Ute Wiedemann, Wolfgang Burgmair und Matthias M. Weber: Die Höchstbegabtenstudie von Adele Juda 1927-1955. Höhepunkt und Ende der psychiatrischen Genialenforschung

in Deutschland

Between 1927 and 1944 the psychiatrist Adele Juda (*1888-+1949) studied the biographies of more than 600 German-speaking „geniuses“ and their families from a period between 1648 and 1920. The concept of this so-called „Höchstbegabtenstudie“ (study on high-gifted persons) had been developed by the psychiatrist, human geneticist and racial hygienist Ernst Rüdin, director of the Deutsche Forschungsanstalt für Psychiatrie in Munich from 1917 to 1945. Juda’s study was aimed at a re-examination of the „Genie-Irrsins-Hypothese“ (genius-madness-theory) having been much discussed in medicine and anthropology since Cesare Lombroso, as it was hardly consistent with some of Rüdin’s racial-hygienic concepts. While trying to make a selection of probands as objective as possible and to overcome a so far common purely casuistic approach, Juda’s study also gave cause for criticism, for example as to the subjectivity of psychopathological assessment or the political and ideological conditions under which data were gathered. Nevertheless the „Höchstbegabtenstudie“ has to be seen as the most extensive and as well as the last scientific piece of research concerning the „Genialenproblem“ having been done in the 20th century, with the material gathered being an important cultural-historical source independent of its originally intended use. As one of the most important results Juda was able to prove a significant relation between mental illness and gift. For different reasons this result was not published until after Juda’s death by Bruno Schulz, one of her former colleagues at the genealogical-demographic department, in 1953 and 1955. Last not least due to the fact that they came from Rüdin’s former institute these publications were not taken much notice of.

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