day … 19 April

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People (Births)

  • 1874 – Ernst Rüdin, Swiss psychiatrist, geneticist, and eugenicist (d. 1952).

Ernst Rudin

Ernst Rüdin (19 April 1874 to 22 October 1952) was a Swiss-born German psychiatrist, geneticist, eugenicist and Nazi. Rising to prominence under Emil Kraepelin and assuming his directorship at what is now called the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Munich. While he has been credited as a pioneer of psychiatric inheritance studies, he also argued for, designed, justified and funded the mass sterilisation and clinical killing of adults and children.

Early Career

Commencing in 1893, Rüdin studied medicine at universities in several countries, graduating in 1898. At the Burghölzli in Zurich, he worked as assistant to Eugen Bleuler who coined the term ‘schizophrenia‘. He completed his PhD, then a psychiatric residency at a Berlin prison. From 1907, he worked at the University of Munich as assistant to Emil Kraepelin, the highly influential psychiatrist who had developed the diagnostic split between ‘dementia praecox’ (‘early dementia’ – reflecting his pessimistic prognosis – renamed schizophrenia) and ‘manic-depressive illness’ (including unipolar depression), and who is considered by many to be the father of modern psychiatric classification. Rüdin became senior lecturer in 1909, as well as senior physician at the Munich Psychiatric Hospital, succeeding Alois Alzheimer.

Kraepelin and Rüdin were both ardent advocates of a theory that the German race was becoming overly ‘domesticated’ and thus degenerating into higher rates of mental illness and other conditions. Fears of degeneration were somewhat common internationally at the time, but the extent to which Rüdin took them may have been unique, and from the very beginning of his career he made continuous efforts to have his research translate into political action. He also repeatedly drew attention to the financial burden of the sick and disabled.

Rüdin developed the concept of “empirical genetic prognosis” of mental disorders. He published influential initial results on the genetics of schizophrenia (known as dementia praecox) in 1916. Rüdin’s data did not show a high enough risk in siblings for schizophrenia to be due to a simple recessive gene as he and Kraepelin thought, but he put forward a two-recessive-gene theory to try to account for this. This has been attributed to a “mistaken belief” that just one or a small number of gene variations caused such conditions. Similarly his own large study on Mood disorders correctly disproved his own theory of simple Mendelian inheritance and also showed environmental causes, but Rüdin simply neglected to publish and continued to advance his eugenic theories. Nevertheless, Rüdin pioneered and refined complex techniques for conducting studies of inheritance, was widely cited in the international literature for decades, and is still regarded as “the father of psychiatric genetics”.

Rüdin was influenced by his then brother-in-law, and long-time friend and colleague, Alfred Ploetz, who was considered the ‘father’ of racial hygiene and indeed had coined the term in 1895. This was a form of eugenics, inspired by social darwinism, which had gained some popularity internationally, as would the voluntary or compulsory sterilization of psychiatric patients, initially in America. Rüdin campaigned for this early on. At a conference on alcoholism in 1903, he argued for the sterilisation of ‘incurable alcoholics’, but his proposal was roundly defeated. In 1904, he was appointed co-editor in chief of the newly founded Archive for Racial Hygiene and Social Biology, and in 1905 was among the co-founders of the German Society for Racial Hygiene (which soon became International), along with Ploetz. He published an article of his own in Archives in 1910, in which he argued that medical care for the mentally ill, alcoholics, epileptics and others was a distortion of natural laws of natural selection, and medicine should help to clean the genetic pool.

Increasing Influence

In 1917, a new German Institute for Psychiatric Research was established in Munich (known as the DFA in German; renamed the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry after World War II), designed and driven forward by Emil Kraepelin. The Institute incorporated a Department of Genealogical and Demographic Studies (known as the GDA in German) – the first in the world specialising in psychiatric genetics – and Rüdin was put in charge by overall director Kraepelin. In 1924, the Institute came under the umbrella of the prestigious Kaiser Wilhelm Society. From 1925, Rüdin spent three years as full Professor of Psychology at Basel, Switzerland. He returned to the Institute in 1928, with an expanded departmental budget and new building at 2 Kraepelinstrasse, financed primarily by the American Rockefeller Foundation. The institute soon gained an international reputation as leading psychiatric research, including in hereditary genetics. In 1931, a few years after Kraepelin’s death, Rüdin took over the directorship of the entire Institute as well as remaining head of his department.

Rüdin was among the first to attempt to educate the public about the “dangers” of hereditary defectives and the value of the Nordic race as “culture creators”. By 1920, his colleague Alfred Hoche published, with lawyer Karl Binding, the influential “Allowing the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Living”.

