Contemporary History of Psychiatry

Psychiatry is one of the more intensively studied fields in the history of medicine. This applies in particular to psychiatry during the National Socialist era, while the subsequent periods have been studied only selectively. In terms of local history, Horst Dilling (1933-2020), former director of the Psychiatric Clinic of the University of Lübeck, has earned particular credit for initiating work on the origins of Lübeck's psychiatry and for his commitment to the reconstruction of the fate of psychiatric patients during the Nazi era. The exclusion and murder of psychiatric patients during the National Socialist era was also the subject of the student initiative "plötzlich weg" ("suddenly gone“) in 2021 commemorating the 70th anniversary of the deportation of over 600 people.

The institute participated at the DFG Research Group Cultures of Madness (FOR 1120) with a project on patient records from Lübeck. In the sub-project "Documents of Madness: Fabulating and Querulating in Literature and Psychiatry," Sonja Mählmann conducted a micro-study of the note-taking practices in the former Strecknitz asylum, the precursor of the psychiatric clinic. In another DFG Research Group with the name „IN#SANE“ (FOR 3031), Cornelius Borck collaborates again with Armin Schäfer (Ruhruniversität Bochum). This time focusing on the most recent history of psychiatry. As part of the subproject "Alterity and Disorder in Psychiatry and Literature since the Seventies of the 20th Century.“, Lisa Schmidt-Herzog writes her dissertation on psychic alterity.

In her dissertation, Alison Dörnte reconstructs psychiatric practice and the everyday life on the wards in the postwar period, when the asylum had been turned into a psychiatric department of the city hospital.

The postwar history of psychiatry in Schleswig-Holstein was the subject of two research projects on injustice in psychiatry and disability care led by Cornelius Borck and Gabriele Lingelbach on behalf of the Social Ministry of the State of Schleswig-Holstein. In the first project the team searched for cases of unethical medical experimentation in psychopharmacological testing from 1949 to 1975. The second project documented incidence of institutional, physical, physic, and sexual violence in psychiatric institutions and homes for mentally retarded children.

The history of psychiatry in the postwar period was also the subject of Dr. Bettina Schubert's dissertation. Under the title "Psychiatry in Reconstruction," she reconstructed continuities and reforms based on the example of the asylum state in Neustadt in Holstein. On the basis of these research results and in exchange with colleagues from similar projects, the anthology "Zwischen Beharrung, Kritik und Reform. Psychiatrische Anstalten und Heime für Menschen mit Behinderung in der deutschen Nachkriegsgeschichte" was produced and edited by Cornelius Borck and Gabriele Lingelbach (Frankfurt: Campus 2023).

The Psychosomatic Clinic of the University of Lübeck during the directorship of Hubert Feiereis, who enjoyed a nationwide recognition, was the subject of Edith Hansen's doctoral thesis "Hubert Feiereis and the History of Psychosomatics in Lübeck".

In individual essays Cornelius Borck has dealt with further aspects of contemporary psychiatric history, from the discussion of psychiatric shock procedures, to Helmut Selbach's theory of crisis of psychiatric phenomena, to Viktor Emil von Gebsattel's "Rise to the Deuter of the Experience of Time“.