Category: Mental Health History

On This Day … 01 January

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People (Deaths)

  • 2020 – Elmira Minita Gordon, Belizean educator and psychologist (b.1930).

Elmira Minita Gordon

Dame Elmira Minita Gordon GCMG GCVO JP (30 December 1930 to 01 January 2021) was a Belizean educator, psychologist and politician; she served as the first governor general of Belize from its independence in 1981 until 1993.

She was the first Belizean to receive a doctorate in psychology. She is one of the few “double dames”, having received damehoods in two separate orders: the Order of St Michael and St George and the Royal Victorian Order.

On This Day … 30 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 2002 – Eleanor J. Gibson, American psychologist and academic (b. 1910).

Eleanor J. Gibson

Eleanor Jack Gibson (7 December 1910 to 30 December 2002) was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants.

Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments.

Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the “visual cliff,” which studied depth perception in both human and animal species, leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the National Academy of Education in 1972, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science.

On This Day … 29 December

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People (Births)

  • 1955 – Donald D. Hoffman, American quantitative psychologist and popular science writer.

Donald D. Hoffman

Donald David Hoffman (born 29 December 1955) is an American cognitive psychologist and popular science author. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, with joint appointments in the Department of Philosophy, the Department of Logic and Philosophy of Science, and the School of Computer Science.

Hoffman studies consciousness, visual perception and evolutionary psychology using mathematical models and psychophysical experiments. His research subjects include facial attractiveness, the recognition of shape, the perception of motion and colour, the evolution of perception, and the mind-body problem. He has co-authored two technical books: Observer Mechanics: A Formal Theory of Perception (1989) offers a theory of consciousness and its relationship to physics; Automotive Lighting and Human Vision (2005) applies vision science to vehicle lighting. His book Visual Intelligence: How We Create What We See (1998) presents the modern science of visual perception to a broad audience. His 2015 TED Talk, “Do we see reality as it is?” explains how our perceptions have evolved to hide reality from us.

On This Day … 25 December

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People (Births)

  • 1875 – Francis Aveling, Canadian psychologist and priest (d. 1941).

People (Deaths)

  • 1925 – Karl Abraham, German psychoanalyst and author (b. 1877).

Francis Aveling

Francis Arthur Powell Aveling MC ComC (25 December 1875 to 06 March 1941) was a Canadian psychologist and Catholic priest. He married Ethel Dancy of Steyning, Sussex in 1925.

Life

Francis Aveling was born at St. Catharines, Ontario 25 December 1875. He went to Bishop Ridley College in Ontario and McGill University before studying at Keble College at the University of Oxford, England. Aveling was received into the Roman Catholic Church by Father Luke Rivington in 1896 and entered the Pontificio Collegio Canadese in Rome. There he earned his doctor of divinity degree. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1899, and served as a curate in Tottenham, before becoming first rector of Westminster Cathedral Choir School. He was also a chaplain at the Cathedral, and to St. Wilfrid’s Convent, Chelsea.

In 1910, Aveling obtained a doctor of philosophy degree at the age of 35 from the University of Louvain (his advisor was Albert Michotte), and in 1912 he was recipient of a doctor of science degree from the University of London, and received the Carpenter Medal following his work On the Consciousness of the Universal and the Individual: A Contribution to the Phenomenology of the Thought Process. Subsequently, Aveling received his doctor of letters degree from the University of London.

Career

Aveling taught at University College, London from 1912 as a Lecturer (Assistant Professor), under the leadership of Charles Spearman, until the First World War. During that war he served in France as a chaplain in the British Army, after which he returned to the University of London. In 1922, he transferred to King’s College, London where he was promoted to reader (associate professor), and later to professor of psychology. He was an extern examiner in philosophy at the National University of Ireland; and a lecturer in pedagogical methods for the London County Council.

Aveling authored several books. He was the doctoral advisor of Raymond Cattell From 1926 until 1929, Aveling was also a president of the British Psychological Society. Aveling was a member of the Council of the International Congresses, of the Aristotelian Society, of the council and advisory board of the National Institute of Industrial Psychology, of the council of the British Institute of Philosophical Studies and of the Child Guidance Council.

He was a contributor to the Dublin Review, The American Catholic Quarterly Review, Catholic World, The nineteenth Century, The Journal of Psychology, and the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

Karl Abraham

Karl Abraham (03 May 1877 to 25 December 1925) was an influential German psychoanalyst, and a collaborator of Sigmund Freud, who called him his ‘best pupil’.

Abraham was born in Bremen, Germany. His parents were Nathan Abraham, a Jewish religion teacher (1842-1915), and his wife (and cousin) Ida (1847-1929). His studies in medicine enabled him to take a position at the Burghölzli Swiss Mental Hospital, where Eugen Bleuler practiced. The setting of this hospital initially introduced him to the psychoanalysis of Carl Gustav Jung.

In 1907, he had his first contact with Sigmund Freud, with whom he developed a lifetime relationship. Returning to Germany, he founded the Berliner Society of Psychoanalysis in 1910. He was the president of the International Psychoanalytical Association from 1914 to 1918 and again in 1925.

Karl Abraham collaborated with Freud on the understanding of manic-depressive illness, leading to Freud’s paper on ‘Mourning and Melancholia’ in 1917. He was the analyst of Melanie Klein during the years 1924-1925, and of a number of other British psychoanalysts, including Edward Glover and Alix Strachey. He was a mentor for an influential group of German analysts, including Karen Horney, Helene Deutsch, and Franz Alexander.

