Horst Kaechele 1944 – 2020
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Horst Kaechele, one of my friends from college, a scholar deeply immersed in the pursuit and re-evaluation of psychoanalysis.
From the little I know, his work in Ulm was aimed to quantify therapist-patient interactions in psychoanalytic therapy. He had a distinguished career and wrote numerous books in his field.
Psychoanalysis was a field which fascinated me yet, at the same time, baffled me greatly. The fascination came from the promise of insights into the workings of the mind and the unconscious layers below it. The confusion came from the realization that the terms and practices of the field were fluid and hard to pin down in a way I was used to from my own education in “hard science” such as physics and chemistry. As a consequence, our exchanges on serious topics were somewhat limited.
I met Horst as part of a circle of about 10 students all supported by the prestigious Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes, the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Wolf Singer, who later rose to prominence in neurophysiology, was part of that interdisciplinary circle. We met periodically to discuss esoteric matters such as cybernetics, the concept of time, behavioral science, taking our clues from Studium Generale, an interdisciplinary journal some of us subscribed to. At one stage we managed to set up a meeting with Konrad Lorenz in his house in Seewiesen, south of Munich. He would win the Nobel Prize in biology a few yours later for his studies of grey geese, essentially founding behavioral studies as a field of science.
After losing touch with Horst for many years I ran into him in the Red Lion Inn, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. That was in 1985. With me were my wife Carol and our four-month old daughter, and we were having dinner in the famous inn. We were living in Albany at the time. Horst attended a workshop in his field nearby. I recall that we talked into the night, filling each other up on the strange, unpredictable journeys from our encounter in the 60s in Munich to this point of intersection.
The Red Lion Inn in Stockbridge, MA
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