Gottfried Benn und die Psychiatrie

Abstract

As a young physician the poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) gave up a promising career in psychiatry after short period in practice. A psychodynamic analysis of this failure stresses the importance of the relationship of father and son in adolescence for the maturing of ego identity and ego ideal. At the beginning of this century psychiatry was a medical field with strong materialistic and biologistic positions. Benn embraced this position and tried to distance himself from his father, who was a charismatic priest with psychotherapeutic ambition. Benn experienced difficulty in competing with his father and this can be attributed to disturbances in his relationship to his mother in early childhood. The consequence was e.g. a narcissistic vulnerability in adulthood. The contrast of the splendid success in brain research with its inapplicability in routine therapy was characteristic of the state of psychiatry at the time of Benn's failure.