Vera King


Vera King is a German sociologist and social psychologist. She has been Professor of Sociology and Social Psychology at Goethe University Frankfurt and Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute in Frankfurt am Main since 2016.

Career

After studies in sociology, psychology and educational science, King obtained her doctorate in 1994 at the University of Frankfurt am Main, writing on the significance of Freud's case study, "Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria" for the theoretical development of psychoanalysis. In 2002, she completed her habilitation writing on The Emergence of the New in Adolescence. Individuation, Generativity and Gender in Modernized Societies, earning the venia legendi for sociology. That same year, she accepted a position at the University of Hamburg as a professor in the Department of Education, specializing in socialization and development research. In March 2016, she accepted a joint professorship for sociology and psychoanalytical social psychology at the Goethe University in Frankfurt together with the position of Managing Director of the Sigmund Freud Institute, which she assumed in November 2016

Research

King's research and publications focus on the analysis of relationships between social conditions and individual development, between culture and the psyche. She has carried out and published on projects in the fields of youth and adolescence research, family and generation research and social-psychological cultural analyses, among others. The book Female Adolescence, published in 1992 with Karin Flaake, combined social and cultural scientific analyses with developmental psychological and psychoanalytical perspectives. In later works, she examined the significance of youth/adolescence and the “adolescent space of possibility” for biographical and cultural development. In particular, she investigated the intergenerational dynamics of adolescence and developed a concept of generativity at the intersection of subject and cultural theory. Her research on intergenerational relationships extends to studies on families and the psychosocial development of parents, children and adolescents in the context of migration and flight.
King also conducts research on the psychosocial and psychological consequences of the dynamics of optimization, altered relationships of time and digitalization. She is spokeswoman for the interdisciplinary research projects Aporias of Perfection in Accelerated Modernity and Measured Life. Productive and Counterproductive Consequences of Digitally Quantifying Optimization. She heads these projects together with Benigna Gerisch and Hartmut Rosa She also engages in research on art and psychoanalysis.

Functions

King is co-editor of the journals Psyche and Psychosozial. She is a scientific advisor to the International Psychoanalytic University Berlin and to the Medical Academy for of Child and Adolescent Psychotherapy] e. V. a member of the Comité scientifique international of the Association Internationale Interactions de la Psychanalyse .

Publications (Selection)