Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 09 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1940 – Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, American psychoanalyst and theorist (d. 2010).

People (Deaths)

  • 1985 – Jimmy Kinnon, Scottish-American activist, founded Narcotics Anonymous (b. 1911).

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein

Eugene Victor Wolfenstein (09 July 1940 to 15 December 2010) was an American social theorist, practicing psychoanalyst, and a professor of political science at University of California, Los Angeles.

Wolfenstein graduated with his Bachelor of Arts magna cum laude from Columbia College in 1962. He was a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

Wolfenstein received his Master of Arts in political science in 1964 and his Ph.D. in political science in 1965 from Princeton University. Wolfenstein became a professor of political science at UCLA.

He also completed a Ph.D. in psychoanalysis from the Southern California Psychoanalytic Institute in 1984. He was the member of the faculty of the institute from 1988 to 2004. Moreover, he was in private practice from the time he received his degree up to the time of his death.

Jimmy Kinnon

Jimmy kinnon (05 April 1911 to 09 July 1985), commonly known as Jimmy Kinnon or “Jimmy K.”, was the primary founder of Narcotics Anonymous (NA), a worldwide fellowship of recovering addicts.

During his lifetime, he was usually referred to as “Jimmy K.” due to NA’s principle of personal anonymity on the public level. He never referred to himself as the founder of NA, although the record clearly shows that he played a founding role.

Narcotics Anonymous

Narcotics Anonymous (NA), founded in 1953, describes itself as a “nonprofit fellowship or society of men and women for whom drugs had become a major problem.” Narcotics Anonymous uses a 12-step model developed for people with varied substance use disorders and is the second-largest 12-step organization.

As of May 2018 there were more than 70,000 NA meetings in 144 countries.

On This Day … 08 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1857 – Alfred Binet, French psychologist and graphologist (d. 1911).
  • 1921 – John Money, New Zealand psychologist and sexologist, known for his research on gender identity, and responsible for controversial involuntary sex reassignment of David Reimer (d. 2006).
  • 1926 – Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, Swiss-American psychiatrist and author (d. 2004).

People (Deaths)

  • 1939 – Havelock Ellis, English psychologist and author (b. 1859).

Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet (08 July 1857 to 18 October 1911), born Alfredo Binetti, was a French psychologist who invented the first practical IQ test, the Binet–Simon test.

In 1904, the French Ministry of Education asked psychologist Alfred Binet to devise a method that would determine which students did not learn effectively from regular classroom instruction so they could be given remedial work. Along with his collaborator Théodore Simon, Binet published revisions of his test in 1908 and 1911, the last of which appeared just before his death.

John Money

John William Money (08 July 1921 to 07 July 2006) was a New Zealand psychologist, sexologist and author known for his research into sexual identity and biology of gender.

He was controversial for his conduct towards vulnerable patients. He was one of the first researchers to publish theories on the influence of societal constructs of gender on individual formation of gender identity. Money introduced the terms gender identity, gender role and sexual orientation and popularised the term paraphilia. He spent a considerable amount of his career in the United States.

A 1997 academic study criticized Money’s work in many respects, particularly in regard to the involuntary sex-reassignment of the child David Reimer.

Money’s writing has been translated into many languages and includes around 2,000 articles, books, chapters and reviews. He received around 65 honours, awards and degrees in his lifetime. He was also a patron of many famous New Zealand artists, such as Rita Angus and Theo Schoon.

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (08 July 1926 to 24 August 2004) was a Swiss-American psychiatrist, a pioneer in near-death studies, and author of the internationally best-selling book, On Death and Dying (1969), where she first discussed her theory of the five stages of grief, also known as the “Kübler-Ross model”.

Kübler-Ross was a 2007 inductee into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, was named by Time as one of the “100 Most Important Thinkers” of the 20th century and was the recipient of nineteen honorary degrees. By July 1982, Kübler-Ross taught 125,000 students in death and dying courses in colleges, seminaries, medical schools, hospitals, and social-work institutions. In 1970, she delivered an Ingersoll Lecture at Harvard University on the theme On Death and Dying.

Havelock Ellis

Henry Havelock Ellis (02 February 1859 to 08 July 1939) was an English physician, eugenicist, writer, progressive intellectual and social reformer who studied human sexuality. He co-wrote the first medical textbook in English on homosexuality in 1897, and also published works on a variety of sexual practices and inclinations, as well as on transgender psychology. He is credited with introducing the notions of narcissism and autoeroticism, later adopted by psychoanalysis.

Ellis was among the pioneering investigators of psychedelic drugs and the author of one of the first written reports to the public about an experience with mescaline, which he conducted on himself in 1896. He supported eugenics and served as one of 16 vice-presidents of the Eugenics Society from 1909 to 1912.

On This Day … 07 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1924 – Natalia Bekhtereva, Russian neuroscientist and psychologist (died 2008).

