Honorary Members
Honorary Members
Christian Müller
(Biography written at time of nomination.)
Christian Müller was born in 1921 in Münsingen near Berne/Switzerland where his father, Prof. Max Müller, was medical director of a great psychiatric hospital. His grand-father, too, was a psychiatrist. Christian Müller achieved his studies of medicine in Berne in 1946 and habilitated in psychiatry and psychotherapy under Manfred Bleuler in Zurich in 1957. From 1960 through 1982, he was ordinary professor of psychiatry and director of the psychiatric university clinic of Cery/Lausanne, Switzerland.
On the base of a classical medical, psychopathological and psychanalytic-psychotherapeutic education, he developed a deep interest in the long-term dynamics of the main mental illnesses, especially schizophrenia. Already since the fifties of the last century, he was an engaged reformer of institutional psychiatry in Switzerland and one of the worlds first pioneers of a psychoanalytically oriented psychotherapy of schizophrenia. In 1956, he founded with Gaetano Benedetti from Basel/Switzerland an international working group on this topic which organised periodic international symposia on the psychotherapy of schizophrenia, first in Zurich and Lausanne, and later abroad. This group This group marked the very beginnings of the later International Society for Schizophrenia Psychotherapy.
Christian Müller's main research focus was on long-term evolution of mental illnesses until old age. His catamnestic long-term investigations on all main psychiatric illnesses which he inaugurated in the sixties under the name "The Lausanne Enquête" are among the longest in the world. After his retirement in 1982, he mainly worked on historical psychiatric themes. He has published a great number of scientific papers and books, covering different fields of psychiatry. As member of several national and international scientific societies, he was also influential in reforming psychiatric care structures and promoting community-related networks for rehabilitation. Furthermore, he was as a core-member of the editor-board of "Psychiatrie der Gegenwart", the leading German psychiatric encyclopaedia. As co-founder of an European working group for geriatric psychiatry, he was also one of the earliest European psychiatrists who developed a special interest in old age psychiatry on which he published the first text-book. He earned several internationational scientific awards and was promoted Doctor honoris causa of the University of Heidelberg in 1980. On the international as well as on the national level, where he is looked at as "the grand old man" of Swiss psychiatry, he is highly estimated for both his professional and his human qualities. He currently lives in Berne/Switzerland where he continues to be an active psychotherapist and psychoanalyst.
Honors: Hermann-Simon Award (Germany) 1971, Theodor Nägeli Award (Switzerland) 1976, Member of the Akademie Leopoldina (Germany)
Main books:
Mikropsie und Makropsie (Karger, Basel 1956)
Über das Senium der Schizophrenen (Karger, Basel 1967)
Alterspsychiatrie (Thieme, Stuttgart 1967) / Abrégé de psychogériatrie (Masson, Paris 1981)
Lexikon der Psychiatrie (Springer, Berlin 1973)
(with L. Ciompi as first author): Lebensweg und Alter der Schizophrenen (Springer, Berlin 1976)
Les maladies psychiques et leur évolution (Huber, Berne 1981)
Les institutions psychiatriques (Springer, Berlin 1982)
Etudes sur la psychothérapie des psychoses (Privat, Toulouse 1982)
Die Gedanken werden handgreiflich (Springer, Berlin 1992)
Vom Tollhaus zum Psychozentrum (Pressler, Hürtgenwald 1993) / De l'asile au centre psychosocial (Payot, Lausanne 1997)
Wer hat die Geisteskranken von den Ketten befreit? (Psychiatrieverlag, Bonn 1998)
Paul Dubois (1848-1918) (Schwabe, Basel 2001)
Rorschach, Briefwechsel (Huber, Bern 2004)
Luc Ciompi