ABSTRACT
The formal qualification of elementary school teacher, which I had acquired alongside my teaching career of four years, enabled me to enrol at the Humboldt University
of East Berlin in 1950 to study psychology. There I was introduced by Kurt Gottschaldt (1902-91) to the problems of neglect encountered by young people during the post-war period, and from which I progressed to the study of clinical developmental psychology. In 1954, after my graduation in psychology (holder of the German diploma degree), I followed the anthropologist and medical specialist in research on adolescence, Hans Grimm (1910-95), who was teaching biology at his Institute for Social Hygiene at the Academy for Advanced Medical Education in East Berlin. After he moved to the University Institute for Anthropology, I received an offer from the child psychiatrist Gerhard Göllnitz (1920-2003) to establish a “Laboratory for Clinical and Developmental Psychology” at the Rostock University Mental Hospital, of which he was Director, giving me the opportunity to cooperate with the departments of child neuropsychiatry, psychiatry and neurology. Starting in 1963 as an assistant professor, and continuing from 1975 as a full professor of psychology at the faculty of medicine, I directed the Laboratory for Clinical and Developmental Psychology until my retirement in 1992. After my retirement, I took the Chair of Developmental Psychology at the JustusLiebig University of Giessen until 1994, although I have continued to observe all the research projects co-initiated by me, albeit from a distance. I have been married since 1950 and, together with my wife, can watch a third generation of descendants growing up.
