Pseudo-therapists, wannabes, and the socially inept: has Berlin lost its mind?
German society has an incredible two-tier system that actually allows so-called “alternative” therapies to be offered to the general public. Has this incredible idea, however, turned sour?
Image Description: a GIF from Cartoon Network’s famous show Dexter's Laboratory shows the main character in bed, raising a finger, and with a caption that reads: “What a fine day for science.”
Let me be clear from the outset: I am not writing this as someone who has swallowed the epistemological assumptions of Western modernity whole. My work as a practicing spiritualist and occultural scholar is grounded precisely in the critique of what Portuguese sociologistBoaventura de Sousa Santos calls the “abyssal line” — that violent partition of knowledge that places certain ways of knowing inside the realm of the visible and legitimate, while consigning others to the void of superstition, folklore, or irrelevance. Walter D. Mignolo’s concept of the colonial wound is equally present in my thinking: the ongoing erasure of non-hegemonic knowledges through institutional gatekeeping is itself a form of epistemic violence. I support esoteric thinking. I support non-Western medicine. I support the weise Frauen — the wise women, the root workers, the curandeiras and the terreiros.
What I do not support is the cynical commercialization of suffering by people who have neither the training, the embodiment, nor the ethical grounding to hold space for another human being in pain. And Berlin — bless its chaotic, beautiful heart — has become something of a capital for exactly that.
A Legal Loophole Wide Enough to Drive a Guru Through
Germany has a singular and genuinely fascinating legal framework governing alternative health practice. The Heilpraktikergesetz — the Healing Practitioners Act — has existed in its current form since 1939, and it creates a professional category that has no real equivalent elsewhere in the Western world: the Heilpraktiker, or non-medical healing practitioner. Under German law, a Heilpraktiker is recognised as an alternative and complementary health professional with the legal right to practice a sweeping range of therapeutic interventions — everything from homeopathy, acupuncture, and herbal medicine to, crucially, psychotherapy in its broadest sense.
What makes this extraordinary — and extraordinarily dangerous — is the absence of any mandatory, standardised training requirement. As the law stands, a candidate need only be at least 25 years of age, hold a secondary school certificate, present a clean bill of health and a police clearance, and pass a state-administered examination conducted by local health authorities (Gesundheitsämter). The examination itself tests primarily biomedical knowledge: anatomy, physiology, pathology. It does not test psychological competence, therapeutic ethics, or the specific methods the applicant intends to use on vulnerable clients. Once a candidate passes — and the test can be retaken indefinitely upon failure — there is, as a 2019 peer-reviewed analysis bluntly noted, virtually no state oversight of their practice for the remainder of their professional life, save for those applying invasive physical methods.
The result is a system in which the title “Heilpraktiker” functions as a kind of master skeleton key. A research investigation published in peer-reviewed medical literature found that of 165 Heilpraktiker schools surveyed in Germany, 83% did not even meet the voluntary guidelines set by the profession’s own associations. There is no uniform state regulation for the training programmes, many of which cost several thousand euros and are not state-recognised. A person who has spent six months doing self-directed reading and practising multiple-choice exam questions from prior years can, on paper, position themselves as a psychotherapist. And here is the crucial legal detail that makes the wellness industry salivate: under German law, the protected term is Psychotherapeut — but the word “psychotherapy” itself, as a description of services offered, is not legally protected in the same way. Naturopaths and Heilpraktiker may use it to describe what they do. The protected title is the credential; the practice itself remains a free-for-all.
This is where the wellness industry has made itself very comfortable. A weekend trauma certification here, a NARM®-adjacent online course there, a certificate in constellation work, another in “Radical Honesty®” — stack them up, build a website, and you have what the market now calls a trauma therapist. Compare this to the path required of a licensed psychotherapist in Germany: a university degree in psychology or medicine, followed by years of clinical training under statutory supervision, with examinations regulated by the Psychotherapeutengesetz and recognition by professional chambers. The contrast is not merely bureaucratic. It is the difference between someone who has been trained, supervised, and held accountable — and someone who has been to enough workshops to know the vocabulary.
The Workshop-to-Guru Pipeline: Famous German Cases
Germany has a long and occasionally illustrious tradition of practitioners who developed their own therapeutic methods outside of academic institutions — some of whom produced genuinely interesting work, others of whom became cautionary tales. The landscape is usefully instructive.
