Hardly any institution appears in our articles as often as this one: the Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene (IGPP) – the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health – in Freiburg is the place where, for 75 years without interruption, the German-speaking world has researched what elsewhere may not even be touched: hauntings, exceptional experiences, the boundary questions of consciousness. Hans Bender, its founder, has his own portrait with us; this article is about the institute itself – its remarkable funding, its treasure vaults and its research today.
1950: a founding with a programmatic name
When Bender founded the institute in Freiburg in 1950, the programme was already in the name: frontier areas of psychology instead of the spiritualistically loaded word "parapsychology", and mental hygiene, because from the beginning it was also about people – about coping psychologically with exceptional experiences, not only about researching them. To this day the institute is organised as a non-profit registered association. It has never given up the dual task of research and counselling – the same pattern we described at IANDS and the Netzwerk Nahtoderfahrung.
The woman who made it possible: Fanny Moser
That the IGPP exists at all it owes to a woman worth a story of her own: Fanny Moser (1872–1953), a Swiss zoologist with a doctorate – and at the same time one of the most thorough investigators of hauntings of her era. Moser began as a convinced sceptic and wrote her two-volume work "Der Okkultismus – Täuschungen und Tatsachen" (1935) with the declared aim of sorting out the fraud; her later standard work "Spuk" (1950) took the remaining hard cases seriously. In the institute's early phase she decisively supported Bender's young institute with an endowment – and bequeathed to it her scientific estate together with a library of some 2,000 volumes. Further private foundation funds, including grants from the Munich Holler Foundation, later made the great expansion possible.
This detail is more than a footnote: the IGPP is at its core privately foundation-funded – and thereby independent of the cycles of state science funding. What that is worth is shown by the contrast in the same city: the Parapsychologische Beratungsstelle founded in 1989 by Walter von Lucadou – a separate institution often confused with the IGPP – depends on state funding whose continuation had to be fought for in court. Two Freiburg addresses, two funding models, two degrees of freedom.
The expansion: from office to the field's largest institution
In the mid-1990s the financial situation allowed a leap no comparable institution in the world has made: in 1996 the IGPP moved into the university-adjacent building at Wilhelmstrasse 3a and grew to about 20 researchers – psychologists, natural scientists, social and cultural scientists. This makes the IGPP today one of the largest research institutions for parapsychology and anomalistics worldwide – larger than most of the Anglo-American centres whose names are far better known internationally, such as the Rhine Research Center in Durham or the Parisian Institut Métapsychique International (see our Richet portrait).
What is researched there today
The institute organises its work in five thematic fields: mind and matter (the relation of consciousness and physics), parapsychology and paranormal phenomena (from telepathy to hauntings), exceptional experiences and altered states of consciousness, spirituality and health, and society, knowledge, discourses – the social-science question of how our culture deals with the unexplained. Added to this are regular scientific colloquia and the co-publication of journals such as the Zeitschrift für Anomalistik.
The most tangible example of current IGPP research for our readers: the project on terminal lucidity under Michael Nahm – the phenomenon that reached mainstream dementia research via the 2019 Mashour position paper. A German frontier-areas institute thereby provided the impulse for a research programme of the US National Institute on Aging.
The treasure vaults: library and archive
Two holdings make the IGPP irreplaceable for the history of science. The library is considered the most important collection of parapsychological and esoteric literature in the German-speaking world and is catalogued in cooperation with the Freiburg University Library – a special collection that exists nowhere else in this form. The archive preserves, alongside Bender's correspondence (among others with C. G. Jung) and the spontaneous-phenomena archive, the estates of Fanny Moser and of Albert von Schrenck-Notzing – the Munich physician whose materialisation investigations we presented in an article of their own. Anyone who wants to study the German history of this research cannot get past Wilhelmstrasse.
The counselling service: Bender's legacy
To this day the IGPP offers free counselling for people struggling with exceptional experiences – by telephone and in person, through a dedicated team. That is the "mental hygiene" in the institute's name and Bender's true legacy: someone who has had a deathbed vision, a haunting or an out-of-body experience needs, first of all, neither a worldview nor a debate, but a knowledgeable, calm counterpart. This stance – take the phenomena seriously, people first – has remained unchanged since 1950.
Who runs the institute
A look at the organisational structure is worthwhile. Formally the usual association order applies: the members' assembly elects the board and controls it, the board appoints the institute's leadership. The bodies are staffed as follows: the director is the perception researcher Jürgen Kornmeier (also active at the University of Freiburg), his deputy Eberhard Bauer – the house's figure of continuity, at the institute since the 1970s and custodian of the Bender legacy. The three-member board consists of Kornmeier (chair), Bauer and the Gießen psychology professor Rudolf Stark – the Gießen connection dates from the era of the long-time director Dieter Vaitl. Remarkable about this construction: the director and deputy director themselves sit on the board that appoints and supervises the institute's leadership – actual control thus rests solely with the members' assembly, whose composition is not public. How one judges this structure is for each reader to decide; it is documented on the institute's website.
Context
The significance of the IGPP can be measured by a simple comparison: almost everywhere else in the world, this research lives off temporary positions, private initiatives and the courage of individuals to risk their careers. In Freiburg, by contrast, there has stood for 75 years a house with a library, an archive, a counselling service and two dozen researchers – funded from the bequest of a zoologist who began as a sceptic and ended as an investigator of hauntings. Continuity is the rarest resource of all in this field. The IGPP has it.
An honest balance sheet, however, also includes the flip side of this continuity. Measured against the resources – some twenty researchers, privately funded for decades, with no financial losses to fear – the yield of research into the phenomena themselves is astonishingly thin. The emphasis has long lain on research about the field: counselling, archive, sociology, history of science. The hard findings this site lives on come almost entirely from the USA – from the university-anchored case research around Ian Stevenson and Bruce Greyson's NDE programme in Virginia, through Julie Beischel's blinded mediumship protocols, to Christopher Kerr's hospice research – where results-oriented funding demands performance. The great Freiburg exception proves the rule: Nahm's terminal lucidity. Secure funding without accountability protects against existential fear – against complacency, evidently, it does not.
How differently things could have gone is shown by a glance less than seventy kilometres further south – across the border, into Switzerland. In 1967 Matthias Güldenstein founded in Basel, expressly inspired by Hans Bender, the Parapsychological Working Group Basel, today's Basler Psi-Verein. Bender's impulse fell on different soil there: the small working group grew into the Basel Psi Days, for decades the largest public congress on the frontier areas of science, and finally into a society with some 300 events a year, on whose stage the best-known mediums in the world appear today. The same founding generation, the same intellectual father, a few kilometres apart – but one place administers the field, the other keeps it alive. That the living variant flourished of all places in Switzerland and not in Germany fits the picture we trace in our article on mediumship in Switzerland.
Sources: The institute's self-description, history, thematic fields and counselling services at igpp.de (including the Fanny Moser endowment, the 1996 expansion and staff numbers; governing bodies and leadership on the "Organisationsstruktur" page, retrieved July 2026); the cooperation page of the Freiburg University Library on the IGPP library; the IGPP research project "Terminale Geistesklarheit"; the entry "Institut für Grenzgebiete der Psychologie und Psychohygiene" in the German Wikipedia (legal form, funding, archive estates); supplemented by our portraits of Hans Bender, Michael Nahm and Schrenck-Notzing.
For more, see our curated knowledge collection and the research link directory – the IGPP is linked there directly.