Anthroposophic psychotherapy

Anthroposophy offers a completely new basis for psychotherapy and psychiatry. It shows that it is the supersensory human being itself which – if unconsciously – builds the body, then emancipates itself from the body in the course of its development and thus recognises itself as a person in pure soul experience and in the course of progressing character-formation learns to develop itself and its environment autonomously.  

Information about the training situation can be found by country on the left.

General advanced training

International conference of the School of Spiritual Science
Britain, Brazil and Israel are also actively involved in the psychotherapeutic research of the School of Spiritual Science. In addition, in recent years a group of specialists from the former republics of the USSR and Russia – not yet organised in their countries – has shown interest.
Email: mljdejong@instantemail.t-mobile.nl  

Conference of the School of Spiritual Science at the Filderklinik
Conference of the School of Spiritual Science at the Filderklinik on child and adolescent psychopathology und psychosomatics in adulthood. Dept. of Internal Medicine 2010
“Abuse and violence in childhood and its consequences for ego development”
innere@filderklinik.de
 
Annual conference of the Medical Section at the Goetheanum
The annual conference of the Medical Section is an international and interdisciplinary forum in which various research groups on the subject of anthroposophically based psychotherapy and diagnosis are involved. It is the task of the coordinators Ad Dekkers and Henriette Dekkers-Appel to invite the international professional group to participate in the theme for the year. The relationship between psychiatry, psychotherapy, biography work and counselling. Whereas psychiatric treatment is fundamentally based on medication, the therapeutic procedures affecting the constituent human elements, exercises and anthroposophic psychotherapy, in that order, psychotherapeutic practice focuses on process-related development based on the diagnosis of the human constituent elements and psychotherapeutic treatment of the three and four membered human being in the disorders and traumas affecting a person’s life.
Ad Dekkers and Henriette Dekkers-Appel
Email: dekkers.appel@planet.nl

The history of anthroposophic psychotherapy
Anthroposophically based psychiatry goes back to Dr. med. Friedrich Husemann, a neurologist and psychiatrist and from 1910 pupil of Rudolf Steiner. Husemann established the first anthroposophic psychiatric sanatorium , Riedberg in 1925 and the Friedrich Husemann Clinic in Wiesneck in 1930. The psychiatric conferences of the School of Spiritual Science at the Goetheanum as well as his basic works on psychiatry – developed in the following decades by Rudolf Treichler and Werner Priever – are seen internationally as fundamental with regard to constitutional pathogenesis, organic psychiatric clinical pictures, transition problems, diagnosis of the constituent elements of the human being, developmental and life disorders and anthroposophic medicine therapy, artistic therapy concepts and patient meditations. The work and research activities of the first initiative group for psychotherapy in Germany and the Netherlands created the conditions from 1975 onwards for the development of a specifically anthroposophic psychotherapy. The professional group continues to focus on basic research and research of the continuously changing picture of psychopathology over time.
1973: Prof. Dr. med. B.C.J. Lievegoed † initiated a working group for psychiatry and psychotherapy in the Netherlands and in 1978 carried out a first, three-year post-doc advanced training, leading to his book Mens op de drempel. 1979: Dr. med. Paul von der Heide (Filderklinik, Germany) established the Institut für anthroposophisch orientierte Psychotherapie (Institute for Anthroposophically-oriented Psychotherapy) together with Dr. med. Werner Priever †, Dr. med. Käthe Weizsäcker †, Dr. med. Hertha Lauer. Other important specialists in the same field also became involved, including Dr. med. Dieter Beck †, Dr. med. Hugo Solms † (Switzerland).
 
Over several decades the work of all initiative groups has fundamentally focused on:

• Paths of spiritual schooling of all psychological and medical psychotherapists and psychiatrists
• Medicines in psychiatric medicine – discovery and therapies
• Pastoral-medical, constitutional, organic psychiatric and karmic perspectives regarding psychiatric diagnosis and problems
• Development of conventional medical psychotherapeutic diagnosis, treatment and prognosis from the perspective of a practical understanding of the human being by means of joint research into clinical case studies
• Research on forms and methods of anthroposophic psychotherapeutic diagnosis, treatments and conversation systems.

Research

Basic research on the continuously changing manifestations over time of psychopathology with the objective of jointly bringing the guidelines for post-doc training up to date with regard to the state of spiritual scientific and conventional medical knowledge. Research subjects are, for example: the increase in psychopathology since the Second World War both qualitatively and quantitatively, the rise of identity problems (personality disorders, particularly borderline disorders), a quantitative and qualitative increase of transition phenomena, a quantitative increase in hetero- and auto-aggressive problems and the forms of manifestation of fear-aggression-depression comorbidity as well as the unavoidable problem area of drug addiction. Also: changes to the human constitution, including the growing problems at kindergarten and school age of small children (i.a. attention deficits, hyperactivity, learning disorders, problems associated with autism, pervasive developmental disorders