Dutch psychiatrist, psychotherapist, medical anthropologist and prolific writer on “Metabletics”.
Between 1933 and 1936, he earned diplomas in primary school and high school education, the latter with a focus on mathematics. He also published papers on entomology. He then entered Utrecht University specializing in psychiatry and neurology. After his medical training and his doctoral dissertation (under prof. Rümke) in Utrecht, he worked as “chef de clinique” under H.C. Rümke. In 1951, he became a professor, first in Utrecht, and later in Leiden in 1954. His teaching assignment was ‘Conflict Psychology and the Phenomenological Method’. He retired in 1979.
Van den Berg’s book Metabletics or theory of change (1956) deals with synchronous abrupt changes in cultural history. There were weird patterns in history, where revolutionary chances suddenly took place in seemingly unrelated arena’s. When Darwin’s “The Origin of Species” appeared in 1859, Marx wrote his “Kritik der politischen Ökonomie”, Napoleon won the battle of Solferino, the Red Cross and astrophysics were established. According to Van den Berg, such changes were not the result of coinciding individual achievements, but the result of changes in the world, matter as well as men. And as a Christian Van den Berg believed that G’d and his ongoing creation was the driving force behind it. It even led to different views of G’d as he wrote in “Metabletica van God: de drie voornaamste veranderingen” (1995).
He died 22 September 2012 in Gorinchem.
Link to Wikipedia