Aaron T. Beck was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on July 18, 1921, the third son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His father was a printer by trade who seriously abided by his socialist ideals. His rather overbearing mother was known for her extreme mood swings. Beck had two siblings who died before he was born. Beck's childhood typified middle-class America, complete with his involvement i…
A central figure in humanistic psychology and in the human potential movement, Abraham Maslow is known especially for his theory of motivation. He was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, and received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Wisconsin in 1934. Maslow then began medical studies, which he discontinued within a year, after which he was offered a postdoctoral research fellowsh…
Adolph Meyer was born in Niederweningen, Switzerland, and received an extensive medical education in neurology in Zurich, obtaining his M.D. in 1892. He emigrated to the United States in the same year. Beginning in 1893, Meyer worked for several hospitals, including a state hospital in Kankakee, Illinois, as a pathologist, and the New York State Hospital Service Pathological Institute, where he wa…
Albert Bandura was born in the province of Alberta, Canada, and received his B.A. from the University of British Columbia. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical psychology at the University of Iowa, focusing on social learning theories in his studies with Kenneth Spence and Robert Sears. Graduating in 1952, Bandura completed a one-year internship at the Wichita Guidance Center before accepting …
Raised in the Bronx, New York, Albert Ellis was shy and physically frail when he was young. Although he had literary ambitions in his teens and twenties, he earned degrees in accounting and business. While in his twenties, he found that he had a gift for advising his friends on sexual matters and undertook an intensive independent study of human sexuality. Deciding to become a professional therapi…
1902-1977 Aleksander Luria's research on normal versus abnormal brain function was critically important in the understanding of how to approach brain injuries. Through his work, much was learned about the impact of head injuries, brain tumors, and the effects of mental retardation. He also studied brain activity among children in an attempt to understand how to minimize abnormal behavior. L…
Alfred Adler was born in a suburb of Vienna, Austria, in 1870. After graduating from the University of Vienna medical school in 1895, he at first practiced ophthalmology but later switched to psychiatry. In 1902, Adler joined the discussion group that later became the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. Sigmund Freud was also a member. Adler eventually became president and editor of its journal. After …
Alfred Binet was born in Nice, France, in 1857. After studying both law and medicine in Paris, he earned a doctorate in natural science. Binet's psychological training—mostly at Jean-Martin Charcot's neurological clinic at the Salpetriere Hospital—was in the area of abnormal psychology, particularly hysteria, and he published books on hypnosis (Le magnetisme animal, wit…
Alfred Charles Kinsey was a well-known entomologist, specializing in the study of gall wasps, when his increasing interest in human sexuality led him in a entirely new scientific direction. Appalled by the lack of reliable scientific information on human sexual practices and problems, Kinsey began conducting extensive interviews, first with his students and then with larger populations. Kinsey�…
A seminal figure in the field of child psychoanalysis and development, Anna Freud was born in Vienna, Austria, the youngest child of Sigmund Freud. She was educated at private schools in Vienna, and at age 19 began two years of study to become a teacher. As the youngest of six children, she became her father's lifelong traveling companion and student. When Freud was 23 years old, she underw…
In her long and productive career, Anne Anastasi has produced not only several classic texts in psychology but has been a major factor in the development of psychology as a quantitative behavioral science. To psychology professionals, the name Anastasi is synonymous with psychometrics, since it was she who pioneered understanding how psychological traits are influenced, developed, and measured. In…
As a graduate student in psychology, Arnold Lazarus first developed a therapy based on behavioral psychology. He expanded this into cognitive behavior therapy, and later into a multi-faceted psychotherapy known as multimodal therapy. In recent years, Lazarus has written popular psychology books. Lazarus has held numerous professional positions and won many honors, including the Distinguished Servi…
Arnold Gesell was born in Alma, Wisconsin, and received his bachelor's degree from the University of Wisconsin. In 1906, he earned his Ph.D. from Clark University, where he was motivated to specialize in child development by studying with the prominent American psychologist G. Stanley Hall (1844-1924). Gesell received his M.D. from Yale University in 1915. After briefly holding a Arnold…
Arthur Otis was born in Denver, Colorado, and educated at Stanford University. He served on the faculty of Stanford University, and held various consulting and research positions at several U.S. government agencies. He was also an editor of tests in mathematics for an educational publishing company. Otis introduced and developed the Otis Group Intelligence Scale, which is considered to be the earl…
Arthur R. Jensen (AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced with permission.) Arthur Jensen was born in San Diego, California, and attended the University of California at Berkeley, San Diego State College, and Columbia University. He completed a clinical internship at the University of Maryland's Psychiatric Institute in 1956, after which he won a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship wi…
B. F. (Burrhus Frederic) Skinner was born in Susquehanna, Pennsylvania. As a youth, he showed talent for music and writing, as well as mechanical aptitude. He attended Hamilton College as an English major, with the goal of becoming a professional writer. After graduation, Skinner, discouraged over his literary prospects, became interested in behavioristic psychology after reading the works of John…