In 1930, Rüdin was a leading German representative at the First International Congress for Mental Hygiene, held in Washington, US, arguing for eugenics. In 1932, he became President of the International Federation of Eugenics Organisations. He was in contact with Carlos Blacker of the British Eugenics Society, and sent him a copy of pre-Nazi voluntary sterilisation laws enacted in Prussia; a precursor to the Nazi forced sterilisation laws that Rüdin is said to have already prepared in his desk drawer.

From 1935 to 1945, he was President of the Society of German Neurologists and Psychiatrists (GDNP), later renamed the German Association for Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Neurology (DGPPN).

The American Rockefeller Foundation funded numerous international researchers to visit and work at Rüdin’s psychiatric genetics department, even as late as 1939. These included Eliot Slater and Erik Stromgren, considered the founding fathers of psychiatric genetics in Britain and Scandinavia respectively, as well as Franz Josef Kallmann who became a leading figure in twins research in the US after emigrating in 1936.[4] Kallmann had claimed in 1935 that ‘minor anomalies’ in otherwise unaffected relatives of schizophrenics should be grounds for compulsory sterilisation.

Rüdin’s research was also supported with manpower and financing from the German National Socialists.

Nazi Expert

In 1933, Ernst Rüdin, Alfred Ploetz, and several other experts on racial hygiene were brought together to form the Expert Committee on Questions of Population and Racial Policy under Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick. The committee’s ideas were used as a scientific basis to justify the racial policy of Nazi Germany and its “Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring” was passed by the German government on 01 January 1934. Rüdin was such an avid proponent that colleagues nicknamed him the “Reichsfuhrer for Sterilization”

In a speech to the German Society for Rassenhygiene published in 1934, Rüdin recalled the early days of trying to alert the public to the special value of the Nordic race and the dangers of defectives. He stated: “The significance of Rassenhygiene racial hygiene did not become evident to all aware Germans until the political activity of Adolf Hitler and only through his work has our 30-year-long dream of translating Rassenhygiene into action finally become a reality.” Describing it as a ‘duty of honour’ for society to help implement the Nazi policies, Rüdin declared: “Whoever is not physically or mentally fit must not pass on his defects to his children. The state must take care that only the fit produce children. Conversely, it must be regarded as reprehensible to withhold healthy children from the state.”

From early on, Rüdin had been a ‘racial fanatic’ for the purity of the ‘German people’. However, he was also described in 1988 as “not so much a fanatical Nazi as a fanatical geneticist”. His ideas for reducing new cases of schizophrenia would prove a total failure, despite between 73% and 100% of the diagnosed being sterilised or killed.

Rüdin joined the Nazi party in 1937. In 1939, on his 65th birthday, he was awarded a ‘Goethe medal for art and science’ handed to him personally by Hitler, who honoured him as the ‘pioneer of the racial-hygienic measures of the Third Reich’. In 1944, he received a bronze Nazi eagle medal (Adlerschild des Deutschen Reiches), with Hitler calling him the ‘pathfinder in the field of hereditary hygiene’.

In 1942, speaking about ‘euthanasia’, Rüdin emphasised “the value of eliminating young children of clearly inferior quality”. He supported and financially aided the work of Julius Duessen at Heidelberg University with Carl Schneider, clinical research which from the beginning involving killing children.

Post-War

At the end of the war in 1945, Rüdin claimed he had only ever engaged in academic science, only ever heard rumours of killings at the nearby insane asylums, and that he hated the Nazis. However, some of his Nazi political activities, scientific justifications, and awards from Hitler were already uncovered in 1945 (as were his lecture handouts praising Nordics and disparaging Jews). Investigative journalist Victor H. Bernstein concluded: “I am sure that Prof. Rüdin never so much as killed a fly in his 74 years. I am also sure he is one of the most evil men in Germany.” Rüdin was stripped of his Swiss citizenship which he had held jointly with German, and two months later was placed under house arrest by the Munich Military Government. However, interned in the US, he was released in 1947 after a ‘denazification’ trial where he was supported by former colleague Kallmann (a eugenicist himself) and famous quantum physicist Max Planck[verification needed]; his only punishment was a 500-mark fine.

Speculation about the reasons for his early release, despite having been considered as a potential criminal defendant for the Nuremberg trials, include the need to restore confidence and order in the German medical profession; his personal and financial connections to prestigious American and British researchers, funding bodies and others; and the fact that he repeatedly cited American eugenic sterilization initiatives to justify his own as legal (indeed the Nuremberg trials carefully avoided highlighting such links in general). Nevertheless, Rüdin has been cited as a more senior and influential architect of Nazi crimes than the physician who was sentenced to death, Karl Brandt, or the infamous Josef Mengele who had attended his lectures and been employed by his Institute.

