Obituary – Horst Kächele (1944–2020)

On June 28, 2020, at 1:20 p.m., our friend and colleague Prof. Dr. Horst Kächele died in Ulm in the presence of his wife Beate, who had fallen ill herself, and his family. After long suffering, one must add. With much courage he spent much of the time of his deadly illness revising the new edition of the “Ulmer Lehrbuch,” lying in bed with the computer on his lap – a masterwork of dedication to a lifelong task of helping to keep psychoanalysis at the forefront of its time. The three volumes of the “Ulmer Lehrbuch,” translated into and printed in more than 20 languages since 1985, will also be a guiding star for future historians of psychoanalysis. For clinicians, they already are.

In fact, there has been and is hardly anyone who has known such a wide range of theoretical and clinical ramifications of long-running, highly interesting discussions, who has been able to establish such rich connections to neighboring sciences (especially infant research, but also literature, neuroscience, social research, and philosophy), and who has been able to constantly draw on first-hand experience, because he simply knew God and the psychoanalytical world, heavenly and internationally. And this is no wonder, because he, who read Freud at the age of 17, was amusedly called an “early starter” and had long paths already behind him when others were just starting.

The way Horst presented the invited speakers at several congresses organized jointly at the IPU was influenced by this. He avoided a formal reading of this or that which someone had published, but visibly enjoyed describing the greats from personal experience, with warmth and charm and at the same time an inimitably ironic distance, which also amused him about his own pleasure of being close to them – and one had to smile involuntarily about this variant of “Apud Sanctos”– the formula for those who wanted to be buried “with the saints,” in or near the church. This, of course, did not prevent him from making himself heard with th