Psychiatrist who co-founded the Institute for Sexual Science and pioneered psychotherapy, dying in Moscow exile
He gave the opening scientific address of the Institute for Sexual Science in 1919 and was its chief physician until 1926; in 1927 he became the first lecturer appointed at the Charité for his qualification in psychotherapy.
A psychiatrist and psychotherapist born into a Jewish lawyer’s family in Berlin. He co-founded the Institute for Sexual Science with Hirschfeld in 1919 and was its chief physician for seven years, then led the “new direction” that brought psychotherapy into medicine and became the first lecturer in psychotherapy at the Charité. In the November Revolution he was prominent in the Freiburg workers’ and soldiers’ council, and he belonged to the Association of Socialist Physicians. Emigrating in 1935, he went via Switzerland to a psychiatric research institute in Moscow, and in October 1941, as German troops approached Moscow, he and his wife took their own lives.
Activities and affiliations
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1909–1935
Science and technology
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1936–1941
Soviet Union state institutions
Science and technology
Related historical events
The institute, psychotherapy and exile
His grandfather had been a synagogue cantor. As a student his first book brought him into contact with Hirschfeld; he became a lifelong friend of Kurt Hiller and was active in the circle of the philosopher Leonard Nelson. In 1912 he published a systematic critique of Freud’s theories, and he also contributed poems and reviews to Expressionist journals. A front-line doctor at Verdun in the First World War, he was decorated several times, and in the November Revolution he was prominent in the Freiburg workers’ and soldiers’ council. From 1919 he worked for seven years as co-founder and organiser of the Institute for Sexual Science, giving its opening scientific address, and in 1924 he published the textbook Psychotherapie. After opening his own practice in 1926 he became in 1927 the first lecturer in Germany appointed at the Charité for his qualification in psychotherapy. A member of the Association of Socialist Physicians from 1926, he treated Trotsky’s eldest daughter Zinaida Volkova in 1931 and appeared as an expert witness in a libel case brought by Hitler in 1932. Stripped of his teaching licence by the Nazis, he emigrated to Switzerland in 1935, moved under threat of expulsion to a neuropsychiatric institute in Moscow in 1936, where he introduced insulin shock therapy, and became a Soviet citizen in 1937. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 he wrote a pamphlet portraying the Nazi leaders as “degenerates”, and on 16 October 1941, in the early stage of the Battle of Moscow, he and his wife Lydia died of an overdose of sleeping pills. In Russia he is still regarded as a classic of psychiatry.