After Rüdin’s death in 1952, the funeral eulogy was held by Kurt Pohlisch, a close friend who had been professor of psychiatry at Bonn University, director of the second-largest genetics research institute in Germany, and expert Nazi advisor on Action T4.

Rüdin’s connections to the Nazis were a major reason for criticisms of psychiatric genetics in Germany after 1945.

He was survived by his daughter, Edith Zerbin-Rüdin, who became a psychiatric geneticist and eugenicist herself. In 1996, Zerbin-Rüdin, along with Kenneth S. Kendler, published a series of articles on his work which were criticised by others for whitewashing his racist and later Nazi ideologies and activities (Elliot S. Gershon also notes that Zerbin-Rüdin acted as defender and apologist for her father in private conversation and in a transcribed interview published in 1988). Kendler and other leading psychiatric genetic authors have been accused as recently as 2013 of producing revisionist historical accounts of Rüdin and his ‘Munich School’. Three types of account have been identified: “(A) those who write about German psychiatric genetics in the Nazi period, but either fail to mention Rüdin at all, or cast him in a favorable light; (B) those who acknowledge that Rüdin helped promote eugenic sterilization and/or may have worked with the Nazis, but generally paint a positive picture of Rüdin’s research and fail to mention his participation in the “euthanasia” killing program; and (C) those who have written that Rüdin committed and supported unspeakable atrocities.”

On This Day … 18 April

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People (Deaths)

  • 1917 – Vladimir Serbsky, Russian psychiatrist and academic (b. 1858).

Vladimir Serbsky

Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky (Russian: Влади́мир Петро́вич Се́рбский, 26 February 1858 to 18 April 1917 in Moscow) was a Russian psychiatrist and one of the founders of forensic psychiatry in Russia. The author of The Forensic Psychopathology, Serbsky thought delinquency to have no congenital basis, considering it to be caused by social reasons.

The Central Institute of Forensic Psychiatry was named after Serbsky in 1921. Now the facility is known as the Serbsky Centre (Serbsky State Scientific Centre for Social and Forensic Psychiatry).

Biography

Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky was born in 1858 in Bogorodsk (now Noginsk, Moscow Region) in the family of a zemstvo doctor.

After Serbsky grew up, his family moved to Moscow, where he studied at the Second Moscow Gymnasium. After graduation he entered the Physics and Mathematics Department of Moscow University, graduating in 1880 with a candidate’s degree. In the same year, he entered the Medical Department of Moscow University. Since he already had a higher education, he was immediately placed into the third year. Serbsky was fascinated by the study of nervous and mental diseases and became one of the students of S.S. Korsakov. In 1883 Serbsky defended his thesis on “The clinical importance of albuminuria”, for which he received a silver medal.

After graduating from the medical department, Serbsky began medical work under the direction of S.S. Korsakov in the private psychiatric hospital M.F. Bekker. In 1885, Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky was offered to manage a zemstvo psychiatric clinic in the Tambov province; he accepted the offer, leading the clinic until 1887. The local zemstvo offered him a trip to Austria, where he worked for almost a year at the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic under the direction of T. Meinert.

After returning from Austria, Serbsky worked for several months in the Tambov Clinic for the mentally ill, and then returned to Moscow, where he was elected to the position of senior assistant of the Moscow University psychiatric clinic. In 1891, Serbsky defended his thesis, “Forms of mental disorders described under the name of catatonia” for the degree of Doctor of Medicine and in 1892 received the title of privat-docent.

After the death of S.S. Korsakov, Serbsky in actuality became the chief psychiatrist in Russia. In 1902 he was appointed extraordinary professor and director of the psychiatric clinic, and in 1903 he headed the Department of Psychiatry of Moscow University, which he directed until 1911.

In 1905, Serbsky made a report in which he showed that the situation created in the country promotes the growth of mental illnesses. After the congress, he published a book in which he considered the role of revolution as a factor influencing the change in the consciousness of a large number of people. Such a position had a negative effect on his relations with the authorities. In 1911, as a sign of protest against the reactionary policy of the Minister of Education L.A. Kasso, Serbsky resigned and in the same year at the First Congress of Russian Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists he spoke against the government’s policy of suppressing rights and freedoms that resulted in the closing of the congress.

