[The German-Jewish psychiatrist James Lewin. A twice forgotten victim]

This study focuses on the life and psychiatric publications of James Lewin (1887-1937) who is a classic example of a person who has been forgotten in both the political and historical realms. His works are based on original and philosophical ideas of which this study investigates two in detail. On the one hand it examines Lewin's call for a psychopathology which describes the phenomenological basis and psychological structure of pathological states and experience regardless of the clinical evaluation of these states. On the other hand it explores his theory of situational psychoses as laid out in his MD thesis. For him this group of psychoses was to include prison psychoses and other psychogenic reactive psychoses that had been described shortly before. After World War I, Lewin worked for a long period as a neuropsychiatrist in his own practice in Berlin. However, as a Jew in Germany he faced increasing fascist oppression and emigrated to Soviet Russia in 1936. Yet, as archival sources show, he was put to death 1 year later within the framework of Stalin's purges, having been accused of conducting espionage on behalf of the Gestapo.