He worked at the psychiatric clinic in Hamburg-Eppendorf between 1969 and 1979 and was awarded a PhD in 1976 from the University of Hamburg.
He received his habilitation in Hamburg in 1979 and was offered a Professorship at the University of Bern, Switzerland.
[pub 3] His 1994 meta-analysis on the outcomes of psychotherapy studies was the most comprehensive and ambitious in Germany, and triggered a heated debate in academic circles as well as in the wider community about the efficacy and effectiveness of various approaches and psychotherapy in general.
In his scientific studies, Grawe asked fundamental questions such as: How does the therapeutic process develop?
His later contributions focused on the integration of the new emerging fields of neurobiology and the brain sciences with clinical psychology and psychotherapy, becoming a father figure to contemporary neuropsychotherapy.