Bärbel Inhelder is permanently linked to Jean Piaget as a remarkable instance of scientific collaboration. Inhelder started working with Piaget in the early 1930s; by the 1940s, as she recalled, Piaget told her he needed her "to counter his tendency toward becoming a totally abstract thinker." Piaget never lost sight of his epistemological goals, while Inhelder was much more o…
Benjamin Rush was born near Philadelphia. He attended the College of New Jersey (the future Princeton University), intending to enter the ministry. Finally deciding in favor of medicine, Rush began his medical studies in Philadelphia, serving a six-year apprenticeship to a local physician. He then enrolled in the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, where many American physicians received their trai…
Benjamin McLane Spock was born on May 2, 1903, in New Haven, Connecticut, the oldest child in a large, strict New England family. His family was so strict that in his 82nd year he would still be saying "I love to dance in order to liberate myself from my puritanical upbringing." Educated at private preparatory schools, he attended Yale from 1921 to 1925, majoring in English literatur…
Bruno Bettelheim was born in Vienna in 1903. He was trained as a psychoanalyst, receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Vienna in 1938. In the same year, the Nazis conquered Austria, and Bettelheim was interned in the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps. He was released in 1939 and emigrated to the United States, where he first became a research associate of the Progressive Bruno Bett…
Carl Jung was born in Switzerland, the son of a Swiss Reform pastor. Having decided to become a psychiatrist, he enrolled in medical school at the University of Basel, from which he received his degree in 1900. Serving as an assistant at the University of Zurich Psychiatric Clinic, Jung worked under psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939), a psychiatrist renowned for his work on schizophrenia. Jung…
Carl Rogers was born in Oak Park, Illinois. Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, Rogers attended the University of Wisconsin and studied for the ministry at Union Theological Seminary before deciding to pursue a doctorate in education and clinical psychology at Columbia University. Between 1928 and 1939, Rogers worked as a counselor at the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children in…
Carl Wernicke was an influential member of the nineteenth-century German school of neuropsychiatry, which viewed all mental illnesses as resulting from defects in brain physiology. A practicing clinical neuropsychiatrist, Wernicke also made major discoveries in brain anatomy and pathology. He believed that abnormalities could be localized to specific regions of the cerebral cortex and thus could b…
Charles Edward Spearman was an influential psychologist who developed commonly used statistical measures and the statistical method known as factor analysis. His studies on the nature of human abilities led to his "two-factor" theory of intelligence. Whereas most psychologists believed that mental abilities were determined by various independent factors, Spearman concluded that gener…
Charles Robert Darwin was born in Shrewsbury, England. His father was a successful provincial physician, and his grandfather, Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), had been a distinguished intellectual figure. Young Darwin attended the Shrewsbury School, and his early failure to achieve academic distinction continued at Edinburgh University, where he studied medicine, and at Cambridge University, where he s…
Christiana Drummond Morgan grew up living the life of a debutante and may well have become no more than a society figure. Because she came of age at a time of social upheaval throughout the world, and because her life crossed paths with many influential scientists and intellectuals, she was able to expand her talents and make important contributions to behavioral therapy. Her unorthodox romance wi…
Born in Windsor, Connecticut, Christine Ladd-Franklin spent her early childhood in New York City. Her father was a prominent merchant and her mother was a feminist. Following her mother's death when Ladd-Franklin was 13, she moved to Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to live with her paternal grandmother. Ladd-Franklin attended the Wesleyan Academy in Wilbraham, Massachusetts for two years, taking…
Clark L. Hull was born in a country farmhouse near Akron, New York, on May 24, 1884. He attended high school for a year in West Saginaw, Michigan, and the academy Clark Hull (Archives of the History of American Psychology. Reproduced with permission.) of Alma College. His education was interrupted by bouts of typhoid fever and poliomyelitis, giving him pause to consider possible vocational …
Clifford Whittingham Beers was born in New Haven, Connecticut, studied at Yale University, and began a professional career in the insurance industry. In 1900 he was institutionalized for a mental breakdown after a suicide attempt and diagnosed as manic-depressive. Confined to both public and private institutions over a three-year period, Beers found the treatment of mental patients inhumane and in…
Psychologist and educator David Elkind was born in Detroit, Michigan, to Peter and Bessie (maiden name Nelson) E. Elkind. He and his family moved to California when he was an adolescent. He received the Bachelor of Arts from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1952, and his Doctorate in Philosophy (Ph.D.) from UCLA in 1955. He also received an honorary Doctorate in Science from R…
If one was to judge a philosopher by a gauge of relevance—the quantity of issues and arguments raised by him that remain central to contemporary thought—David Hume would be rated among the most important figures in philosophy. Ironically, his philosophical writings went unnoticed during his lifetime, and the considerable fame he achieved derived from his work as an essayist and histo…
In a career that spanned nearly 50 years, David Shakow conducted research that led to a vastly improved understanding of schizophrenia, one of the most complex mental disorders. Shakow's research covered all aspects of the disease, but in particular he focused on the mental deterioration that accompanied its progression. He was a strong advocate for patients of schizophrenia, which helped l…
David Wechsler developed the first standardized adult intelligence test, the Bellevue-Wechsler Scale, in 1939. Likewise, the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, published in 1949 and revised in 1974, was considered to be the best test available. The concept that intelligence involves the abilities necessary to succeed in life was one of Wechsler's major contributions to psychology. He…
