Within what ethical boundaries has psychiatry operated, and does it continue to operate? This question runs like a common thread through the events marking the Karl Jaspers Visiting Professorship, which is being held this winter semester by Frank Schneider, Director of the Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics at Aachen University Hospital.
Prof. Dr Dr Frank Schneider will open the series on Monday 22 February at 6.00 pm with a lecture entitled ‘Recorded, Persecuted, Exterminated. Sick and Disabled People under National Socialism”, at the Karl Jaspers Clinic (KJK; Hermann-Ehlers-Straße 7, Bad Zwischenahn). The exhibition focuses on sick and disabled people who were regarded as a burden on the German ‘national community’ during the Nazi era. Up to 400,000 people were sterilised against their will, and more than 200,000 were murdered as part of the ‘euthanasia’ programme. The exhibition, which can be viewed in the clinic foyer until 6 March, also addresses the long delay in coming to terms with these crimes after 1945.
On Tuesday 23 February, two colloquia will take place at the Karl Jaspers House in Oldenburg (Unter den Eichen 22). Under the title ‘The Heidelberg and Tübingen Schools of Psychopathology: A Controversy’, Schneider will be in discussion from 3.00 pm to 5.30 pm with the Oldenburg philosopher Prof. Dr Matthias Bormuth and the former Jaspers visiting professor Prof. Dr Markus Jäger (Ulm). From 6.00 pm to 9.00 pm, Schneider will give a lecture on “Ethics and the History of Psychiatry in the Context of Karl Jaspers”. The medical ethicist and historian Prof. em. Dr Dietrich von Engelhardt (Lübeck/Karlsruhe) will be contributing to this colloquium.
Registration for the events can be made at the Office of KJK Chief Physician Dr Christian Figge by telephone on 0441/9615-685 or by email to katja.boelts@kjk.de. As a co-organiser, Dr Figge can also provide further information about the exhibition.
The renowned psychiatrist Dr Schneider, former President of the German Society for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Psychosomatics and Neurology (DGPPN), is the fourth Karl Jaspers Visiting Professor. The aim of the visiting professorship is, in the spirit of the Oldenburg-based psychiatrist and philosopher after whom it is named, to examine issues in clinical psychiatry from methodological and philosophical perspectives and to discuss new approaches in psychiatric research.
The visiting professorship is sponsored by the Karl Jaspers Society in co-operation with the Karl Jaspers Clinic, whose University Department of Psychiatry forms part of the Medical Campus of the University of Oldenburg. Matthias Bormuth, holder of the Heisenberg professorship in Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Oldenburg, is responsible for the academic coordination – in close consultation with the ‘European Medical School Oldenburg-Groningen’.
