Jean Starobinski

Jean Starobinski ( born November 17, 1920 in Geneva ) is a Swiss physician and literary scholar, medical historian and historian of ideas.

Life and work

Jean Starobinski is the son of Aron Starobinski and Sulka Frydman Polish- Jewish origin. After his studies in literature and medicine at the University of Geneva, where he earned doctorates in both subjects, Starobinski worked as a physician at the Cantonal Hospital of Geneva and later at the psychiatric hospital in Cery (Canton of Vaud ). In between he taught from 1953 to 1956 Romance languages ​​at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. From 1958 to 1985 he was professor of the history of ideas in Geneva, from 1966 to 1985 in addition to medical history and 1967-1985 history of French literature. In addition, he held teaching positions in Basel ( 1959-61 ), Paris ( Collège de France, 1987-88 ) and Zurich (ETH, 1992-93) true.

He was president of several scientific societies. The recognition for his work is reflected in the award of numerous honorary doctorates from (so far a total of thirteen ).

Starobinski researched the history of melancholy and its treatment (History of Melancholiebehandlung, 1960, possession and exorcism in 1974, Melancholy in the Mirror, 1990; L' encre de la mélancolie he reached in 2012 its smaller work on together); he examined in elaborately designed volumes the defining themes of the visual arts of Europe in the century before the French Revolution (The Invention of Liberty, 1964) as well as during the revolution itself ( 1789, 1973); also a portrait of the artist as a juggler in Literature and Art (1970) and the social exchange of gifts ( good gifts, bad gifts, 1994).

He was known especially for his work on French literature of the 16th to 18th century ( Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Montaigne, Racine, Corneille and others), in which he psychoanalytical and phenomenological approaches, the view of the physician to the complexity and individual aspect of human experience and the historian of literature on thematic links to penetrating analyzes combined.

In 1964 he published the studies Ferdinand de Saussure on anagrams. In other books, he devoted himself to the pair of terms action and reaction in the natural and human sciences (1999 ) and the figure of the enchanting woman at the opera ( The sorceresses, 2005).

In 1984 he was awarded the Balzan Prize for Literature History and Criticism, 1998 Grand Prix de la Francophonie de l' Académie Française.

The archive and the personal library of Jean Starobinski are located in the Swiss Literary Archives of the Swiss National library.

Writings

  • Montesquieu: an essay; with selected reading pieces ( 1953), Munich, Vienna: Hanser 1991
  • Rousseau: a world of resistors (1958, revised edition 1971), Munich, Vienna: Hanser 1988
  • History of Melancholiebehandlung from the beginnings to 1900 ( Documenta Geigy Acta psychosomatica 4. ), Basel: Geigy 1960; New edition with a revised translation and detailed introduction v. Cornelia Wild, Berlin: August 2011
  • About Corneille (from: L' Oeil vivant, 1961), in: Pierre Corneille: Polyeuctes, Frankfurt, Hamburg 1962
  • History of Medicine, Lausanne: Édition Rencontre 1963
  • The invention of freedom. 1700-1789 (1964 ), Geneva: Skira, 1964
  • Psychoanalysis and Literature (1970 ), Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1973
  • Portrait of the Artist as a juggler (1970 ), Frankfurt: Fischer 1985
  • Words under the words: the Anagrams of Ferdinand de Saussure (1971 ), Frankfurt, Berlin, Vienna: Ullsteinhaus 1980
  • 1789, the emblems of Reason ( 1973), Paderborn: Schöningh 1981
  • Possession and exorcism. 3 figures of derangement (1974 ), Percha: Schulz 1976
  • Rousseau's indictment of the Company ( Konstanz University 89 speeches ), Konstanz: University Press 1977
  • Montaigne. Thinking and existence (1982 ), The Hague: Mouton 1986
  • A short history of body image, Konstanz: University Press, 1987 ( collection of essays )
  • The saving in danger: tricks of the Enlightenment (1989 ), Frankfurt: S. Fischer 1990
  • Melancholy in the Mirror: Baudelaire Readings (1990 ), Munich, Vienna: Hanser, 1992
  • Good gifts, bad gifts: the ambivalence of social gestures ( 1994), Frankfurt: Fischer 1994
  • Action and reaction: the life and adventures of a term pair ( 1999), Munich, Vienna: Hanser 2001
  • ( with Ilse Grubrich - Simitis, Mark Solms :) hundred years, " Interpretation of Dreams" by Sigmund Freud: Three Essays, Frankfurt: Fischer 2000
  • The sorceresses. Power and seduction at the opera (2005), The Hague: Mouton 2007
  • Ways of poetry, The Hague: Mouton 2011 (essays )
Prilly Melancholia Denis Diderot Michel de Montaigne Jean Racine Integrated Authority File
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