Neuauflagen alter Affinitäten, oder Psychotherapie an der Charité (ab 1957) : Neurosen, Künste, Ausdruckskörper

In the context of medicine, ‘wholeness’ recalls different things: of course, the relationship between body and soul, or soma, psyche and environment, depending on the historical context and different terminologies. But holism is also playing a role in the self-understanding of a medicine or psychiatry that strives for the ‘whole’ by incorporating questions, methods, and perspectives from the humanities and the arts. Although holistic medicine existed before the 18th century, this claim of a ‘bio-psycho-social epistemology’ dates from the 18th century and its so-called ‘anthropological turn’; and it reemerges in psychosomatic medicine in the 20th century. This article focuses on the psychiatry of the Berlin Charité under the direction of Karl Leonhard (from 1957): In contrast to the official Pavlovian-oriented GDR psychosomatics, Leonhard had a great affinity for the arts and paid special attention to the diagnostic potential of bodily expressive phenomena with explicit recourse to the acting theory and theories of psychotechnics of the 1920s. On the one hand, the article traces the hope for a quasi ‘holistic’ transgression of one’s own scientific, disciplinary boundaries. And, on the other hand, it shows how the claim to wholeness and the aporias of knowledge are related to each other.