The difference between the way a young brain and an older brain processes information was the focus of Donald Hebb's research during a career that spanned nearly half a century. Hebb was fascinated by the way people learned and the way they retained information. His research opened many doors in the field of behavioral science and made him one of the most influential behaviorists in twentie…
Edward Tolman was born on April 14, 1886, in Newton, Massachusetts. After graduation from the Newton public schools in 1907 and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1911, he did graduate study in psychology at Harvard. At Harvard (1911-1915), Tolman witnessed the initial reaction of the academic world to two new sets of psychological ideas: those of the Gestalt psychologists (Wolfgang…
Edward Frank Zigler was born in 1930 to Louis Zigler and Gertrude (Gleitman) Zigler of Kansas, Missouri. His parents and two older sisters immigrated to the United States from Poland. After attending a vocational high school in Kansas City, Zigler earned his B.S. at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. He went on to obtain his Ph.D. in developmental psychology from the University of Texas at A…
Edward Thorndike was born in Williamsburg, Massachusetts, and grew up in a succession of New England towns where his father served as a Methodist minister. After receiving his bachelor's degree from Wesleyan University, Thorndike did graduate work in psychology, first at Harvard under the guidance of William James and later at Columbia under James McKeen Cattell. His first major research pr…
Edwin Guthrie, born Jan. 9, 1886, in Lincoln, Nebraska, was one of five children. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father a store manager. He received a bachelor's and a master's degree from the University of Nebraska, specializing in mathematics, philosophy, and psychology. He entered the University of Pennsylvania as a Harrison fellow, receiving his doctorate in 1912. His ed…
Most widely known for her work in the psychology of sex differences, Eleanor Maccoby has achieved a distinguished career as an educator as well. She spent eight years in the 1950s as a lecturer and research associate in social relations at Harvard University. Later, she joined the faculty at Stanford University and eventually became chairman of the psychology department. Eleanor Emmons was born Ma…
Gibson was born Eleanor Jack in Peoria, Illinois, into a successful Presbyterian family on December 7,1910. Her parents were William A. and Isabel (Grier) Jack. She married fellow psychologist James J. Gibson on September 17, 1932. They had two children, James J. and Jean Grier. Due to prevailing attitudes discouraging females— even gifted ones—from pursuing an education, young Elean…
Emil Kraepelin was a pioneer in the development of psychiatry as a scientific discipline. He was convinced that all mental illness had an organic cause, and he was one of the first scientists to emphasize brain pathology in mental illness. A renowned clinical and experimental psychiatrist, Kraepelin developed our modern classification system for mental disease. After analyzing thousands of case st…
Erich Fromm was born in Frankfurt, Germany, and studied sociology and psychology at the universities of Frankfurt and Heidelberg, where he received his Ph.D. in 1922. Fromm was trained in psychoanalysis at the University of Munich and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Berlin. In 1925, he began his practice and was associated with the influential Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt. Althoug…
Erik Erikson was born in Frankfurt, Germany, to Danish parents. As a youth, he was a student and teacher of art. While teaching at a private school in Vienna, he became acquainted with Anna Freud, the daughter of Sigmund Freud. Erikson underwent psychoanalysis, and the experience made him decide to become an analyst himself. He was trained in psychoanalysis at the Vienna Psychoanalytic Institute a…
Ernest Hilgard distinguished himself through his studies of the role of hypnosis in human behavior and response. Hypnotism, often regarded as nothing more than a stage trick by pseudo-psychics, is in fact an important psychological tool; it can be used to alter behavior (smoking cessation, for example), and to relieve pain. Much of Hilgard's research and writing on the topic was done with h…
Ethel Dench Puffer was born in Framingham, Massachusetts, the eldest of four daughters. Her family was of native New England stock and highly educated by the standard of the era. After graduating from Smith College in 1891 at the age of 19 and teaching high school for one year in New Hampshire, Puffer returned to Smith as an instructor of mathematics, where she taught for the next three years whil…
Evelyn Hooker's groundbreaking work on homosexuality paved the way for greater acceptance of a group of people who had for years been labeled "abnormal." Modern society still finds many ways to discriminate against gay men and lesbians, but before Hooker's study many viewed homosexuality as a bona fide mental disorder. Hooker's research proved that, aside from th…
The word "mesmerize" means to hold one's attention as though that person were in a trance. Such was the popularity of Franz Mesmer, whose unorthodox methods of treating illness were highly popular with his patients. Those methods were criticized and ultimately dismissed by his contemporaries, and he lived out his days in obscurity. Yet his initial fame was the result of his su…
Frederick S. Perls, known to his friends and colleagues as Fritz, was the co-founder with his wife Laura (1905-1990) of the Gestalt school of psychotherapy. Trained as a Freudian, Perls felt that Freud's ideas had limitations, in part because they focused on past experiences. One of the key elements of Gestalt therapy is its focus on what Perls called the "here and now." Durin…
How we interpret our own behavior, as well as that of others, formed the basis for Fritz Heider's work during a career that lasted more than 60 years. Heider explored the nature of interpersonal relations, and his work culminated in the 1958 book The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. Heider espoused the concept of what he called "common-sense" or "naïve�…
