1950

In Germany, establishment of Department for Psychosomatic Medicine at University of Heidelberg, following Mitschlerlich’s proposal for a university setting to link psychoanalytic psychotherapy to all other medical specialties and, at the same time, to open it to the behavioral sciences. The department was not part of the psychiatry department but attached to Weizsächer’s neurology section of the department of internal medicine (Roelcke, 484). The new department was a result of Mitscherlich’s and Weizsäcker’s political maneuvering and attested to the fact “that the success of postwar psychotherapy and psychosomatic medicine in and outside German universities was not a consequence of an acceptance by physicians of the merits of psychoanalysis, or psychotherapy, but the result of outside political pressures” (482, cf. 491).