In 1913, the English and Scottish societies of psychiatrists elected the scientist their honorary member and were invited to visit Britain. Serbsky accepted the invitation. He was accepted as a famous scientist and public figure. He gave lectures, visited clinics, and advised patients. The University of Edinburgh offered him the position of a professor. He declined it and returned to Russia.

In 1913 Serbsky publicly denounced unsound examination of government-inspired anti-Semitic case M. Bayliss, who was unjustly accused of murdering a boy for ritual purposes.

After the Provisional Government came to power, the new Minister of Education, A.A. Manuilov, sent a letter to Serbsky, in which he invited him to return to Moscow University. The letter came too late, the scientist was already terminally ill. Vladimir Petrovich lived out his last days in poverty, since he retired without earning his pension. Renal failure due to chronic nephritis was gradually aggravated, and on 23 March 1917, Serbsky died. He was buried at the Novodevichy Cemetery.

Scientific Activity

Under the supervision of Serbsky, the Tambov hospital became one of the most advanced institutions of its type in Russia. Straight jackets and leather sleeves were banned in the patients clinic. There was a widespread use of work and entertainment for patients and the main contingent of workers who took part in walks and other festivities consisted of chronic patients.

Serbsky always advocated that patients were treated primarily as people. He repeatedly engaged in arguments with psychiatrist E. Krepelin, who fell back on a formalised diagnosis of mental illness. Considering the big picture of the disease, Serbsky took into account not only mental, but also physical ailments of patients, trying to recreate a picture of their relationships.

Serbsky was the first teacher at Moscow University in 1892 who lectured on forensic psychiatry to students of the law and medical departments.

Serbsky worked on issues of diagnosing the main forms of psychosis. He was the first one to find that some of the painful manifestations observed in adult patients are consequences of their childhood intellectual disorders. Gradually, Serbsky formulated the basic principles of the methodology by which psychiatrists could now determine the degree of the patient’s sanity, that is, the ability to critically evaluate his actions.

Serbsky supported and developed A.W. Freze’s and V.X. Kandinsky’s positions on the significance of the psychological understanding of mental disorders for the correct solution to forensic psychiatric questions. He pointed to the merits of V.X. Kandinsky: “V. X. Kandinsky developed the need to establish the psychological criterion of insanity by law with the greatest conviction- I can only align myself with the views of this talented psychologist.”

Serbsky first proved the inconsistency of K. Kalbaums’s doctrine of catatonia as an independent disease. In 1890 Serbsky found that the catatonic symptom complex can be a consequence of schizophrenia and other psychoses.

In 1895, Serbsky released the first volume of “The Guide to Forensic Psychopathology,” devoted to general theoretical questions and legislation on forensic psychiatry. This covered issues of forensic psychiatric theory and practice, as well as legislation for mental patients. The second volume of the “Guide” was published in 1900. For many decades the book was the desk guide for psychiatrists around the world. In this book, for the first time in the history of science, a description of various forms of malignant schizophrenia was presented. Serbsky succeeded in showing that an accurate diagnosis can be made only on the basis of a comprehensive examination of the patient.

Serbsky proved that from the point of view of psychiatry even a dangerous criminal can be a sick person. In this case, he should be isolated from society and be allowed to heal. The scientist was deeply convinced that in many crimes the environment that influenced the formation of his personality is to blame. He suggested introducing mandatory psychiatric examination for those accused of committing serious crimes. Usually in such cases, death sentences were imposed.

In 1912, Serbsky organised and headed the “Moscow Psychiatric Circle of Small Fridays,” which became one of the first organisational structures composed and led by psychoanalysts (M.M. Asatiani, E.N. Dovbnya, N.Ye. Osipov, O.B. Feltsman and others). He criticized a number of provisions of Freud’s teachings and the works of Russian psychoanalysts, including his students. At the same time encouraged the discussion of psychoanalytic problems. The discussions were carried out from the first day of the work of the circle.

Serbsky developed a modern form of sponsorship for psychiatric patients, was one of the founders of the Journal of Neuropathology and Psychiatry after S.S. Kosakov and the Russian Union of Psychiatrists and Neuropathologists, he was an active participant in all psychiatric and Pirogov congresses, delivering program papers on problems of forensic psychiatry, participated in many complex and forensically responsible psychiatric examinations in cases that caused great public outcry, boldly defending his own-always clinically sound- opinion.

Memory

Since 1912 the name of Vladimir Petrovich Serbsky has been carried by the Central Institute of Forensic Psychiatry in Moscow.

Major Works

  • The Forensic Psychopathology (1896-1900).
  • On Dementia praecox (1902).
  • Manual of Study of Mental Diseases (1906).