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This contribution by Hermann Argelander was first published in the German psychoanalytic journal Psyche - whose subtitle translates as ‘Journal of Psychoanalysis and its Applications’ - in 1970 (Argelander, 1970a). Hermann Argelander was born in 1920, and after his medical studies became a specialist in internal medicine; he completed his training in psychoanalysis at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, qualifying during the 1950s. In 1959 he joined Alexander Mitscherlich at Heidelberg University's Department of Psychosomatic Medicine, moving in 1960 to Mitscherlich's newly established Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt. Together with others, Argelander built up the Institute's psychoanalytic training and research capability, and he continued to work there until 1977. He was then appointed to the Chair of Psychoanalysis in the Psychology Department at Frankfurt University as Alexander Mitscherlich's successor, remaining in post until his retirement in 1985. Argelander died in 2004.
The reconstruction of psychoanalysis in Germany came to centre on the new Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt from the 1960s onwards. During this period, on the basis of the Critical Theory of Horkheimer and Adorno, an amazingly stimulating and fertile culture of discussion had arisen in Frankfurt, devoted in particular to the finding of an appropriate scientific methodology in the social sciences and to issues of scientific objectivity and the hermeneutic understanding of meaning, which constituted a fruitful methodological and theoretical catalyst for the further development of psychoanalysis. Before that, during the 1950s, the German psychoanalysts had found their way back into the mainstream of international psychoanalysis and its developments principally by way of ego psychology. Now, in the 1960s, ego psychology's conception of itself as a natural science and the search for a causal basis for psychological manifestations found themselves under heavy fire. A milestone in such crit