Galen, the last and most influential of the great ancient medical practitioners, was born in Pergamum, Asia Minor. His father, the architect Nicon, is supposed to have prepared Galen for a career in medicine following the instructions given him in a dream by the god of medicine, Asclepius. Accordingly, Galen studied philosophy, mathematics, and logic in his youth and then began his medical trainin…
George Alexander Kelly, originator of personal construct theory of personality, was born on farm near Perth Kansas. He was the only child of Elfleda Merriam Kelly and Theodore Vincent Kelly. Kelly's father trained for the Presbyterian ministry but gave that up and moved to the farm soon after wedding Kelly's mother. When Kelly was four, his family moved to Eastern Colorado to make a …
Gordon Willard Allport was one of the great personality theorists of the twentieth century. His work was a synthesis of individual personality traits and the traditional psychology of William James, which emphasized psychological traits that are common among humans. He also examined complex social interactions. As a humanistic psychologist, he opposed both behavioral and psychoanalytical theories …
Gustav Theodor Fechner was born on April 19, 1801, at Gross-Särchen, Lower Lusatia. He earned his degree in biological science in 1822 at the University of Leipzig and taught there until his death on Nov. 18, 1887. Having developed an interest in mathematics and physics, he was appointed professor of physics in 1834. About 1839 Fechner had a breakdown, having injured his eyes while experime…
Hans Eysenck's obituary in the New York Times called him "one of the most distinguished, prolific, and maddeningly perverse psychologists of his generation." This accurately sums up a long career that Eysenck claimed he entered almost by accident. As a personality and behavior theorist, he popularized the terms "introvert" and "extrovert," and he cr…
Experimental and comparative psychologist Harry Harlow is best known for his work on the importance of maternal contact in the growth and social development of infants. Working with infant monkeys and surrogate mothers made of terrycloth or wire, Harlow concluded that extended social deprivation in the early years of life can severely disrupt later social and sexual behavior. Harlow also conducted…
Harry Stack Sullivan, born on February 21, 1892, in the farming community of Norwich, New York, was the only surviving child of a poor Irish farmer. His childhood was apparently a lonely one, his friends and playmates consisting largely of the farm animals. His mother, who was sickly, was unhappy with the family's poor situation, and is reported to have shown her son little affection. These…
1893-1988 American biochemist, physician, and clinical and experimental psychologist who developed an integrated theory of personality. Henry Alexander Murray, Jr. developed "personology," the integrated study of the individual from physiological, psychoanalytical, and social viewpoints. His background in medicine, biology, Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, and clinical and experi…
Hermann Ebbinghaus (Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced with permission.) Born in Germany, Hermann Ebbinghaus received his formal education at the universities of Halle, Berlin, and Bonn, where he earned degrees in philosophy and history. After obtaining his philosophy degree in 1873, Ebbinghaus served in the Franco-Prussian War. For the next seven years following the war, he tutored and studied in…
Hermann Helmholtz was one of the few scientists to master two disciplines: medicine and physics. He conducted breakthrough research on the nervous system, as well as the functions of the eye and ear. In physics, he is recognized (along with two other scientists) as the author of the concept of conservation of energy. Helmholtz was born into a poor but scholarly family; his father was an instructor…
Howard Earl Gardner was born and raised in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His parents, Ralph and Hilde (maiden name Weilheimer), were refugees from Nazi Germany. Gardner was a good student who greatly enjoyed playing the piano. In fact, he became an accomplished pianist as a child and considered becoming a professional pianist. While Gardner did not pursue becoming a professional pianist, he did teach pi…
Ivan Pavlov was born into an impoverished family in the rural village of Ryazan, Russia. He won a government scholarship to the University of St. Petersburg and studied medicine at the Imperial Medical Academy, receiving his degree in 1883. In 1890, Pavlov was appointed to a professorship at the St. Petersburg Military Academy and a few years later joined the faculty of the University of St. Peter…
James Jerome Gibson proposed a theory of vision that was a first of its kind; he suggested that visual perception was the direct detection of environmental invariances, and that visual perception did not require inference or information processing. Gibson was born in 1904 in McConnelsville, Ohio. He started his undergraduate career at Northwestern University. He transferred to Princeton University…
James McKeen Cattell developed an approach to psychological research that continues to dominate the field of psychology today. During psychology's early years, most research focused on the sensory responses of single individuals studied in depth because Wilhelm Wundt (1832-1920), the first experimental psychologist, favored this approach. As Cattell's ideas developed, his perspective…
Janet Taylor Spence has made important contributions to several branches of psychology. Her early work, the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (MAS), became a standard method for relating anxiety to performance. She discovered the importance of intrinsic motivation in performance, at a time when most psychologists believed in reward models of learning and performance. Later, Spence turned her attention…
Jay Haley is an American psychologist recognized as one of the founders of family therapy. Haley was a cofounder of the Family Therapy Institute in Washington, D.C., and he created the publication Family Process. His contributions to the field of therapy include the development of strategic and humanistic processes. Haley was born on July 19, 1923, in Midwest, Wyoming, to Andrew J. and Mary (Snedd…
Jean Martin Charcot was born in Paris on Nov. 29, 1825, the son of a carriage maker. He took his medical degree at the University of Paris in 1853 and was appointed professor of pathological anatomy there in 1860. In 1862 he was appointed senior physician at the Salpêtrière, a hospital for the treatment of the mentally ill. It became a center for psychiatric training and psychiatric …
