Helm Stierlin

Stierlin was co-founder of the Systemic Family Therapy Program at the Psychotherapeutic Institute Bergerhausen founded by Hans-Werner Gessmann. Since 2002 exists the Helm Stierlin Institute hsi, one of the leading training institutes for systemic therapy and consulting in Germany. Emerging from the Heidelberg School of Systemic Therapy founded by Helm Stierlin in 1975 the hsi in Haus Schmeil, a large old villa located in a park near Heidelberg Castle, has since been training experts in health care, social work, education, management consulting and other human services in the theory and practice of various systemic consulting approaches.

Until 1995 he was the editor of the journal Familiendynamik. His scientific writings and books were translated into twelve languages.

In 1974 Helm Stierlin received a call to the University Clinic Heidelberg for the newly established chair Department of Psychoanalytic Basic Research and Family Therapy. He held this chair until his retirement in 1991.

Stierlin interrupted his stay in America for one year from 1963 to 1964 in order to pursue further training at the Sanatory Bellevue in Kreuzlingen. From 1965 to 1973 he headed the Department of Family Therapy at the National Institute of Mental Health in Bethesda, Maryland. During his years in America, he was invited to guest lectureships and visiting professorships at various American universities. He also followed invitations to guest lectures and lectures in New Zealand and Australia.

In 1957 Helm Stierlin went to the United States. Here he worked and researched in particular about psychosomatic medicine, the psychopathology of schizophrenia, psychosis, about the process of detachment in adolescence and the most recent therapeutic experiences in family therapy with the expanding therapeutic concepts within the framework of system-theoretical approaches.

In 1950, a chair for psychosomatic medicine was established at the University of Heidelberg, of which Viktor von Weizsäcker became the first holder. Mitscherlich, who played a major role in the establishment of the institute, left Heidelberg in 1960 and moved to Frankfurt am Main, where he became the first director after the war at the newly founded Sigmund Freud Institute.

Stierlin received his doctorate in philosophy in 1950 from Karl Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg with a dissertation on: "The Concept of Responsibility: Attempt at a Discussion of John Dewey's Pragmatic Ethics of science in Comparison with the Ethik of Kant with Consideration of Max Weber's Concept of Science". The rapporteur was Kurt Rossmann, the co-rapporteur was Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Helm Stierlin was the oldest of three sons of the bridge-building engineer and government architect Paul Stierlin (1890 in Stuttgart – 1 April 1945 in Mannheim) and his wife Elsbeth-Sophie, née Schöningh (1905 in Meppen – 1995 in Neckarhausen).

Helm Stierlin grew up in Mannheim, Großwallstadt, Neckarsteinach and from 1935 to 1945 in Stettin. Due to his father's job, the Stierlin family moved several times. As a young soldier Helm took part in the Second World War. After the Unconditional surrender of the Wehrmacht on 7 May 1945, he succeeded as a 19-year-old in reaching his homeland via Prague without being captured. Helm Stierlin's younger brother Gerhard died at the age of 17 in the Second World War.

When the universities reopened their doors in 1945, Helm Stierlin enrolled for the medicine at the University of Heidelberg after completing an emergency baccalaureate. Parallel to the compulsory medical lectures and seminars, Stierlin attended the philosophical lectures of Karl Jaspers as often as he could, which demanded a balancing act from him every now and then, since the lecture venues of the medical faculty and the philosophical faculty were far apart from each other, but the compulsory lectures and the optional lectures at Karl Jaspers in Philosophy that interested him were very close in their schedule. Besides Jasper's approaches, the Hegel school of thought for Stierlin remained a lifelong paradigm.

Besides yet unresolved derailments of the ethical attitudes and medical practices of some professors at the medical faculties of the universities of Germany during the National Socialism period, there were many positive research approaches and new interdisciplinary ties and connections in Heidelberg after 1945, which had been initiated in particular by the scientific approaches and research work of Viktor von Weizsäcker and Alexander Mitscherlich.

Helm Stierlin (12 March 1926 – 9 September 2021), born as Wilhelm Paul Stierlin, was a German psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and systemic family therapist. From 1974 to 1991 he was the medical director and chairowner of the Department for psychoanalytic basic research and Family Therapy at the Medical Faculty of the University of Heidelberg. Stierlin contributed significantly to the establishment and further development of systemic therapy in Germany.

His paternal grandparents are Wilhelm Stierlin, director of the Königlich Württembergische Eisenbahn (1853-1906), nobility by awarding the Hausorden der Württembergischen Krone, and his wife Anna Stierlin, née Bilfinger (1856-1928). Johann Wendelin Bilfinger, dean in Cannstatt, later Protestant abbot, is an ancestor of Helm Stierlin and the father of Georg Bernhard Bilfinger. Stierlin's maternal grandparents are the manor owner Eduard Schöningh and his wife Elisabeth.