Karl Rickels: A Tribute on His 90th Birthday

In his 2011 autobiography, A Serendipitous Life [1] , Karl Rickels describes how in 2008 in Munich at the 50th anniversary of the Collegium Internationale NeuroPharmacologicum (CINP) he looked around at the President’s Dinner, ‘... a special event held in the Emperor’s Hall at the residence of Bavaria’s famous king. I saw only one person I remembered from the first congress in Rome. I had been one of the younger biological psychiatrists in 1958, so this wasn’t a surprise ...’ I was attending the same dinner, and while we were waiting for the doors to open at this 2008 President’s Dinner I actually had a good long talk with Karl Rickels. I told him that in 1982 I had participated in Aaron Beck’s workshop on cognitive therapy for depression. It was held in Philadelphia on the premises of Beck’s Center for Cognitive Therapy that was situated (around Room 602) on the same floor where Karl Rickels’ Division of Psychopharmacology was also situated (around Room 402). I asked Karl whether he and Aaron Beck were both still working there at the University of Philadelphia, and he told me that this was indeed the case. Since 1959 Beck and Rickels had worked at the University of Pennsylvania and as good colleagues treated outpatients suffering from neurotic depression and neurotic anxiety [2] . They had both drawn the conclusion Received: October 16, 2013 Accepted after revision: November 7, 2013 Published online: April 12, 2014