Bert Hellinger (1925–2019) is perhaps the most consequential example. A former Catholic missionary who spent sixteen years among the Zulu in South Africa before leaving the priesthood and retraining in psychoanalysis, gestalt therapy, and transactional analysis, Hellinger developed the method he called Familienaufstellung, or Family Constellation Therapy. The premise is that individuals carry unconscious burdens from their family systems across generations, and that through a group process — using participants as “representatives” of family members — these systemic entanglements can be revealed and resolved. Hellinger’s method has attracted both devoted followers and withering critique from the scientific community. His own published statements have included the suggestion that victims of sexual abuse who later become sex workers do so out of an unconscious love for their perpetrators — a position that is not merely pseudoscientific but actively harmful to survivors.
In Brazil — my home country — the story of Family Constellations has taken a turn so surreal it would be comic if it were not so consequential. The method arrived in Brazil in 1999 and found an unlikely patron in Judge Sami Storch, who developed a concept he called Direito Sistêmico — Systemic Law — and began applying Family Constellations in courtrooms as a conflict resolution tool. The idea spread to family courts across the country, eventually being used in cases involving divorce, child custody, alimony, and, disturbingly, domestic violence. By some accounts, the practice became active in 19 Brazilian states and the Federal District, underpinned by Article 3 of Brazil’s Code of Civil Procedure, which encourages alternative methods of conciliation and mediation. Women came forward to report being encouraged to ask their aggressors for forgiveness in these settings, forced to confront their abusers and relive their traumas in the name of “systemic harmony.” The Institute Question of Science (IQC) in Brazil exposed these abuses in a detailed campaign, and the issue eventually reached the Senate in a public hearing — though not before considerable damage had been done to vulnerable people by a method applied with neither clinical rigour nor institutional oversight. The Brazilian Minister of Human Rights, Silvio Almeida, formally requested action against the abuse of Family Constellation practices in October 2023.
Hellinger’s case illustrates something important: even practitioners with genuine biographical richness and intellectual curiosity can produce frameworks that, stripped of their context, misapplied by underprepared facilitators, and scaled through a certification industry that requires minimal gatekeeping, become instruments of harm.
I say all of this not from a position of detached academic scepticism, but from the inside.
I have done Family Constellation work — in sessions led by a practitioner of genuine depth, rigour, and decades of embodied experience. I have sat with kambô, the Amazonian frog secretion used in Indigenous purging ceremonies by the Matsés and Katukina peoples of the Western Amazon, in the care of a facilitant who had lived and trained within those communities for years. I have undergone past life regression therapy. I have worked with mediums and spiritual healers, as well as with astrologers whose knowledge of symbolic systems was as sophisticated as any academic I have encountered.
I have, in short, done more or less every variety of what the uninitiated might call “woo woo,” and I am richer — intellectually, spiritually, and in some cases clinically — for all of it. The difference, in every single case that was genuine and useful, was the same: the practitioner had paid a real price for their knowledge. Not in money. In time, in lineage, in apprenticeship, in years of sitting with their own darkness before presuming to sit with someone else’s. They were accountable — to their community, to their tradition, to the living chain of transmission that had shaped their practice. The transformation I experienced in a Family Constellation led by such a person is not something I would trade. And it is precisely because I know what that work looks like when it is done well that I find its imitation so offensive. There is a difference between the master and the man who has watched the master’s YouTube videos and bought the certification.
Benedikt Zeitner, or: How to Build a Brand Out of Other People’s Pain
Which brings us, with a certain inevitability, to Benedikt Zeitner — Heilpraktiker, “trauma therapist”, coach, and what one might charitably call Berlin’s answer to the tech bro who discovers mindfulness and immediately pivots to selling it.
Ok, that was me being fastidious (to a certain extent). I have met Benedikt in real life, and he is quite a nice chap. He used to be a prominent performing artist in Germany, and I saw his transition from Instagram celebrity between 2018-2019 into the so-called full-time “trauma therapy”, besides knowing him through common circles. But I have also experienced firsthand what his own traumas and unhealed wounds have caused to people in his surroundings, so I cannot stay quiet about it.
Zeitner’s biography, as presented on his own website, is at least candid about its trajectory. Born in 1983 in Krefeld, he studied opera singing in Berlin from 2003 to 2010, then spent thirteen years touring Germany, Switzerland, and Austria as part of a music-comedy duo called “Ass-Dur.” He obtained his Heilpraktiker licence in 2010 — that is, the same year he completed his singing conservatory studies — and began practicing therapeutically on a part-time basis while his main job remained cabaret performance. In 2019, he went full-time as a therapist. He describes having obtained his Heilpraktiker authorisation through self-directed study and the accumulation of various private further training courses, listing among his influences such eclectic figures as Bert Hellinger, Byron Katie, Milton Erickson, Wilhelm Reich, and the founder of Germanische Neue Medizin (German New Medicine), Ryke Geerd Hamer — whose theories, one should note, have been roundly condemned by medical authorities across Europe and linked to preventable deaths from cancer patients who abandoned conventional treatment on Hamer’s advice.
