Hans-Werner Gessmann

Hans-Werner Gessmann (born 24 March 1950, in Duisburg) was a German psychologist, founder of humanistic psychodrama and university teacher in Russia, India and Africa, one of the best known psychotherapists worldwide.

In 1973 he founded the Psychotherapeutic Institute Bergerhausen (PIB) in Duisburg and in 1977 nearby Kerpen, Germany a European training center now for more than 1500 psychotherapists.

Gessmann received a doctorate in 1976 by his work about causation factors of Dyslexia.

He is the founder of humanistic psychodrama and adopted in the same year for the first time psychodrama with hypnosis in the context of sexual dysfunctions.

In the last twenty years he concentrated on diagnosis and therapy of transgender people and is in Germany accepted as a court expert.

He also established humanistic psychodrama in the field of child psychotherapy.

In the early 80s he began making film-documentations about complete group-psychotherapy-sessions in European countries.

He is the publisher of book series and the International Journal of Humanistic Psychodrama.

Gessmann is one of the few empirical researchers in the field of psychodrama and has published over 200 articles on psychological topics.

Gessmann is a member of the American Society of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama as well as the International Association of Group Psychotherapy and Psychodrama since 1977.

Gessmann developed and has taught humanistic psychodrama since 1979 as a new form of psychodrama.

It became an integral part of humanistic psychology.

Gessmann moved the collective action and nature of the people at the center of the therapeutic ethic.

Faith, love, hope, and the idea of a human community are essential to meaningful humanistic psychodrama.

Intuitive look for detecting the wholeness of a thing, the dialectical conception of polarities, the renunciation of absolute authority, take decisive influence on the image and life of man.

The goals and methods of classical psychodrama were necessarily re-evaluated and described.

This led to a fundamental change in international psychodrama practice.

Through his work in many countries and with many different people of different ages, he was able to gain extensive experience, which in turn was very helpful for his future work.

He understand new and strange situations and people faster and better.

Working with different multicultural people taught him more and more that there is no single type of real life, but that there are an infinite number of individual ways of life and that every person has the right to decide for himself how he would like to shape his life.

Good empathy and accepting knowledge of the difference between different people is a crucial prerequisite for successful therapeutic work.

The humanistic image of man is guiding him and his work.

In 1986, Gessmann founded Germany's first home-based sleep laboratory with the Department of Sleep Medicine.

After introduction of the test for medical study courses (TMS, colloquially also medicine test) 1986 this was reconstructed for training in the original by Gessmann several times.

These training versions are published under the title Ü-TMS.

Standards continued his research on the method of doubling from 1996.

He is the only author in the German-speaking area, who handled this issue fundamentally and scientifically, including translations of the complete source texts from English.

From 1998 to 2002, under his guidance, the tongue muscle training with the registered trademark ZMT ® was developed as an alternative treatment against sleep apnea.

Gessmann teaches clinical psychology in the faculty of social psychology of the State University Kostroma in Kostroma (KSU) since 2007 and is a professor of general and developmental psychology in the governmental Academy of Social Administration Moscow (ASOU).

In April 2011 it was announced he would be the director of the International Centre for Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy (ICCPP) at the governmental University Kostroma with a focus on psychotherapy training and research, particularly humanistic psychodrama and systemic family therapy.

Since February 2012, he has been a professor of systemic family therapy and humanistic psychodrama at the Moscow State University of Psychology and Education (МГППУ)].

With the beginning of 2013 Gessmann is a visiting professor at the State University Smolensk.

Here he teaches Humanistic Psychodrama.

In the same year Gessmann receives a call to the Chair for Humanistic Psychodrama at the Southeast University in Nanjing province Jiansu, one of the oldest universities in China.

He was added from Stanford University U.C. in Berkeley to the list of the 30 most influential psychologists working today and from the Harvard university to the list of 30 most influential living counseling psychologists.

In September 2017, Hans-Werner Gessmann introduced group psychotherapy in Azerbaijan for the first time.

141 psychotherapists from the country took part in the event in Baku.

In March 2020 he changed his activity from Kostroma to the State Medical Medicine University in Krasnoyarsk.

He started to work here in cooperation together with the International Center of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy The ICCPP was growing fast, working in more than 30 countries with over 200 specialists.

He is chief-editor of the scientific ICCPP-Journal.