Luise Reddemann

Born in 1943 in Württemberg. After studying in Freiburg, Munich and Cologne she trained to be a neurologist and later lived in the Rhineland where she had her own practice for ten years. In Dusseldorf she continued her training to become a psychoanalyst.

From 1985 to the end of 2003 she was Head of the Clinic for Psychotherapeutic and Psychosomatic Medicine of the Protestant Johannes Hospital in Bielefeld. From the very beginning she had an interest there in the treatment of people with severe trauma and its aftermath and, together with the treatment team at the clinic, she developed "Psychodynamic Imaginative Trauma Therapy", PITT, which has been continuously refined since she left the clinic at the end of 2003.

Luise Reddemann has practised mediation since 1972 and, after her encounter with Sylvia Wetzel in 1995, began to gradually incorporate elements of Buddhist psychology into her therapeutic approach. Mindfulness, compassion and the concept of a non damaged and not damageable inner “center”, (called "Buddha-nature" in Buddhist psychology) therefore play an important part in her current composition of the PITT concept.

Her focus has always been on integrative psychotherapy and therefore she regards PITT as a form of applied psychoanalysis which makes use of cognitive, imaginative and experience-related elements from other psychotherapeutic schools. Luise Reddemann has promoted female-based psychotherapy for many decades.

Since June 2007 she has been Honorary Professor for Psychotraumatology and Psychological Medicine at the University of Klagenfurt.

Music, particularly that composed by J.S. Bach, is an important source of inspiration for her. She bases her thoughts on a sentence from Erich Fried.

There is only one counterweight to unhappiness

... and that is happiness