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I used the occasion of his 70th birthday later this year as an excuse to talk to Michael B. Buchholz about how he developed into the psychoanalyst, psychologist, social scientist, and professor that he is today. We met in his office at the International Psychoanalytic University (IPU), and talked for almost four hours. Still, I am left with an impression that we have only sketched the contours of a prolific clinical and academic career.
This text is an edited and abridged version of the interview, the transcript of which was prepared by Gamze Farz, MA.
Aleksandar Dimitrijevic (A.D.):
Michael, how did you become a psychoanalyst? How did you make up your mind to take up this profession, and what where the steps in your career?
Michael B. Buchholz (M.B.B.):
When I was about 20 years old, I read that psychoanalysts have sometimes already been doing a therapeutic job in their families of origin. And I felt touched by this idea.
My mother came from old German nobility, while my father was a “half-Jew” in Nazi terminology. They had met by the end of 1945. And my father had been in the concentration camps, first at Zerbst, which was not a camp for annihilating people, but a labor camp. He was transferred in September 1944 to Buchenwald, from where he was liberated in April 1945 by the American Army. Several months later, my mother and father met for the first time, and they married in January 1946.
Years later, when I was working as a family therapist, often including grandparents, I understood that so many families of my parents’ generation, who had suffered from a mass destruction we cannot really imagine, tried to reorganize their family lives as if they were able to start again from the time before 1933, but you cannot cut these horrible 12 years out of the timeline and begin again.
Two years after my parents’ marriage, in March 1948, my brother was born; I followed in April 1950 and my sister in November 1951.
My father was full of stories about national socialism. When I was y