Arne Raeithel's Death

Joern Scheer ( (no email) )
Mon, 9 Dec 1996 10:52:22 +0200

Dear members of the PCP community,
I have the sad duty of informing you of the death of Arne Raeithel, a
prominent member of the
German PCP group who died, within hours, of a cerebral hemorrhage
last sunday. He was only
53 and is survived by his wife and two sons.

Some of you may remember him from the International Congress in
Assisi in 1989 where he,
together with Ulrike Willutzki and Maureen Pope, demonstrated the use
of computers in
communicating on-line with clients about the analysis of their
constructions.

Arne was born in Munich, later worked in Berlin and in the psychology
department at the
University of Hamburg. Through his academic teaching he introduced
many people to PCP
some of whom are still active in the area.

Few people, at least in Germany, immerged as deeply into the
mathematical foundations of grid
analysis as Arne did. He developed his own "Eigenstructure Analysis"
(ESA) and the
Macintosh based grid analysis package GridStack. Ana Catina and I
were happy that Arne
wrote the chapters on grid analysis and, together with Ulrike
Willutzki, on grid analysis
software in our German language Introduction to Repertory Grid
Technique.

Recently, Arne's interests centered around the relationship of
Kellian thinking to
"connectionist" approaches in cognitive science and in research on
artificial intelligence. Still
much of his PCP work was devoted to practical problems like caring
for HIV and Aids patients
on the one hand and to business applications on the other.

In a small, still developping scientific "community" like the PCP
group, the loss of a creative
force like Arne's is felt much more then in a well-staffed
established discipline. But this is only
one, and a somewhat abstract way of looking at an event like this
one. What counts more is
that one looses a colleague, friend, spouse, father - and there is no
reason or explanation for it,
however hard ones tries "to attach a meaning" to what happens.

Joern Scheer
Giessen, Germany

NEW TELEPHONE AND FAX NUMBER FROM DECEMBER 20th !!
Tel. 0049-641-99-45682
Fax. 0049-641-99-45689

Prof. Dr. Joern W. Scheer Tel: 0049-641-702 2486
Dept. of Medical Psychology Fax: 0049-641-702 4610
University of Giessen email: joern.scheer@psycho.med.uni-giessen.de
Friedrichstr. 36
35392 Giessen
Germany

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