Eugene K. Epstein, Ph.D.

Theodor-Heuss STR. 64
26129 Oldenburg, Germany

Phone: 0441/664916
Fax:  04421/5703586
Email: eugene@epsteinx.de

In the late 1970’s, shortly before he would have been thrown out for raising unwelcome questions about patients’ rights, Eugene left his job as a mental health worker in a locked ward of a psychiatric hospital near New York City and promised himself never to work in such an inhumane setting ever again. Several professional degrees later and having worked as faculty member at the Galveston Family Institute in Texas with Harry Goolishian in the mid 1980’s, Eugene moved with his wife to Germany where he helped found and develop a clinic for child and adolescent psychiatry based on theoretical assumptions of social constructionism and postmodern dialogically oriented therapies. He and his colleagues view psychiatric diagnoses as rather unaesthetic and unhelpful vocabularies of infirmity, psychopharmaceutical drugs and forced treatment as unnecessary excesses of a society that places little value upon relationship. The clinic has developed an approach to crisis intervention that has been most resourceful in resolving crises without coercion, hospitalization or use of psychopharmacology. Eugene has many years of experience as a supervisor, teacher and trainer of professionals in the helping professions and is currently a faculty member of the Institut für Systemische Impulse und Ausbildung in Berlin (isiberlin), the Systemisches Institut für Aufmerksamkeit Berlin (SIA) and the Marburger Institut für C-Studien (MiCs), as well as being a member of the Network of Psychosocial Experts for the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Sharing a strong interest in cultural studies, and in particular film and media along with his colleagues and fellow Taos Associates, Manfred Wiesner and Lothar Duda, they find themselves frequently trying to imagine the contours of a post therapeutic future.