Macht, Schuld, Schuldfähigkeit und Freiheit

Dr. med. Rainer Schmidt ist Facharzt für Psychotherapeutische Medizin, Psychoanalytiker und Lehranalytiker. Er war lange Jahre Vorsitzender der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Individualpsychologie.

This text deals with the inner psychic connection between the words power, guilt, responibility, and freedom. The undertaking was triggered by the extent of the Nazi Cultural catastrophe experienced by the author as a young adult. How guilty were the fellow human beings? How free is a man to determine and take responsibility for his own actions? He finds answers and new questions by turning the philisophers and poets. The search leads him to psychoanalysts, to Freud, who points him towards the unconcious, and his disciples. One of these, Adler, focuses his deliberations on the unconcious on the human pursuit of power as an attempt to overcome a deeply felt helplessness and the sense of community as an innate feeling of living together. In this sense, guilt would be an alienation of man from himself, the degenation of his own shadow. Freedom - as inner freedom - would be self-acceptance, the ability to admit one's own guilt and thus strengthen the feeling of respnsible living together.