The centerpiece of Zeitner’s current offer is what he calls the “5 Biologische Naturgesetze” — the Five Biological Laws of Nature, derived directly from Hamer’s framework — applied alongside NARM® (Neuroaffective Relational Model) trauma therapy, gestalt work, and something called “Deep Honesty,” inspired by the Radical Honesty movement. He runs group sessions, online webinars, individual sessions, and weekend intensives, charging up to €390 for a single weekend event. His online presence spans YouTube (in German) and TikTok and Instagram under the handle @benfromberlin (in English), where he delivers content about trauma and healing to a multilingual audience.
It is worth pausing on the “5 Biologische Naturgesetze.” Hamer’s system — also marketed as Germanische Heilkunde — claims that all diseases are caused by specific emotional conflicts, and that conventional medicine is essentially a conspiracy. Hamer himself was stripped of his medical licence in Germany, convicted in France of fraud, and his methods have been directly implicated in patient deaths. That a self-described “trauma therapist” operating in Berlin in 2026 lists this framework as a foundational pillar of his practice — while simultaneously offering NARM®, a legitimate evidence-adjacent trauma approach — tells you something important about the epistemic salad that passes for methodology in this sector. It is not eclecticism. It is the wholesale mixing of the dangerous with the credible, in the hope that the credibility of one launders the danger of the other.
On his English-language therapist profile, Zeitner notes openly that he “struggled with his homosexuality for many years” and is happy to support LGBTQ+ clients. This disclosure is his own, public, and made in a professional context — and it is relevant not to mock him, but to observe the irony: a man who, by his own account, spent years in an unresolved relationship with his own sexual identity, who has no formal psychological training, who draws on a framework condemned by medical authorities, is positioning himself as someone equipped to guide others through the most intimate recesses of their trauma. The gap between the brand and the substance is not merely aesthetic. It is structural.
In the Brazilian community in Berlin, Zeitner has become something of a known quantity — someone who deploys the vocabulary of trauma therapy with fluency and confidence, whose digital presence reads as authoritative, but whose actual capacity to hold clinical space remains entirely unaccountable to any professional body, any ethical committee, or any regulatory framework. This is the tech-bro move applied to spirituality: move fast, build the product, iterate the brand, and let the market sort out the harm later. Spirituality as a startup. Trauma as content.
Nothing New Under the Berlin Sun: Joseph Weißenberg and the Long History of Cures
If all of this feels alarmingly contemporary, it is worth remembering that Berlin has been here before — many times, and more dramatically.
Joseph Weißenberg (1855–1941) was, in the parlance of his era, a Gesundbeter — a prayer-healer — who rose to extraordinary prominence during the final years of the German Empire and the turbulence of the Weimar Republic. A bricklayer by trade and a man of intense spiritual conviction, Weißenberg founded the Vereinigung ernster Forscher von Diesseits nach Jenseits — the Association of Earnest Researchers of this Life and the Next — in 1907, which eventually became the Evangelical Johannine Church (Johannischen Kirche). His healing practices included the laying on of hands, necromancy, prayer, and, most notoriously, the application of Quark — a fresh white cheese — to ailing bodies, which he believed had curative properties. This earned him the popular title of the “Weißkäseheiler,” the white-cheese healer, and drew followers by the tens of thousands. By the time of his 77th birthday in 1932, an estimated 35,000 people gathered to celebrate him.
Weißenberg’s relationship with institutional power was characteristically tangled. He faced multiple court cases for medical malpractice during the Weimar years, including charges related to the treatment of a diabetic man who died, and an infant girl who went blind from an eye infection. He was ultimately acquitted on appeal — a fact his church’s Board of Management has been at pains to emphasise in the historical record, and which is important to note accurately. The larger truth, however, is that his methods were pseudoscientific by any reasonable standard, and that the media controversy surrounding his trials did nothing to diminish his following. If anything, it amplified it.