People (Deaths)

  • 2006 – John Money, New Zealand-American psychologist and author (born 1921).

Natalia Bekhtereva

Natalia Petrovna Bekhtereva (Russian: Ната́лья Петро́вна Бе́хтерева; 07 July 1924 to 22 June 2008) was a Soviet and Russian neuroscientist and psychologist who developed neurophysiological approaches to psychology, such as measuring the impulse activity of human neurons.

She was a participant in the documentary films The Call of the Abyss (Russian: Зов бездны) and Storm of Consciousness (Russian: Штурм сознания), which aroused wide public interest. Candidate of Biological Sciences, Doctor of Medicine, Full Professor.

John Money

John William Money (08 July 1921 to 07 July 2006) was a New Zealand psychologist, sexologist and author known for his research into sexual identity and biology of gender.

He was controversial for his conduct towards vulnerable patients. He was one of the first researchers to publish theories on the influence of societal constructs of gender on individual formation of gender identity. Money introduced the terms gender identity, gender role and sexual orientation and popularised the term paraphilia. He spent a considerable amount of his career in the United States.

A 1997 academic study criticised Money’s work in many respects, particularly in regard to the involuntary sex-reassignment of the child David Reimer.

Money’s writing has been translated into many languages and includes around 2,000 articles, books, chapters and reviews. He received around 65 honours, awards and degrees in his lifetime. He was also a patron of many famous New Zealand artists, such as Rita Angus and Theo Schoon.

On This Day … 05 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1929 – Jovan Rašković, Serbian psychiatrist, academic, and politician (d. 1992).

Jovan Raskovic

Jovan Rašković (05 July 1929 to 28 July 1992) was a Croatian Serb psychiatrist, academic and politician.

Rašković was born in Knin in 1929. During World War II, after an Ustasha pogrom which resulted in the deaths of his relatives, he was exiled to Kistanje in Italian-occupied Dalmatia. He passed his secondary school exams in Šibenik, and graduated in Zagreb. He then studied electrical engineering and medicine at the University of Zagreb, where he obtained his diploma and a PhD from the university’s medical school.

In the 1960s, he served as director of Šibenik city hospital and later director of the medical centre. He was one of the founders of the Medical Research Institute of Neurophysiology in Ljubljana. Rašković was a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, the Academy of Medical Sciences of Croatia and a number of psychiatry associations in the United States, Czechoslovakia and Italy. He was a university professor in Zagreb and Ljubljana and a visiting professor at the Universities of Pavia, Rome, Houston and London.

In February 1990, Rašković went into politics and founded and led the Serbian Democratic Party (SDS), which took part in the first Croatian democratic elections. He noticed that there was no equivalent party in Bosnia and Herzegovina so he contacted Radovan Karadžić, a colleague, to suggest for him to establish one.

Although the SDS won relatively few seats in the 1990 elections, it quickly began to increase its power, and Rašković was soon perceived as a leader of Serbs by Franjo Tuđman and his new government. That led to direct negotiations between the two about the future of Serbs in Croatia. During one meeting, Rašković remarked, “Serbs were crazy people”. Tuđman’s chief political advisor, Slaven Letica, had the words secretly taped and leaked the transcript to Croatian media to discredit Rašković among his people and then replace him with someone more acceptable to Croatian government. That backfired, as instead of rejecting Rašković, many Serbs lost any trust in Croatian government and embraced extremism and then armed conflict.

Later in 1990, Rašković was removed from power by “more radical, hard-line Serb nationalists”, who went on to create the Republic of Serbian Krajina. Rašković retired from politics in 1991, after the Plitvice Lakes incident.

Rašković died in Belgrade from a heart attack on 28 July 1992 at the age of 63. He is interred in the Alley of Distinguished Citizens in the Belgrade New Cemetery.

Streets in Trebinje, Prijedor, Banja Luka and Novi Banovci are named in his honour.

On This Day … 01 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1818 – Karl von Vierordt, German physician, psychologist and academic (d. 1884).
  • 1917 – Humphry Osmond, English-American lieutenant and psychiatrist (d. 2004).

Karl von Vierordt

Karl von Vierordt (01 July 1818 to 22 November 1884) was a German physiologist.

Vierordt was born in Lahr, Baden. He studied at the universities of Berlin, Göttingen, Vienna, and Heidelberg, and began a practice in Karlsruhe in 1842. In 1849 he became a professor of theoretical medicine at the University of Tübingen, and in 1853 a professor of physiology.

Vierordt developed techniques and tools for the monitoring of blood circulation. He is credited with the construction of an early “hemotachometer”, an apparatus for monitoring the velocity of blood flow. In 1854, he created a device called a sphygmograph, a mechanism consisting of weights and levers used to estimate blood pressure, and considered to be a forerunner of the modern sphygmomanometer. One of his better known written works was a treatise on the arterial pulse, titled Die Lehre vom Arterienpuls in gesunden und kranken Zuständen.

