IPU Berlin
Stromstr. 3b
10555 Berlin
Tel.: +49 30 300 117-500
E-Mail: tilmann.habermas(at)ipu-berlin.de
I teach mainly in clinical psychology and psychotherapy at the Master level. In lectures on psychotherapeutic schools and methods as well as on mental disorders, I engage in getting students interested in original authors, in the subjective experience of mentally ill people, and in current developments and controversies. In seminars on the theory of psychotherapeutic treatment techniques, I place just as much emphasis on reading exemplary classical and recent authors as on discussing clinical examples. In seminars on institutional contexts of psychotherapy, I also emphasize a sociological perspective and the topic of violations of the normative framework.
My view of psychology is informed by psychoanalysis, but also shaped by developmental and cultural psychological interests.
Inspired by a psychoanalytic interest in the life story, Erikson's concept of identity, and psychological research on autobiographical memory and on the socialization of narrative abilities, I am interested in narrative in three ways. How do people form their identity by telling their life story in a specific way? In the longitudinal MainLife Study (2002-2021), we collected short life narratives from the same participants every four years over a period of 16 years. We were interested in the development of the ability to tell life stories, as well as how they change over time and whether they correlate with well-being and psychopathology. We also investigated (sub)cultural differences in life narratives (Neşe Hatiboğlu Altunnar), the specificity of life narratives in clinically depressed people, in people with schizophrenia (with Fabrice Berna and Mélissa Allé), and in older adults with Alzheimer's disease and clinical depression (with Stefan Frisch and Fabian Fußer).
Habermas, T. (2022). The longitudinal study of brief life narratives: Mainlife Study (2002-2019) Study Report. Qualiservice & GESIS. doi.org/10.26092/elib/1651
Then I am interested in the form of narrating emotional experiences as a sign of mental illness or of coping with difficult experiences, and in how narrative form influences listeners’ emotional reactions. We investigated how autobiographical narratives change over time and with coping, how they vary in posttraumatic stress syndrome, with rumination, with different ways of losing a loved one, and with having been abused in childhood. This field also includes work on the role of narrative in communicating and processing emotions (book Narrative and Emotion, 2019).
Finally, we began studying how in asymmetrical relationships between a more competent and a less competent (parent-child) or mentally distressed person (therapist-patient) individual , narratives are told and responded to in a way that improves emotion processing skills. One project (with Daniel Fesel) worked with data from the Munich Psychotherapy Study, other projects collected life narratives and narratives of emotional experiences of adolescents and a parent.