Jean Piaget is universally known for his studies of the development of intelligence in children. Although he is one of the creators of child psychology as it exists today, psychology was for him only a tool of epistemology (the theory of knowledge). He identified his domain as "genetic [i.e., developmental] epistemology." He thus studied the growth of children's capacity to th…
Jerome Kagan is one of the major developmental biologists of the twentieth century. He has been a pioneer in re-introducing physiology as a determinate of psychological characteristics. The Daniel and Amy Starch Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, Kagan has won numerous awards, including the Hofheimer Prize of the American Psychiatric Association (1963) and the G. Stanley Hall Award of …
Jerome S. Bruner was born in New York City and educated at Duke University. During World War II, Bruner worked on the subject of propaganda and popular attitudes for U.S. Army intelligence at General Dwight D. Eisenhower's headquarters in France. He obtained his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1947, after which he became a member of the faculty, serving as professor of psychology, as well …
John Bowlby's pioneering work on the relationship between mothers and children was instrumental in shaping child psychology in the twentieth century. His research focusing on the mother-child bond—what it meant, and what happened when it did not or could not exist—formed the basis for groundbreaking work that culminated in his "attachment theory" about maternal b…
John Broadus Watson is best known as the founder of behaviorism, which he defined as an experimental branch of natural science aimed at the prediction and control of behavior. Its model was based on Ivan Pavlov's studies of conditioned reflex: every conduct is a response to a stimulus or to a complex set of stimulus situations. From birth, a few stimuli elicit definite reactions. But most b…
John Carew Eccles was a neurophysiologist whose research explained how nerve cells communicate with one another. He demonstrated that when a nerve cell is stimulated it releases a chemical that binds to the membrane of neighboring cells and activates them in turn. He further demonstrated that by the same mechanism a nerve cell can also inhibit the electrical activity of nearby nerve cells. For thi…
John Dewey was born near Burlington, Vermont. After receiving his B.A. from the University of Vermont, he taught high school and studied philosophy independently before entering the graduate program in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University. After receiving his Ph.D. in 1884, Dewey served on the faculties of the University of Michigan, the University of Minnesota, the University of Chicago, and Co…
John Hurley Flavell is a founder of social cognitive developmental psychology. His research on "role-taking," the cognitive skills that children require in order to understand and accept the roles of others, was a major contribution to developmental psychology. Flavell was one of the first psychologists to study the ways in which children think about their thinking processes and the …
John Locke was born on August 29, 1632, in Wrington, in Somerset, where his mother's family resided. She died during his infancy, and Locke was raised by his father, who was an attorney in the small town of Pensford near Bristol. John was tutored at home because of his always-delicate health and the outbreak of civil war in 1642. When he was 14, he entered Westminster School, where he remai…
Josef Breuer made the crucial observations upon which early psychoanalytic theory was based. He discovered that neuroses could arise from unconscious processes and, furthermore, that the neurotic symptoms could disappear when these underlying causes became part of the conscious mind. He communicated these findings to Sigmund Freud and the two men entered into a collaboration. Breuer emphasized hyp…
Joseph Wolpe's groundbreaking work as a behaviorist was grounded in his belief that behavior therapy was as much an applied science as any other aspect of medicine. He is probably best known for his work in the areas of desensitization and assertiveness training, both of which have become important elements of behavioral therapy. He was born on April 20, 1915 in Johannesburg, South Africa, …
Julian B. Rotter was born in Brooklyn, New York. His parents were Jewish immigrants, and he was their third son. His father operated a profitable business until it ran into trouble during the Great Depression. The economic downturn greatly affected Rotter and his family, and made him realize how strongly people are affected by their environments. In high school, Rotter's interest in psychol…
Karen Horney (Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced with permission.) Karen Horney was born in Hamburg, Germany, and educated at the University of Berlin and the University of Freiberg. She emigrated to the United States in 1932, after having taught for two years at the Berlin Institute of Psychoanalysis. From 1932-34, she was assistant director of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis; she then l…
Karl Spencer Lashley was born at Davis, West Virginia, on June 7, 1890. Even as a child he was interested in animals, an interest which continued throughout his adult life. His mother, Maggie Lashley, encouraged him in intellectual pursuits. After studying at the University of West Virginia and then taking a master's degree in bacteriology at the University of Pittsburgh, Lashley did doctor…
Many psychologists have made history within their profession; few, however, have had an impact on the laws of a nation. Such was the case with Kenneth Bancroft Clark, whose work the Supreme Court cited in its historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling. In the 1954 case, which overturned racial segregation in public schools, the Court referred to a 1950 paper by Clark, and described him as a �…
Kenneth Wartinbee Spence was known for his theoretical and experimental studies of conditioning and learning. His analyses and interpretations of the theories of other psychologists also were very influential. Spence was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1954 and was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association (APA). T…