Vierordt also made substantial contributions to the psychology of time perception, via his book (published in 1868) Der Zeitsinn nach Versuchen, “The experimental study of the time sense”. This reported a large number of experiments on the perception of duration, with the time sense being considered a “general sense” along with the perception of space, in contrast to the “special senses” such as vision and hearing. Included in this book is discussion of, and evidence for, what has come to be known as Vierordt’s Law: roughly the proposition that short durations tend to be overestimated, while long durations tend to be underestimated.

Between these two extremes is a “point of indifference” where the “time sensation”, in Vierordt’s terminology, corresponds exactly to physical time. However, the 1868 book does much more than report this “law” and contains extensive discussions of different methods used to measure duration perception, as well as different sorts of errors that can occur.

Although Vierordt was not the first person to carry out experiments on time perception, his 1868 book involved much more extensive experimentation and discussion than had been carried out until then.

He died in Tübingen, aged 66.

Humphry Osmond

Humphry Fortescue Osmond (01 July 1917 to 06 February 2004) was an English psychiatrist who expatriated to Canada, then moved to work in the United States. He is known for inventing the word psychedelic and for his research into interesting and useful applications for psychedelic drugs. Osmond also explored aspects of the psychology of social environments, in particular how they influenced welfare or recovery in mental institutions.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karl_von_Vierordt >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

On This Day … 30 June [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1791 – Félix Savart, French physicist and psychologist (d. 1841).

Felix Savart

Félix Savart (30 June 1791 to 16 March 1841, Paris) was a French physicist and mathematician who is primarily known for the Biot–Savart law of electromagnetism, which he discovered together with his colleague Jean-Baptiste Biot.

His main interest was in acoustics and the study of vibrating bodies. A particular interest in the violin led him to create an experimental trapezoidal model. He gave his name to the savart, a unit of measurement for musical intervals, and to Savart’s wheel – a device he used while investigating the range of human hearing.

On This Day … 28 June [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1948 – Daniel Wegner, Canadian-American psychologist and academic (d. 2013).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Richard Isay, American psychiatrist and author (b. 1934).

Daniel Wegner

Daniel Merton Wegner (28 June 1948 to 05 July 2013) was an American social psychologist.

He was a professor of psychology at Harvard University and a fellow of both the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was known for applying experimental psychology to the topics of mental control (for example ironic process theory) and conscious will, and for originating the study of transactive memory and action identification. In The Illusion of Conscious Will and other works, he argued that the human sense of free will is an illusion.

Richard Isay

Richard A. Isay (13 December 1934 to 28 June 2012) was an American psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, author and gay activist.

He was a professor of psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and a faculty member of the Columbia University Centre for Psychoanalytic Training and Research. Isay is considered a pioneer who changed the way that psychoanalysts view homosexuality.

On This Day … 26 June [2022]

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People (Births)

Virginia Satir

Virginia Satir (26 June 1916 to 10 September 1988) was an American author and psychotherapist, recognised for her approach to family therapy. Her pioneering work in the field of family reconstruction therapy honoured her with the title “Mother of Family Therapy”. Her most well-known books are Conjoint Family Therapy, 1964, Peoplemaking, 1972, and The New Peoplemaking, 1988.

She is also known for creating the Virginia Satir Change Process Model, a psychological model developed through clinical studies. Change management and organisational gurus of the 1990s and 2000s embrace this model to define how change impacts organisations.

On This Day .. 24 June [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1941 – Julia Kristeva, Bulgarian-French psychoanalyst and author.

Julia Kristeva

Julia Kristeva (born Yuliya Stoyanova Krasteva, Bulgarian: Юлия Стоянова Кръстева; on 24 June 1941) is a Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, semiotician, psychoanalyst, feminist, and, most recently, novelist, who has lived in France since the mid-1960s.

She is now a professor emerita at the University Paris Diderot. The author of more than 30 books, including Powers of Horror, Tales of Love, Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia, Proust and the Sense of Time, and the trilogy Female Genius, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honour, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg International Memorial Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize, and the Vision 97 Foundation Prize, awarded by the Havel Foundation.

Kristeva became influential in international critical analysis, cultural studies and feminism after publishing her first book, Semeiotikè, in 1969. Her sizeable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history. She is prominent in structuralist and poststructuralist thought.

Kristeva is also the founder of the Simone de Beauvoir Prize committee.

On This Day … 23 June [2022]

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People (Births)

Ellyn Kaschak

Ellyn Kaschak (born 23 June 1943), is an American clinical psychology, Professor of Psychology at San Jose State University.

She is one of the founders of the field of feminist psychology, which she has practiced and taught since 1972. Her many publications, including Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women’s Experience (Kaschak, 1993), and Sight Unseen: Gender and Race through Blind Eyes (Kaschak, 2015), have helped define the field. She was the editor of the academic journal, Women & Therapy for twenty years.