Horst-Eberhard Richter Explained

Horst-Eberhard Richter (28 April 1923 – 19 December 2011) was a German psychoanalyst, psychosomatist and social philosopher. The author of numerous books was also regarded by many as the große alte Mann of the Federal German Peace movement.

Life

Horst-Eberhard Richter was born in Berlin as the only child of the engineer Otto Richter and his wife Charlotte and grew up as an only child. He describes his mother as a very emotional woman who clung strongly to him. His father was a successful engineer, head of a Siemens plant and author of a standard reference book on precision mechanics. Richter himself experienced his father as a quiet, introverted brooding man. Richter was a member of the Hitler Youth and the Reich Labour Service.[1] [2] [3]

After his school-leaving examination in 1941, Horst-Eberhard Richter was drafted into the Wehrmacht. In 1942, he served as a gunner in an on the Eastern front. In 1943, he was able to transfer to the medical corps. In 1945, he was deployed in the Italian campaign, where he deserted shortly before the end of the war and hid in a refuge in the Alps. There, French occupation soldiers tracked him down and suspected him of being a Nazi Freischar in hiding, a so-called Werwolf and held him for four months in an old Innsbruck prison until a French court-martial released him. After returning home to Germany, he learned that his parents had been murdered by Soviet soldiers months after the end of the war.

In 1946, Richter met Bergrun Luckow, who was married and pregnant at the time. After their divorce, Richter and Luckow married a year later. After Luckow's first husband agreed, Richter adopted the daughter and they had another son and daughter.[4] [5]

Richter studied medicine, philosophy and psychology in Berlin. He wrote his dissertation on the subject of Die philosophische Dimension des Schmerzes in the flat of a bombed-out tenement building in Berlin-Halensee, with which he was awarded a Dr. phil. in 1949. With a scientific thesis, which he wrote in the course of his further medical training, he obtained the doctorate in medicine in 1957.[6]

From 1952 to 1962, Richter ran a counselling and research centre for mentally disturbed children and adolescents in Berlin. In addition, he trained as a psychoanalyst and as a specialist in neurology and psychiatry. From 1959 to 1962, he directed the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. In 1962, he was appointed to the newly established chair of psychosomatics at the University of Giessen, where he built up a three-part interdisciplinary centre with a psychosomatic clinic and departments of medical psychology and medical sociology, of which he became director. In addition, he founded a psychoanalytic institute at the site. From 1964 to 1968, Richter was chairman of the .[7] In 1971, he endorsed as an expert witness the Socialist Patients' Collective founded by Wolfgang Huber. He retired in 1991. In 2004, he held a visiting scholarship at the University of Vienna endowed by Peter Ustinov. From 1992 to 2002, he directed the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt.

Richter died on 19 December 2011 in Giessen at the age of 88 after a short illness.[8] The funeral took place on 23 December 2011 at the state-owned Friedhof Heerstraße in Berlin Westend (grave location: 16-C-57). Spouse Bergrun Richter née Luckow (b. 1923) was buried at his side in August 2019.[9] As a gravestone serves a boulder with a quotation by Max Scheler, which was already to be read in simplified form in the family's funeral announcement: "Man, before he is a thinking and a willing being, is a loving being."

Work

Richter first became internationally known as one of the pioneers of psychoanalytic family research and family therapy. Complementing Freud's analysis of the, he conversely investigated the pathogenic effect of disturbed parents on their children. In joint research work with Dieter Beckmann he wrote a textbook on cardiac neurosis and, together with, developed the . Richter "discovered the emancipatory potential of the group, both in psychotherapeutic and political terms."

After critical analyses of the new social movements of the 1970s, his cultural-philosophical work Der Gotteskomplex appeared: Man wants to replace the loss of faith security with a will to rule based on natural science - being God instead of having God. In the vacillation between fear of impotence and delusion of omnipotence, the scientific-technical revolution threatens to lose ethical control.

