„Der Mensch ist dazu gemacht, das Menschliche zu ergründen.“

This article is a contribution to the theoretical and philosophical foundations of the West German psychiatric reform. I argue that the phenomenological anthropological approach played a crucial role for changes in psychiatry during the late 1950s and early 1960s (the so-called “reform before the reform”, cf. Kersting) and that this approach gave rise to the specific anthropological attitude of German social psychiatry towards mental illness. To show this in detail, I will focus on four key figures of the aforementioned reform: Walter von Baeyer, Heinz Hafner, Caspar Kulenkampff and Karl Peter Kisker. I will first give a short summary of their phenomenological anthropological concepts and then reflect upon the relevance of these concepts for the reform. In the following, I will highlight the critiques made by Erich Wulff, Klaus Dorner and Karl Peter Kisker to further indicate the problematic relation between social psychiatry and anthropological psychiatry. Finally, I will discuss the impact of what I call the anthropological social-psychiatric attitude on the reform of West German psychiatry.