Karl Wilhelm Ideler

Karl Wilhelm Ideler (1795 to 1860) was a German psychiatrist and a prominent voice of the romantic school of German psychiatry in the first half of the nineteenth century. Born in Bentwisch, he took his doctorate in Berlin in 1820, practised as a general physician in several towns, and in 1828 returned to Berlin to head the department for mental illness at the Charite, becoming professor and director of the psychiatric clinic in 1840. In books such as Anthropology for Physicians and Outline of Soul Treatment he wrote on the relation of mind and body, religious mania and the role of unfulfilled passion in mental disturbance, ideas that later readers likened to psychoanalysis. He was not averse to punitive measures and did little to improve the harsh conditions for patients at the Charite, which Wilhelm Griesinger later challenged. He died near Wittenberge in 1860.