In 1981, Richter's book Alle redeten vom Frieden[10] became one of the leading figures of the peace movement[11] and in 1982 co-founded the West German section of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1985 for its commitment. In 1987, Richter co-initiated the International Foundation for the Survival and the Development of Humanity, supervised by Mikhail Gorbachev. There, he led a comparative study to improve understanding between German and Russian students. From 1991 to 2001, Richter moderated the East-West Symposium on Political Self-Reflection with leaders from politics, science, literature and the church from the old and new federal States. During both Iraq wars, he was one of the most respected intellectuals of the peace movement. What Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker called the "mental illness of peacelessness" in the West has been the main topic of Richter's cultural psychology analyses in speeches and writings since 2007.

Richter drafted a Frankfurt Declaration, which was intended to make it possible for doctors to publicly declare by signature "to refuse any training and further education in war medicine." Since 2001, i.e. from the very beginning, he was committed to the "globalisation-critical Attac movement".

Horst Eberhard-Richter Institut

In September 2017, the Psychoanalytic Institute Giessen was renamed the Horst Eberhard Richter Institute for Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Richter was a founding member of this institute in the early 1960s. The laudatory speech at the ceremony to mark the renaming was given by Hans-Jürgen Wirth. Stephan Scholz reported on Richter's tribute in the and called him a "thinker who dominated the bestseller lists for years and whose humanity is still praised in the highest terms today."

Awards

Richter refused three times the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany on the grounds that "too many s" had received it.[15]

Publications

1960–1969

1970–1979

1980–1989

1990–1999

2000–2009

2010–2011

Other publications

Film

References

  1. Web site: Paracelsusmedaille für Prof. Dr. med. Dr. phil. Horst-Eberhard Richter . Bundesärztekammer . 20 May 2008 . 2 September 2021 . 19 October 2020 . https://web.archive.org/web/20201019220128/https://www.bundesaerztekammer.de/aerztetag/aerztetage-der-vorjahre/111-daet-2008-in-ulm/paracelsus-medaille/richter/ . dead .
  2. Web site: Professor Dr. Horst-Eberhard Richter Psychoanalytiker im Gespräch mit Ulrike Leutheusser . Bayerischer Rundfunk . 6 September 2000. 2 September 2021.
  3. Web site: Hans-Jürgen Wirth . Horst-Eberhard Richter ist gestorben . Psychosozialverlag . 30 December 2011. 2 September 2021.
  4. Book: Horst-Eberhard Richter . Wanderer zwischen den Fronten: Gedanken und Erinnerungen . Cologne . 2017.
  5. Web site: Bergrun Richter ist 95 . Gießener Allgemeine . 3 September 2018. 2 September 2021.
  6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=249MjC3GR5k Zeitzeugen-TV
  7. Mourning announcement of the DPV, Tagesspiegel from 24 December 2011, .
  8. Web site: Horst-Eberhard Richter ist tot . . de . 3 September 2021.
  9. Web site: Traueranzeigen von Bergrun Richter . Tagesspiegel Trauer . de . 3 September 2021.
  10. Web site: Böhme . Erich . Wir leben im kollektiven Verfolgungswahn . . 25 October 1981 . de . 3 September 2021.
  11. News: Feddersen . Jan . Nachruf Horst-Eberhard Richter: Der Therapeut der Republik . Die Tageszeitung: Taz . 20 December 2011 . 3 September 2021.
  12. http://www.fairness-stiftung.de/LaudatioDorotheeSoelle2001.htm Laudatio von Dorothee Sölle
  13. After the bourgeois majority in the Giessen city parliament rejected an honorary citizenship for Richter in 2003, among other things with reference to his pacifist attitudes and his criticism of the Iraq War, the city parliament voted by a majority on 20 September 2007 in favour of the magistrate's application for honorary citizenship.
  14. Auszeichnung für soziales Engagement. In Oberhessische Presse Marburg, 20 April 2010, .
  15. Web site: Leitfigur der Friedensbewegung . . 28 April 2008 . de . 3 September 2021.

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External links

Interviews

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