45 years of Menterschwaige Clinic, a dynamic psychiatric development space

Christiane Manderscheid

For 45 years, the Menterschwaige Clinic has provided society with a pioneering and successful dynamic psychiatric, development space. G. Ammon created an innovative treatment room in Germany with this clinic, which has lost nothing of its innovative power to this day. This is achieved through a group-therapeutic, group-dynamic approach in a milieu-therapeutic setting. Due to the intersubjective, supportive and strengthening primary group character of the setting, the patients are offered ideal conditions for an identity-correcting development.

The foundation of the clinic in 1979 coincided with the time of the Psychiatry Enquete, which called for more humane conditions in the housing and treatment of mentally ill people. It thus took over a goal of Dynamic Psychiatry that had always existed. For this still sees the human being in his subjective being, with his needs for meaning, contact and attachment. Today, psychiatry and psychoanalysis are still faced with the task of fulfilling their responsibility by creating the space in everyday clinical practice in which the mentally ill person can develop toward healing. For only the liberated person, the person who sees himself again as an agent in his own identity, dares to participate in social life and to take responsibility for himself and others. This therapeutic process requires sufficient time. Time is thus an elementary component of medical evidence. Making health policy responsible for this is only one of the urgent tasks of current professional policy and clinical activity.