Johannes Heinrich Schultz—Inventor of Autogenic Training

Johannes Schultz (1884–1970) was born in Göttingen, Germany. He studied medicine and did his doctorate at the university of  his home town in 1908. After several posts in junior positions, he did his PhD and, in the early 1920s, he began to develop his ‘Autogenic Training’. In 1932, he published his first book about this therapy, which soon became internationally known. Schultz was a supporter of the Nazi movement and its programmes of compulsory sterilization and euthanasia of ‘life unworthy of living’. He was furthermore convinced that homosexuality was a perversion curable through psychotherapy. After the war, he made an academic career as a psychiatrist and down-played his involvement in the Third Reich. Schultz died in Berlin in 1970.