Dietfried Muller-Hegemann (1910-1989), German psychiatrist and neurologist. In 1930 at the start of his medical studies Muller-Hegemann joined the Communist Party and worked with a communist resistance group against the National Socialist government. Between 1936 and 1943 he trained at the German Institute for Psychological Research and Psychotherapy, focusing on Schizophrenia. During World War II he was a military doctor and was taken as a Soviet prisoner of war in 1944. He was released in 1948 and moved to what was to become East Germany where he continued his psychiatry studies and became a proponent of the Pavlovian school of psychiatry. From 1950 he held a number of senior positions in the University of Leipzig's medical faculty and, in 1953, established Leipzig's first psychotherapy institution. Muller-Hegemann became the Director of the Wilhelm Griesinger Psychiatric Hospital in East Berlin in 1965, holding the position until 1971, when he defected to the West. After a year at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, he returned to West Germany to head the Psychotherapy department of the Knappschafts hospital in Essen, where he remained until retirement.