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IF You Want to stride into the Infinite, move but within the Finite in all directions. “These words of Goethe,”1 Kurt Goldstein said ten years ago, on his seventieth birthday, “have been guiding me all my life.” They describe well the steadily widening horizon of his life and work.
Kurt Goldstein was born in Katowice, a small city in Upper Silesia, now a part of Poland. He gained his medical degree from the University of Breslau in 1903. His doctorate thesis was on the structure of the posterior columns of the spinal cord. He was working in the laboratory of the well-known neurologist, Professor Foerster. Chairman of the department was Professor Wernicke, the pioneer in the field of aphasia. Goldstein's approach to the whole problem of language later became quite different, but Wernicke's conviction that neurology and psychiatry form one inseparable unit prevailed in his thinking. In 1904, he became assistant to Professor Edinger at the Neurological Institute in Frankfurt. The next ten years saw him in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Freiburg, as assistant to Professor Hoche; working with Professor Oppenheim in the Neurologic Polyclinic in Berlin, and as Privatdozent at the University of Koenigsberg. It was here that Frieda Fromm-Reichmann met him, to follow him later back to Frankfurt—an encounter which proved highly fruitful for the development of psychoanalysis, particularly for the therapy of schizophrenics.
In 1914 he returned to Frankfurt as the successor to Professor Edinger, his former teacher, and became Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry in Frankfurt and Director of the Neurological Institute there. During the first World War he became the Director of the Military Hospital for brain-injured soldiers, which later became the “Institute for Research on the After-effects of Brain Injuries.”
Here I met him first. I see it as characteristic of Kurt Goldstein's life-affirmative coming to terms with the world and the medical science around him th