August Stärke (1880–1954)

On 16 September, 1954, August Stärke died after a prolonged illness. In him the Dutch Psycho-Analytical Society lost one of its founders and one of its most original members. A few years before his death the Society showed its appreciation of his work by granting him Honorary Membership.

In looking through Stärke's works on psycho-analysis one is struck by the valiant and heroic quality of his penetrating mind and by his determination to understand the fundamental laws of human psychology. They contain thoughts of unmistakable genius which are only marred—as he himself admitted—by a too lapidary style and by a speculative trend which is sometimes hard to follow. All his work shows the signs of a strong revolutionary tendency. Freud's writings, of which On Dreams (1901) was the first to reach him, made a profound impression on him as here at last he found the hypocrisy of the traditional psychology of the conscious mind unmasked. From then on he became a fervent supporter of psycho-analytical theory which to him was often a vehicle for his revolt against the ethical and aesthetic prejudices that dominate science.

Stärke had no less than 146 publications to his name, his early papers being neurological and psychiatrical, the latter mainly psycho-analytical. From 1926 on he wrote a great number of papers on myrmecology; this change of subject may be explained by the sociological content of many of his papers.

Stärke was not a psycho-analyst in the usual sense; he spent his life as a psychiatrist in a mental hospital and one has the impression that psycho-analysis as a therapeutic technique was not the central point of his interest. His most important contributions to psycho-analysis concern the psychoses: 'Comments on Paranoia' (1919 and 1935), in which he located the real persecutor in the scybalum, and Psycho-Analysis and Psychiatry (1921), for which he received the Freud Prize. In the latter he made profound observations on the differences between psychotic a