Prof. Dr. Peter Theiss-Abendroth

Professor of Psychology

Peter Theiss-Abendroth graduated with a degree in medicine from Freie Universität Berlin where he also obtained his doctoral degree. His profound interest in the liberal arts led him to take an interdisciplinary approach to the history of scholastic psychology for his dissertation, supported by a grant from the Berlin senate.

Trained as a psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychoanalyst (DGPT, DPG), he has continuously gathered clinical experience in various areas and positions since 1993. In the private practice he has run since 2004, he developed two core areas of clinical interest: the treatment of patients with psychotic features and of immigrants from the Portuguese-speaking world, particularly Brazil. His publications on the latter aimed to provide a comprehensive view on the interdependency of unconscious conflicts and the social environment. The significance of psychological trauma in a given cultural or historical context marks the underlying theme of most of his work which lately resulted in the publication of two small biographies on Jewish scholars.

He currently heads a joint research project on the history of the concept of traumatic psychosis in cooperation with the Institute for the History of Medicine and Ethics in Medicine at the Charité.

His academic contributions also encompass public lectures, reviews and translations from Latin and Portuguese into German.
In addition to these activities, he works as a lecturer, supervisor and training therapist at Berliner Akademie für Psychotherapie (BAP) and also lectures at Berliner Institut für Psychotherapie und Psychoanalyse (BIPP).