The struggle for a psychoanalytic research institute: The evolution of Frankfurt’s Sigmund Freud Institute

Editorial introduction: Psychoanalytical perspectives on the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…But his political commitment led to many conflicts, especially with the right‐wing conservative government in Hessen, so that in 2003, 1 year after Rolf Haubl and I (MLB) had taken over the leadership of the SFI, the SFI was to be closed. It was an existential experience for me that the SFI—as a psychoanalytic research institute—due to the powerful and mighty Zeitgeist of empirical research—could now only survive if it earned an international reputation in the world of science, for example in comparative psychotherapy research, and carried out successfully large, externally funded interdisciplinary research projects (see Leuzinger‐Bohleber & Plänkers, 2019).…”

“…It became a national model project. Since we were able to empirically show its effectiveness, it led to the establishment of three Psychosocial Centers that continue to serve refugees to this day (now under the responsibility of professor Patrick Meurs—for more details, see Leuzinger‐Bohleber & Plänkers, 2019).…”

Obituary: Prof. Dr. med. Dr. phil. Horst Kächele, Ulm, a messenger of empirical research in psychoanalysis (born 18 February1944, died 28 June 2020)

“…To understand his career it is important to mention that Horst Kächele was born in the 1940s. He thus belonged to the so-called "war generation", the '68 generation, of psychoanalysts in Germany (see, for example, Bohleber 2019;Leuzinger-Bohleber and Plänkers 2019). He completed his psychoanalytic training in the 1970s, during the international heyday of psychoanalysis.…”

“…Horst often expressed how much he regretted the tendencies towards splittings within the psychoanalytic movement, the withdrawals into the ivory towers of psychoanalytic institutions and affinities to religious group processes, and how much it hurt him to be pushed into a corner by some psychoanalytic colleagues, being labelled an empiricist, a "positivistic researcher" who was "not a real psychoanalyst", etc. A detailed history of psychoanalysis as a (traumatized) discipline (Bohleber 2019;Leuzinger-Bohleber and Plänkers 2019) and its influence on its attitude to empirical research has yet to be written. Horst would certainly have welcomed such a piece of necessary research.…”

“…A look at his approximately 900 publications shows how extensively Horst networked with around 400 co-authors. This reflects another of his personality traits: great curiosity about previously unfamiliar fields such as forensic psychotherapy (Pfäfflin and Kächele 1996;Kächele 1998) or cognitive science, or other research traditions such as the unwieldy psychoanalytic research tradition of Ulrich Moser at the Department of Clinical Psychology in Zurich (Kächele, Eberhardt, and Leuzinger-Bohleber 1999;Leuzinger-Bohleber and Plänkers 2019).…”