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I first met Martin Teising during the 2007 IPA meeting in Berlin. The psychoanalytic institute in Kassel had invited attendees to a pre-Congress tour of the Documenta, a contemporary art exhibition that regularly takes place in Kassel, and about twenty of us had arrived from Berlin. I had accepted the invitation but had come mainly to see Kassel, the city of my birth, which I'd left as a toddler.
As director of the Kassel institute, Martin began its reception for us with a brief history of the city and its fate during the war. In his moving introduction, he was forthright about his awareness that traveling to Germany might be difficult for some of us, and he voiced his gratitude for our having come. It was a stirring and sobering welcome for those who might have had misgivings about travel to Germany since the war.
Over the ensuing years I would regularly see Martin and his wife, Ingrid, at international meetings. Several years ago he told me he would be giving up his practice in Kassel to assume the role of president of a psychoanalytic university in Berlin. I peppered him with questions about structure, funding, faculty, programs, and so forth. Many of us in the U.S. have long thought it imperative to reintroduce psychoanalysis as part of university curricula, and not just in departments of art and literature, but we have not known how this might be accomplished. So hearing Martin's description of undergraduate and graduate programs in psychoanalytic studies, of an entire degree-granting university with funded research devoted to psychoanalytic ideas, was extremely exciting.
I've asked Martin to explain to us how this has been accomplished in Germany, in the hope that it can serve, if not as a model to be replicated, at least as a suggestive example for our own attempts to normalize psychoanalysis as a domain of inquiry at the university level.
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