Antoni Kępiński

Antoni Ignacy Tadeusz Kępiński (1918 to 1972) was a Polish psychiatrist and philosopher, born in Dolina, then in Poland and now in Ukraine. He entered the medical faculty of the Jagiellonian University in 1936, interrupted his studies in 1939 to volunteer for the Polish Army, was captured and imprisoned in Hungary, escaped in 1940 and made his way through France and Spain, where he was held at Miranda de Ebro, to the United Kingdom. He finished his medical degree at the Polish School of Medicine of the University of Edinburgh in 1946, then returned to Poland to practise psychiatry at the Psychiatric Clinic in Krakow, and was named a professor shortly before his death. In the 1950s he took part in a rehabilitation programme for survivors of Auschwitz and with colleagues described the concentration camp syndrome, which is now regarded as an early form of post-traumatic stress disorder research. He is known as the originator of the concepts of information metabolism and axiological psychiatry, the latter treating the hierarchy of values as central to psychosis and therapy. His books were translated into Russian but not English, so his work is little known in the English-speaking world.