Konrad Lorenz played a lead role in forging the field of ethology, the comparative study of animal behavior, and helped regain the stature of observation as a recognized and respected scientific method. Along the way, his observations—particularly of greylag geese —led to important discoveries in animal behavior. Perhaps his most influential determination was that behavior, like phys…
Working with Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler, Kurt Koffka helped establish the theories of Gestalt psychology. It was Koffka who promoted this new psychology in Europe and introduced it to the United States. He was responsible for systematizing Gestalt psychology into a coherent body of theories. He extended Gestalt theories to developmental psychology, and his ideas about perception, in…
Kurt Lewin was born in Mogilno, Prussia, on September 9, 1899. He studied at the universities of Freiburg and Munich and completed his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1914. He taught in Berlin from 1921 until the advent of Hitler to power in 1933, when he emigrated to the United States. He was visiting professor at Stanford and at Cornell before receiving an appointment as professor of ch…
The milestones of child language development— the onset of babbling, first words, first sentences—are quite variable across individuals in a culture, despite the universal similarity in the general ages of their development. In one study of 32 normally developing children at 13 months, the average number of words reported by parents was 12, but the range was 0 to 45. The two-word-sen…
Lawrence Kohlberg was born in Bronxville, New York, and received his B.A. (1948) and Ph.D. (1958) from the University of Chicago. He served as an assistant professor at Yale University from 1959 to 1961 and was a fellow of the Center of Advanced Study of Behavioral Science in 1962. Kohlberg began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1963, where he remained until his 1967 appointment to the fac…
Many people know that cigarettes cause cancer and other diseases, but nonetheless continue to smoke. This is an example of what Leon Festinger called cognitive dissonance—the idea that when conflict arises in one's belief system, the resulting tension must be eliminated. People going through cognitive dissonance will find some rationale for whatever is causing the conflict, or they m…
Terman was born in Indiana and attended Indiana University and Clark University. He served on the faculty of Stanford University as professor of education Lewis Terman (Archives of the History of American Psychology. Reproduced with permission.) and as professor of psychology. In 1916, Terman published the first important individual intelligence test to be used in the United States, the Sta…
Margaret Floy Washburn was the first woman ever to receive a doctorate in psychology and the second woman to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1931), the most eminent scientific society in the United States. The only child of Francis Washburn and Elizabeth Floy Davis, Washburn was raised in a middle class home in New York. The women in her family were exceptional and attained high le…
Margaret Mead was born in Philadelphia to a family of educators. In her youth, her main influences were her mother and maternal grandmother, both of whom had raised families and also pursued careers. Mead's formal education before entering college was sporadic, and she was mainly educated at home by her grandmother. An unhappy year at DePauw University turned Mead against coeducation, and s…
Margaret Naumburg was not a psychologist, but her work as an educator and as a therapist influenced twentieth century ideas about creativity and mental illness. Her work with children and with the mentally ill was widely studied by psychologists and psychiatrists. She was able to achieve all this despite her lack of training as a scientist. Naumburg was born in New York on May 14, 1890. She attend…
Maria Montessori is best known for the progressive method of education that bears her name. She earned her medical degree from the University of Rome in 1894, the first Italian woman to do so. A psychiatrist by training, Montessorri worked with deprived and retarded children at the Orthophrenic School in Rome starting in 1899. Her observations of the educational challenges facing these children le…
Mary D. Satler Ainsworth graduated from the University of Toronto in 1935 and earned her Ph.D. in psychology from that same institution in 1939. She is best known for her landmark work in assessing the security of infant attachment and linking attachment security to aspects of maternal care giving. Ainsworth began her career teaching at the University of Toronto before joining the Canadian Women&#…
The eldest of five children born to Reverend Wolcott Calkins, a strong-willed, intellectually gifted evangelical minister, and Charlotte Grosvenor Whiton, a daughter of an established New England Puritan family, Mary Whiton Calkins grew up in a close-knit family that valued education. As her mother's mental and physical health began to deteriorate, Calkins took on increased responsibilities…
Max Wertheimer was born in Prague on April 15,1880. At the University in Prague he first studied law and then philosophy; he continued his studies in Berlin Max Wertheimer (Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced with permission.) and then in Würzburg, where he received his doctorate in 1904. During the following years, his work included research on the psychology of testimony, deriving no doubt…
The idea of combining psychology and philosophy may seem to run counter to the idea of psychology as a science. But psychology is a science of the mind, and the releationship between the mind and ideas is critically important to psychological study. Medard Boss, trained as a physician, used his knowledge of philosophy to help humanize psychology. He spent his career developing the concept he calle…
As the first woman to earn a Ph.D. from the University of California, Milicent Shinn is credited today for her outstanding early American study, "Notes on the Development of a Child." First published in 1898 as a doctoral dissertation, this work is still hailed as a masterpiece and a classic in its field. A native Californian, Shinn was born in 1858 to parents who emigrated from the …
Murray Bowen grew up in a small town that he believed gave him the foundation for his theories on family therapy. To Bowen, the family was an emotional unit; although it was made up of individuals who had their own thoughts and needs, much of how they behaved was the result of how they functioned as part of the family. Bowen, the oldest of five children, was born in Waverly, Tennessee, on January …