The connection between Weißenberg and the cultural moment of his time was given its sharpest artistic form not in the courtroom but on the stage. On 17 November 1931, at the Volksbühne in Berlin, the composer Kurt Weill and lyricist Günther Weisenborn premiered a song called “Lied vom weißen Käse” — or, as it is alternatively titled, “Lied vom blinden Mädchen” (Song of the Blind Girl). The song was written for and first performed by Lotte Lenya as part of a political cabaret revue staged to benefit unemployed actors during the depths of the Great Depression. In it, a blind girl narrates a faith healer’s attempts to cure her blindness with white cheese, concluding — with the particular bitterness that Weill and Brecht’s Berlin had refined into an art form — that perhaps it would be better if everyone were blind, so that no one would have to see the state of the world.
The song was then lost — genuinely, archivally lost — for nearly nine decades. It was rediscovered in 2017 in the theater archives of the Freie Universität Berlin by musicologist Elmar Juchem, and the discovery made headlines in major publications around the world. It prompted extensive coverage in print, radio, and online media, with substantial articles appearing in The New York Times, Die Welt, the Financial Times, and Der Tagesspiegel. Austria’s Kleine Zeitung ran an interview with soprano Ute Gfrerer, who recorded the song — a video selection of which was featured on the New York Times website. The song was subsequently published by European American Music, with an English translation by Michael Feingold, in a recording by Ute Gfrerer and Shane Schag.
"Lied vom Blinden Mädchen (Lied vom weißen Käse)"
Kurt Weill/Günther Weisenborn (1931)
Entschuldigung, ich sehe nicht ganz richtig
Denn ich bin blind, doch das ist nicht so wichtig
Denn ich habe einen Glauben, der ist schön
Und einen Weißenburg, zu dem wir beten gehen
So nimm denn meine Hände und führe mich
Als ich krank war, trat der Meister ein
Legte weißen Käse auf die Augen mein
Lobte Gott und sagte: „Du bist Gottes Kind!
Ich heile dich!“
Doch leider blieb ich blind
Bis an mein selig Ende und ewiglich
„Es ist gut,“ sprach er, „doch ist es besser
Dass du diese Welt nicht siehst, mein Kind.“
„Es ist gut,“ sprach er, „denn Gottes Gnade
Braucht man nicht zu sehn, die glaubt man blind.“
Ich kann allein nicht gehen, nicht einen Schritt
Wo du wirst gehen und stehen, da nimm mich mit
Und ich sprach: Schließ allen doch die Augen
Mit weißem Käse , Weihrauch und Gebet
O wie schön wär es doch nicht zu schauen
Was auf dieser Welt hier vor sich geht
Lass ruhen zu deinen Füßen dein armes Kind
Ich will die Augen schließen und glauben blind
ENGLISH
Forgive me, but I cannot see you clearly,
for I am blind — a minor matter merely,
for my faith will see me through from day to day
thanks to the Healer in whose Church we go to pray.
Take thou my hand, O Healer, and lead thou me.
In my sickness, he was good and wise.
Fresh white cheese he plaster’d on my ailing eyes.
He prais’d God and told me, ‘Child, our Lord is kind.
You have been heal’d.’
Yet somehow I’m still blind
Until my journey’s ending, eternally.
„Es ist gut,“ sprach er, „doch ist es besser
Dass du diese Welt nicht siehst, mein Kind.“
„Es ist gut,“ sprach er, „denn Gottes Gnade
Braucht man nicht zu sehn, die glaubt man blind.“
Ich kann allein nicht gehen, nicht einen Schritt
Wo du wirst gehen und stehen, da nimm mich mit
Und ich sprach: Schließ allen doch die Augen
Mit weißem Käse , Weihrauch und Gebet
O wie schön wär es doch nicht zu schauen
Was auf dieser Welt hier vor sich geht
Lass ruhen zu deinen Füßen dein armes Kind
Ich will die Augen schließen und glauben blind
The resonance of the rediscovery was not merely musicological. A 1931 song satirising a charismatic Berlin faith healer who promised cures he could not deliver, written during a period of economic collapse and rising authoritarianism, surfacing in 2017 — the year of Brexit, of the first year of the first Trump administration, of the accelerating erosion of institutional trust across the Western world — felt less like an archive find than a dispatch from the future addressed to the past. Weißenberg’s story rhymes with the present not because human credulity is a constant (though it is), but because the conditions that make pseudoscientific healing attractive — economic precarity, institutional distrust, the genuine failures of orthodox medicine to address the whole person — have returned with a force that Weimar-era satirists would have recognised immediately.
A Scientific Conclusion (With a Note on What “Pseudoscience” Does and Does Not Mean)
It is at this point that I want to be precise about a word I have been using, and will use again: pseudoscience.
