Obituary Notices

Wilhelm Bitter, who died on 12 January 1974, was the child of a mixed Protestant and Catholic marriage. It may well be that this led to his pronounced tendency in later life to bring diverse elements together.

He first intended to study theology, but then changed his mind and read economy, and especially national economy and constitution. He possessed great organizational talents and became the leader of an organization which became connected with the League of Nations after the First World War, and was concerned with helping dispossessed people to recover their property abroad. At that time he also wrote a book, The sickness of Europe, demanding a revision of the Treaty of Versaille with the hope of stemming the rising tide of nationalism in Germany. He was already forty-one when he took up the study of medicine and psychotherapy and was trained first as a psychoanalyst and later as an analytical psychologist. He worked with Jung and also became a neurologist at Lausanne and Zürich.

On his return to Germany after the war he founded the psychotherapeutic training institute at Stuttgart (1948), the German Society for Psychotherapy and Depth Psychology and, in the same year, the Society ‘Arzt und Seelsorger’ (doctor and psychotherapist) whose members included lawyers and other people in the helping professions. This became an international society with over 1,000 members. Bitter further supported the foundation of the C. G. Jung Society in Stuttgart in 1957, which in 1960 became part of the German Society for Jung's analytical psychology. It was with his help that the ‘House for Neurotics’, a clinic specially designed and built for healing by means of psychotherapy was built, and this also became a research institute associated with the provincial university. The C. G. Jung Institute in Stuttgart (1971) was his last foundation and he also left a research trust.

Wilhelm Bitter published eighteen scientific works, his main one appearing as a pocket book, Anx