Nancy Bayley was a pioneer in the field of human development. She devoted her life to documenting and measuring intellectual and motor development in infants, children, and adults. Her studies of the rates of physical and mental maturation have greatly influenced our understanding of developmental processes. Her "Bayley Scales of Mental and Motor Development" are used throughout the …
Nathan Ward Ackerman was born in Bessarabia, Russia on November 22, 1908. His parents were pharmacist David Ackerman and Bertha (Greenberg) Ackerman. They came to the United States in 1912, and were naturalized in 1920. He was married to Gwendolyn Hill on October 10, 1937. They had two daughters, Jeanne and Deborah. Ackerman attended a public school in New York City. In 1929 he was awarded a B.A. …
Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia and educated at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received his B.A. (1949), M.A. (1951), and Ph.D. (1955). In 1955, he was appointed to the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he has served as professor of foreign languages and linguistics. He has also taught courses and lectured at many universities throughout the world, i…
Otto Rank was Sigmund Freud's closest collaborator for 20 years. Later, he strongly influenced the development of psychotherapy in the United States. He was the first psychoanalyst to examine mother-child relationships, including separation anxiety. He also was one of the first to practice a briefer form of psychotherapy, called "active therapy." His work, in contrast to ortho…
Paul Everett Meehl, born on January 3, 1920, is a renowned expert in various aspects of clinical psychology. He earned his A.B. from the University of Minnesota in 1941, where he remained throughout his entire professional career. In 1945 he was awarded his doctorate from the same institution. His career as a faculty member at Minnesota has included his position as chair of the Department of Psych…
Philippe Pinel was born near Toulouse, France, the son of a surgeon. After first studying literature and theology, he pursued medical studies at the University of Toulouse, receiving his M.D. in 1773. In 1778, Pinel moved to Paris, where he worked as a publisher, translator of scientific writings, and teacher of mathematics. He also wrote and published articles, a number of them about mental disor…
Born in Paris on May 28, 1859, Pierre Janet spent his childhood and youth in that city. His bent for natural sciences led him to pursue studies in physiology at the Sorbonne at the same time that he was studying philosophy, for which he received a master's degree in 1882. Janet then left Paris for Le Havre and for seven years taught philosophy there in the lycée. Janet, however, want…
Pierre Paul Broca, the son of a Huguenot doctor, was born near Bordeaux, France, in 1824. After studying mathematics and physical science at the local university, he entered medical school at the University of Paris in 1841. He received his M.D. in 1849. Though trained as a pathologist, anatomist, and surgeon, Broca's interests were not limited to the medical profession. His versatility and…
Raymond B. Cattell was one of psychology's most prolific scholars. In a career spanning over half a century he wrote more than 50 books and 500 research articles, and his contributions to personality and intelligence testing are widely regarded as invaluable. Yet some of his theories about natural selection, particularly as put forth in a philosophy known as Beyondism, were attacked as raci…
Descartes was born in France, near the small village of Le Haye. From the age of 10, he attended the most prestigious school in France, the Royal Collège of La Flèche, graduating at the age of 16. After spending some time sampling the amusements of Parisian society, followed by a period of solitary studies in philosophy and mathematics, Descartes briefly served as a soldier on the ev…
Robert Aubrey Hinde has played an important role in integrating ethology (the scientific study of typical behavior patterns in animals) with other fields, such as psychology. He was born in 1923 in Norwich, England. The youngest of four children, Hinde's father, Ernest Bertram, was a doctor, and his mother Isabella (maiden name Taylor) was a nurse. He got much of his early education at an E…
Robert J. Sternberg was born in December 1949 in Newark, New Jersey. As a child growing up in Maple-wood, New Jersey, Sternberg suffered from a problem common to many children. An otherwise bright student, he suffered such severe anxiety when taking IQ tests that he consistently scored low. His active brain was evident when he discovered as a sixth grader re-taking a test among fifth graders that …
Psychiatrist and author Robert Coles pioneered the use of oral history as a method of studying children. His Robert Coles (AP/Wide World Photos, Inc. Reproduced with permission.) five-volume series of books called Children in Crisis, published from 1967-1978, won a Pulitzer Prize in recognition of its wide-ranging examination of children throughout the world and how they cope with war, pove…
Robert Yerkes was born in Pennsylvania, and was educated at Harvard University, where he received his doctorate in psychology in 1902. He served as professor of psychology at Harvard, the University of Minnesota, and Yale University, and as a member of the National Research Council. In 1919, Yerkes founded the Yale Laboratories of Primate Biology and served as its director from 1929 to 1941, when …
Rollo May was one of the most influential American psychologists of the twentieth century. He helped to introduce European existential psychoanalysis to an American audience. He was a founder of humanistic psychology, with its focus on the individual, as opposed to the behaviorist psychology and Freudian psychoanalysis that was prevalent in the 1940s and 1950s. May's writings were both prac…
Ronald David Laing, or R.D., as he was invariably known, developed the theory that mental illness was an escape mechanism that allowed individuals to free themselves from intolerable circumstances. As a revolutionary thinker, he questioned the controls that were imposed on the individual by family, state, and society. Rejecting a physiological basis for diseases such as schizophrenia, Laing argued…
