Life as Conflict

Through his political opinions and sociopsychological analyses, the physician, psychoanalyst and social-psychologist Alexander Mitscherlich (1908-1982) has had a decisive inuence on the intellectual profile of West Germany. Works such as `Society without the Father` and `The Inability to Trust` are still considered important elements in the development and disposition of West German society in the post-war years.

Using previously unpublished material, Martin Dehli places the biography of Mitscherlich against the background of German history of the 20th century. His story stretches from the national revolutionary circles around Ernst Jünger and Ernst Niekisch in Berlin in the early 1930s, through exile and imprisonment, and on to Heidelberg and finally Frankfurt, where Mitscherlich continued the development of his work.
Mitscherlich does not appear as an icon of West German self-concept. He is instead someone with all the contradictions that a founding ⁄gure in a time of transition would possess - the richness of facets and an immediacy that, by enhancing the import of his political and scholarly works, initially made possible his contributions to the modernization of German scholarship and society.