I am not deploying this term as a weapon of epistemicide. Epistemicide — a concept developed within the decolonial tradition — refers to the destruction or suppression of non-hegemonic forms of knowledge through the imposition of Western scientific rationality as the exclusive arbiter of the real. It is a genuine and ongoing harm, and I am deeply aware of it in my own work. Traditional healing systems — Ayurveda, traditional Chinese medicine, the plant medicine traditions of the Amazon, the practices of the weise Frauen (wise women) of central and eastern Europe, the work of Candomblé priests and Umbanda mediums — contain bodies of accumulated wisdom that took centuries to develop, that are embedded in specific cosmologies, ethical frameworks, and relational practices, and that deserve serious, respectful engagement rather than dismissal. When I critique pseudoscience, I am not critiquing these traditions. I am critiquing the appropriation, decontextualisation, and commodification of such traditions by practitioners who have neither the lineage, the training, the cultural embeddedness, nor the ethical accountability to transmit them.
What makes a practice pseudoscientific in the relevant sense is not that it falls outside Western biomedical categories. It is that it makes specific causal claims — about disease, trauma, healing, and the human body — without the evidentiary basis to support those claims, and then markets those claims to vulnerable people, often at significant financial cost, and without the oversight mechanisms that would catch and correct harm. The “5 Biologische Naturgesetze” of Hamer’s system are pseudoscientific not because they are non-Western or spiritual, but because they make empirically falsifiable claims about the relationship between emotional events and specific tumour locations — claims that have been tested and found wanting, and whose application has caused measurable, documented harm. Family Constellations, as practiced in Brazilian courtrooms without clinical training or accountability, is pseudoscientific not because it draws on systemic thinking, but because it is applied to adversarial legal proceedings — including domestic violence cases — on the basis of a methodology with no robust evidence base for that application.
The deeper harm in all of this is not merely to the individuals who are misled or retraumatised. It is to the practitioners who do this work seriously. The curandeiras. The herbalists with generations of botanical knowledge. The trained somatic therapists who have done the years of supervision and clinical practice. The Indigenous healers who hold their communities’ wisdom as a sacred trust. When Benedikt Zeitner posts TikTok content about trauma under the handle @benfromberlin — when the wellness industry at large monetises suffering with a weekend certificate and a Canva logo — it does not merely mislead clients. It actively degrades the landscape in which serious, accountable, embodied healing work takes place. It makes it harder to distinguish the real from the performed. It colonises the aesthetic of depth without paying the price that depth actually costs.
Berlin has always been a city of reinvention, of radical experimentation, of people who arrive from somewhere else and build something new in the rubble. That is part of its genius. But there is a difference between the genuine experimental spirit — the kind that produced the Volksbühne, that gave Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht their sharpest material, that has historically attracted artists and thinkers willing to do the actual work of transformation — and the entrepreneurial appropriation of the language of healing as a personal brand strategy. Joseph Weißenberg, for all his faults, at least had the courage of his convictions and the social grounding of a genuine community. The contemporary wellness entrepreneur has a Stripe account and a content calendar.
The blind girl in Weill’s song does not recover her sight. The white cheese does not work. And the world, she concludes, might be easier to bear if everyone else were blinded too — so that no one could see what was being done in the name of healing. In 2026, ninety-five years after that song was first performed on the Volksbühne stage, I find myself unable to decide whether that punchline has aged into prophecy or merely into repetition.
References and further reading:
1. Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. Paradigm Publishers, 2014.
2. Mignolo, Walter D. The Darker Side of Western Modernity. Duke University Press, 2011.
3. Kurt Weill Newsletter, Vol. 36, No. 1 (Spring 2018): “Lied vom blinden Mädchen: Coverage.”
4. Juchem, Elmar. “Probably Buried in Some Basement.” Kurt Weill Newsletter, Vol. 35, No. 2 (Fall 2017).
5. German History Documents (germanhistorydocs.org): “Joseph Weißenberg, Faith Healer and Founder of the Evangelical Johannine Church, 1932.”
6. The Skeptic (UK): “Family Constellation: the pseudoscience retraumatising victims at the approval of Brazilian courts,” April 2022.
7. InformedHealth.org / NCBI: “In brief: Psychotherapy providers in Germany.”
8. Ernst, Edzard. “The schools that train Heilpraktiker in Germany: no standards and no control,” May 2023.
9. benediktzeitner.de (official website, accessed May 2026).
10. complicated.life: Benedikt Zeitner therapist profile (accessed May 2026).