The eldest of three children born to the children of Russian-Jewish immigrants, Salvador Minuchin was born and raised in a closely knit small Jewish community in rural Argentina. His father had been a prosperous businessman until the Great Depression forced his family into poverty. In high school he decided he would help juvenile delinquents after hearing his psychology teacher discuss the philoso…
Sigmund Freud was born in Moravia. When he was three years old, his family moved to Vienna, the city where he was to live until the last year of his life. At the age of 17, Freud entered the University of Vienna's medical school, where he pursued a variety of research interests. Although primarily interested in physiological research, Freud was forced to enter into clinical practice due to …
Born in Birmingham, England, Francis Galton was descended from founders of the Quaker religion. He learned to read before the age of three and became competent in Latin and mathematics by age five. Nevertheless, Galton's formal education was unsuccessful. A rebellious student, he left school at the age of 16 to receive medical training at hospitals in Birmingham and London. Entering Cambrid…
Stanley Milgram carried out influential and controversial experiments that demonstrated that blind obedience to authority could override moral conscience. His early studies on conformity were the first experiments to compare behavioral differences between people from different parts of the world. Milgram also examined the effects of television violence, studied whether New York City subway riders …
Like Dr. Benjamin Spock (1903-) before him, T. Berry Brazelton has earned a nationwide reputation as a trusted expert on child care, reaching a mass audience through books, personal appearances, newspaper columns, videos, and a cable-TV program. His research on infant behavior and development led him to formulate the Neonatal Behavioral Assessment Scale (NBAS), a series of clinical tests used in h…
Born March 26, 1905, in Vienna, Austria-Hungary (present-day Austria); died September 2, 1997, in Vienna, Viktor Frankl (DIZ Munchen GmbH. Reproduced with permission.) Austria, of heart failure. Viktor E. Frankl, a Jewish psychiatrist and author, drew on his experiences as a survivor of the Holocaust (Nazi Germany's campaign to exterminate the Jewish population of Europe during World…
In collaboration with Dr. William Howell Masters, psychologist and sex therapist Virginia E. Johnson pioneered the study of human sexuality under laboratory conditions. She and Masters published the results of their study as a book entitled Human Sexual Response in 1966, causing an immediate sensation. As part of her work at the Reproductive Biology Research Foundation in St. Louis and later at th…
Although Virginia Satir devoted her career to family therapy, she believed strongly in focusing on the self-worth of individuals. The family unit might be critically important, she felt, but the self-esteem of each member of the family had to come from within each person. Because of her studies, her experience based on working with thousands of families, and her instinctive understanding of family…
Once considered among the most influential of twentieth-century intellectuals, Waldo Frank is now largely forgotten. This is not for lack of writings; Frank Waldo Frank (AP/Wide World Photos. Reproduced with permission.) wrote 14 novels, 18 volumes of social history, and numerous articles for literary and political magazines. During the 1920s, Frank was part of an artistic circle that inclu…
Wilder G. Penfield and his wife. (The Library of Congress. Reproduced with permission.) Wilder Graves Penfield was born in Spokane, Washington, on January 26, 1891. He was one of three children born to Charles Samuel and Jean (Jefferson) Penfield. His father was a physician and died when Penfield was very young. To support herself and her family, Penfield's mother became a writer and…
Wilhelm Wundt was born on August 16, 1832, in Baden, in a suburb of Mannheim called Neckarau. As a child, he was tutored by Friedrich Müller. Wundt attended the Gymnasium at Bruschel and at Heidelberg, the University of Tübingen for a year, then Heidelberg for more than three years, receiving a medical degree in 1856. He remained at Heidelberg as a lecturer in physiology from 1857 to…
Although Wilhelm Reich is remembered primarily for his legal battle with the United States Food and Drug Administration (FDA) over their outlawing of his "orgone energy accumulator," his earlier works were influential in the development of psychoanalysis. In The Function of the Orgasm, published in German in 1927 and in English in 1942, Reich placed the drive for sexual fulfillment a…
William Herbert Sheldon developed "constitutional psychology," the study of the relationships between physical attributes and personality traits. To describe physical build, Sheldon studied thousands of photographs and developed a rating system for three major components or somatotypes—endomorphy, mesomorphy, and ectomorphy—and three secondary components. Likewise, he d…
William James was born in New York City to a wealthy, educated family that included the future novelist, Henry James, his younger brother. The family traveled extensively in Europe and America in James's youth. James studied chemistry, physiology, and medicine at Harvard College, but was unable to settle on a career, his indecision intensified by physical ailments and depression. In 1872, a…
William Masters was born in Cleveland, Ohio, grew up in Kansas City, and did his undergraduate work at Hamilton College. He received his M.D. degree in 1943 from the University of Rochester School of Medicine, where he assisted in the laboratory research of George Washington Corner, who was studying and comparing the reproductive systems of animals and humans. Masters's interest in the stud…
William McDougall was an experimental psychologist and theorist of wide-ranging interests. Above all, he believed in a holistic psychology that utilized every available tool for understanding the human psyche. He was the first to formulate a theory of human instinctual behavior, and he influenced the development of the new field of social psychology. Born in 1871, in Lancashire, England, the secon…
Wolfgang Köhler was born in Revel, Estonia, and grew up in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. He studied at the universities of Bonn and Tübingen, and at the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he received his Ph.D. in 1909, writing a dissertation on psychoacoustics under the direction of Carl Stumpf (1848-1936). In 1910, Köhler began a long professional association with …