BENN,GOTTFRIED AND PSYCHIATRY

As a young physician the poet Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) gave up a pro mising career in psychiatry after short period in practice. A psychody namic analysis of this failure stresses the importance of the relation ship of father and son in adolescence for the maturing of ego identity and ego ideal. At the beginning of this century psychiatry was a medi cal field with strong materialistic and biologistic positions. Benn em braced this position and tried to distance himself from his father, wh o was a charismatic priest with psychotherapeutic ambition. Benn exper ienced difficulty in competing with his father and this can be attribu ted to disturbances in his relationship to his mother in early childho od. The consequence was e.g. a narcisstic vulnerability in adulthood. The contrast of the splendid success in brain research with its inappl icability in routine therapy was characteristic of the state of psychi atry at the time of Benn's failure.