Erwin Walter Maximilian Straus (11 November 1891,

Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt am Main () is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 773,068 inhabitants as of 2022 make it the List of cities in Germany by population, fifth-most populous city in Germany. Located in the forela ...

– 20 May 1975,

Lexington, Kentucky Lexington is a Consolidated city-county, consolidated city coterminous with and the county seat of Fayette County, Kentucky, United States. As of the 2020 United States census, 2020 census the city's population was 322,570, making it the List of ...

) was a

German-American German Americans (, ) are Americans who have full or partial German ancestry. According to the United States Census Bureau's figures from 2022, German Americans make up roughly 41 million people in the US, which is approximately 12% of the pop ...

phenomenologist and

neurologist Neurology (from , "string, nerve" and the suffix -logia, "study of") is the branch of medicine dealing with the diagnosis and treatment of all categories of conditions and disease involving the nervous system, which comprises the brain, the ...

who helped to pioneer

anthropological Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, wh ...

medicine and

psychiatry Psychiatry is the medical specialty devoted to the diagnosis, treatment, and prevention of deleterious mental disorder, mental conditions. These include matters related to cognition, perceptions, Mood (psychology), mood, emotion, and behavior. ...

, a

holistic Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. Julian Tudor Hart (2010''The Political Economy of Health Care''pp.106, 258 The aphorism "The whole is greater than t ...

approach to medicine that is critical of

mechanistic Mechanism is the belief that natural wholes (principally living things) are similar to complicated machines or artifacts, composed of parts lacking any intrinsic relationship to each other. The doctrine of mechanism in philosophy comes in two diff ...

and

reductionistic Reductionism is any of several related philosophical ideas regarding the associations between phenomena which can be described in terms of simpler or more fundamental phenomena. It is also described as an intellectual and philosophical positio ...

approaches to understanding and treating human beings. Some of his work can also be regarded as a precursor to or early version of

neurophenomenology Neurophenomenology refers to a scientific research program aimed to address the hard problem of consciousness in a pragmatic way. It combines neuroscience with phenomenology in order to study experience, mind, and consciousness with an emphasis o ...

. Straus taught at

Black Mountain College Black Mountain College was a Private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The coll ...

. His books published in English include: * ''Phenomenology: Pure and Applied'' (1964,

Duquesne University Press Duquesne University Press, founded in 1927, is a publisher that is part of Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The Press is the scholarly publishing arm of Duquesne University, and publishes monographs and collections in the humani ...

) * ''Phenomenological Psychology'' (1966,

Basic Books Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1950 and located in New York City, now an imprint of Hachette Book Group. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and his ...

) * ''Psychiatry and Philosophy'' (1969, Springer) * ''Phenomenology of Memory'' (1970,

) * ''Language and Language Disturbances'' (1974,

) * ''Man, Time, and World: Two Contributions to

Anthropological Anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, concerned with human behavior, human biology, cultures, societies, and linguistics, in both the present and past, including archaic humans. Social anthropology studies patterns of behaviour, wh ...

Psychology Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Its subject matter includes the behavior of humans and nonhumans, both consciousness, conscious and Unconscious mind, unconscious phenomena, and mental processes such as thoughts, feel ...

'' (1982, Humanities Press) * ''On Obsession: A Clinical and

Methodological In its most common sense, methodology is the study of research methods. However, the term can also refer to the methods themselves or to the philosophical discussion of associated background assumptions. A method is a structured procedure for bri ...

Study'' (1987, Johnson Reprint Corp)

Bibliography

* ''Zu Leben und Werk von Erwin Walter Maximilian Straus (1891-1975''), by Franz Bossong (1991, Königshausen & Neumann)

External links

Decade of the Person: Tribute to Erwin Straus MD
by Brian Koehler 1891 births 1975 deaths 20th-century American psychologists 20th-century German psychologists University of Kentucky faculty German emigrants to the United States {{Germany-med-bio-stub