Robert Eugen Gaupp (3 October 1870 – 30 August 1953) was a German

psychiatrist A psychiatrist is a physician who specializes in psychiatry, the branch of medicine devoted to the diagnosis, prevention, study, and treatment of mental disorders. Psychiatrists are physicians and evaluate patients to determine whether their sy ...

and neurologist who was a native of

Neuenbürg Neuenbürg is a town in the Enz district, in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is situated on the river Enz, 10 km southwest of Pforzheim. History Neuenbürg originated as a village around a castle built by the in the 12th century. Between 1 ...

Württemberg Württemberg ( ; ) is a historical German territory roughly corresponding to the cultural and linguistic region of Swabia. The main town of the region is Stuttgart. Together with Baden and Hohenzollern, two other historical territories, Würt ...

. Gaupp was an assistant to Carl Wernicke (1848–1905) and Karl Bonhoeffer (1868–1948) at Breslau, and afterwards worked with Emil Kraepelin (1856–1926) at the Universities of

Heidelberg Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...

and

Munich Munich ( ; german: München ; bar, Minga ) is the capital and most populous city of the States of Germany, German state of Bavaria. With a population of 1,558,395 inhabitants as of 31 July 2020, it is the List of cities in Germany by popu ...

. From 1908 to 1936 he was a professor of psychiatry at the

University of Tübingen The University of Tübingen, officially the Eberhard Karl University of Tübingen (german: Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen; la, Universitas Eberhardina Carolina), is a public research university located in the city of Tübingen, Baden-Wü ...

. One of his assistants was Ernst Kretschmer. Following World War II, he was departmental head of health and welfare for the city of

Stuttgart Stuttgart (; Swabian: ; ) is the capital and largest city of the German state of Baden-Württemberg. It is located on the Neckar river in a fertile valley known as the ''Stuttgarter Kessel'' (Stuttgart Cauldron) and lies an hour from the ...

(1945–48). Gaupp performed numerous investigations of psychological disorders, and is remembered for his case studies of mass-murderer

Ernst August Wagner Ernst August Wagner (22 September 1874 – 27 April 1938) was a German mass murderer who, on 4 September 1913 killed his wife and four children in Degerloch. He subsequently drove to Mühlhausen an der Enz where he set several fires and shot ...

(1874–1938). He was particularly interested in correlations between personality and

psychosis Psychosis is a condition of the mind that results in difficulties determining what is real and what is not real. Symptoms may include delusions and hallucinations, among other features. Additional symptoms are incoherent speech and behavior ...

, and was an advocate of "pastoral psychology". For a period of time, he was also editor of the ''Zentralblatt für Nervenheilkunde und Psychiatrie''. Sometime shortly after the passage by decree, on 15 September 1935, of the "

Nuremberg Laws The Nuremberg Laws (german: link=no, Nürnberger Gesetze, ) were antisemitic and racist laws that were enacted in Nazi Germany on 15 September 1935, at a special meeting of the Reichstag convened during the annual Nuremberg Rally of th ...

"(officially "Laws for the Protection of German Blood and Honor"), Gaupp came to the support of a local physician, Albrecht Schroeder (pictured at left in image below), a collegiate fraternity brother in a non-fighting order, die Igel (the Hedgehogs), to which Gaupp also belonged. With the passage of the Nuremberg Laws and the preemption of organizational authority to permit Jewish membership in non-dueling fraternal orders (Jews had never been permitted to join German dueling orders), Schroeder's status was made precarious because he was married to a Jew, ''née'' Felicia Rosenstein of

Bad Cannstatt Bad Cannstatt, also called Cannstatt (until July 23, 1933) or Kannstadt (until 1900), is one of the outer stadtbezirke, or city boroughs, of Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Bad Cannstatt is the oldest and most populous of Stuttgart's b ...

, an outer district of Stuttgart. At a meeting convened of the general membership to decide upon Schroeder's suitability for membership given Schroeder's marital status and his "

Mischling (; " mix-ling"; plural: ) was a pejorative legal term used in Nazi Germany to denote persons of mixed "Aryan" and non-Aryan, such as Jewish, ancestry as codified in the Nuremberg racial laws of 1935. In German, the word has the general denota ...

" (mixed race) children, Gaupp, otherwise unaffiliated with Schroeder (Gaupp was 65 at the time, Schroeder 44; and the two had never before met), declared before those assembled: "Wenn der Schroeder raus muss, dann geh ich auch." (If Schroeder goes, then I go, too.) Schroeder withdrew his petition sometime before final disposition by the fraternity towards his case, and Gaupp himself left the organization voluntarily around the same time, as he had pledged doing on behalf of Schroeder. The two men remained close friends until Gaupp's death in 1953.An account of this episode is made in article authored by Schroeder's grandson, Matthew T. Witt, entitled "Sorrowful Empire, Distempered Union: Negative Dialectics and the Art(s) of Freedom," published in the journa
''Administrative Theory & Praxis''
March, 2008 (Vol. 30, Issue 1).

Publications

* '' Psychologie des Kindes'', Leipzig/Berlin, 1907

References

American Journal of Psychiatry, Robert Gaupp

Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, etc. By David Trotter

A Historical Dictionary of Psychiatry By Edward Shorter

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Gaupp, Robert 1870 births 1953 deaths People from Neuenbürg People from the Kingdom of Württemberg German psychiatrists German neurologists Academic staff of the University of Tübingen Officers Crosses of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany