ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Pluralism in Psychosomatics in Germany

• In Event: The Making of Psychotherapeutic Knowledge: Research Practices, Epistemic Cultures, and Disciplinary Negotiations 2

English Abstract

While psychosomatics emerged in the American context at the intersection of physiological research on stress and the application of psychoanalytic concepts to organic conditions (as it now dominates the international conceptualization of psychosomatic medicine), its genealogy in the German context was more convoluted. Here, the early triumphs of machine medicine kindled already during the Weimar Republic a wave of criticism in search of more personalized approaches to medicine and alongside with early attempts of applying psychoanalytic theory. With the forced exodus of psychoanalysis after 1933, psychosomatics coalesced in Germany around a biographical hermeneutics of clinical conditions in internal medicine, as exemplified in the famous case histories of Viktor von Weizsäcker – but with many more figures bridging from internal medicine into psychosomatics. Only with the re-import of psychoanalysis after the war, with its renaissance after 1968, with a reform of the medical curriculum and with the introduction of clinical training in psychology, psychoanalytic psychotherapy became the therapeutic center of psychosomatics in Germany and psychosomatics advanced to an academic specialty of its own, as exemplified by the clinics led by Alexander Mitscherlich and Johannes Cremerius. The diversification went even further, when Thure von Uexküll conceptualized psychosomatics as a form of comprehensive medicine, fully integrating all its different branches to a holistic pluralism. This vision seems to have faltered meanwhile – and with it, positive notions of pluralism have vanished.

Author

• Cornelius Borck, Inistitute for History of Medicine and Sciences Studies, University of Luebeck