You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Helmut Thomä died on 3 August 2013, having slowly lost his personal capacities over a period of two years. His lifetime achievement consists in his arduous endeavor to further the scientific basis of psychoanalytic therapy.
Born on 6 May 1921 in Stuttgart, Helmut Thomä belonged to the generation of young men who were about to be drafted at the beginning of World War II. He chose to apply for service in the medical field and was drafted to study medicine in Berlin. At the end of the war, he served as an assistant doctor in Bavaria. At first, he gained unpaid experience in the realm of internal medicine, but subsequently he took up a trainee position at the psychiatric department of the University Clinic Freiburg in 1949. A short psychoanalytic experience with Dr. Schottländer in Stuttgart – at that time the only member of the International Psychoanalytic Association in West Germany – helped him to apply for a post at Alexander Mitscherlich's newly established Psychosomatic Hospital in Heidelberg. Back then, Thomä felt encouraged to experiment with a diversity of psychotherapeutic approaches. He also enjoyed his meetings with like-minded people and intense debates about philosophical and theological issues whose central focus was the issue of German collective guilt.
Joining Mitscherlich's team in Heidelberg certainly was the most formative environment for an aspiring young psychiatrist in the early 1950s in Germany. Mitscherlich's group was heavily involved in the upcoming debates between Viktor von Weizsäcker's holistic psychosomatic theory, and the psychoanalytic discourse that Mitscherlich had initiated. During this time, Thomä published a variety