Karl Abraham studied the role of infant sexuality in character development and mental illness and, like Freud, suggested that if psychosexual development is fixated at some point, mental disorders will likely emerge. He described the personality traits and psychopathology that result from the oral and anal stages of development (1921).

Abraham observed his only daughter, Hilda, reporting on her reaction to enemas and infantile masturbation by her brother. He asked that secrets be shared with him but he was careful to respect her privacy and some reports were not published until after Hilda’s death. Hilda was later to become a psychoanalyst.

In the oral stage of development, the first relationships children have with objects (caretakers) determine their subsequent relationship to reality. Oral satisfaction can result in self-assurance and optimism, whereas oral fixation can lead to pessimism and depression. Moreover, a person with an oral fixation will present a disinclination to take care of him/herself and will require others to look after him/her. This may be expressed through extreme passivity (corresponding to the oral benign suckling substage) or through a highly active oral-sadistic behaviour (corresponding to the later sadistic biting substage).

In the anal stage, when the training in cleanliness starts too early, conflicts may result between a conscious attitude of obedience and an unconscious desire for resistance. This can lead to traits such as frugality, orderliness and obstinacy, as well as to obsessional neurosis as a result of anal fixation (Abraham, 1921). In addition, Abraham based his understanding of manic-depressive illness on the study of the painter Segantini: an actual event of loss is not itself sufficient to bring the psychological disturbance involved in melancholic depression. This disturbance is linked with disappointing incidents of early childhood; in the case of men always with the mother (Abraham, 1911). This concept of the prooedipal “bad” mother was a new development in contrast to Freud’s oedipal mother and paved the way for the theories of Melanie Klein (May-Tolzmann, 1997).

Another important contribution is his work “A short study of the Development of the Libido”, where he elaborated on Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917) and demonstrated the vicissitudes of normal and pathological object relations and reactions to object loss.

Moreover, Abraham investigated child sexual trauma and, like Freud, proposed that sexual abuse was common among psychotic and neurotic patients. Furthermore, he argued (1907) that dementia praecox is associated with child sexual trauma, based on the relationship between hysteria and child sexual trauma demonstrated by Freud.

Abraham (1920) also showed interest in cultural issues. He analysed various myths suggesting their relation to dreams (1909) and wrote an interpretation of the spiritual activities of the Egyptian monotheistic Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (1912).

Abraham died prematurely on 25 December 1925, from complications of a lung infection and may have suffered from lung cancer.

On This Day … 22 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1902 – Richard von Krafft-Ebing, German-Austrian psychiatrist and author (b. 1840).

Richard von Kraft-Ebing

Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (full name Richard Fridolin Joseph Freiherr Krafft von Festenberg auf Frohnberg, genannt von Ebing; 1840-1902) was a German psychiatrist and author of the foundational work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886).

Krafft-Ebing was born in 1840 in Mannheim, Germany. He studied medicine at the University of Heidelberg, where he specialised in psychiatry. He later practiced in psychiatric asylums. After leaving his work in asylums, he pursued a career in psychiatry, forensics, and hypnosis.

He died in Graz in 1902. He was recognised as an authority on deviant sexual behaviour and its medicolegal aspects.

On This Day … 21 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1948 – Władysław Witwicki, Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist (b. 1878).

Wladyslaw Witwicki

Władysław Witwicki (30 April 1878 to 21 December 1948) was a Polish psychologist, philosopher, translator, historian (of philosophy and art) and artist. He is seen as one of the fathers of psychology in Poland.

Witwicki was also the creator of the theory of cratism, theory of feelings, and he dealt with the issues of the psychology of religion, and the creation of secular ethics. He was one of the initiators and co-founders of Polish Philosophical Society. He is one of the thinkers associated with the Lwów-Warsaw school.

On This Day … 20 December

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People (Births)

  • 1917 – David Bohm, American-English physicist, neuropsychologist, and philosopher (d. 1992).

People (Deaths)

  • 1984 – Stanley Milgram, American psychologist and academic (b. 1933).

David Bohm

David Joseph Bohm FRS (20 December 1917 to 27 October 1992) was an American-British scientist who has been described as one of the most significant theoretical physicists of the 20th century and who contributed unorthodox ideas to quantum theory, neuropsychology and the philosophy of mind.

Bohm advanced the view that quantum physics meant that the old Cartesian model of reality – that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, that somehow interact – was too limited. To complement it, he developed a mathematical and physical theory of “implicate” and “explicate” order. He also believed that the brain, at the cellular level, works according to the mathematics of some quantum effects, and postulated that thought is distributed and non-localised just as quantum entities are.

Bohm warned of the dangers of rampant reason and technology, advocating instead the need for genuine supportive dialogue, which he claimed could broaden and unify conflicting and troublesome divisions in the social world. In this, his epistemology mirrored his ontology. Due to his Communist affiliations, Bohm was the subject of a federal government investigation in 1949, prompting him to leave the United States. He pursued his scientific career in several countries, becoming first a Brazilian and then a British citizen. He abandoned Marxism in the wake of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956.

Bohm’s main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular as a coherent whole, which according to Bohm is never static or complete.

Stanley Milgrim

Stanley Milgram (15 August 1933 to 20 December 1984) was an American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.

Milgram was influenced by the events of the Holocaust, especially the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in developing the experiment. After earning a PhD in social psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Yale, Harvard, and then for most of his career as a professor at the City University of New York Graduate Centre, until his death in 1984.

His small-world experiment, while at Harvard, led researchers to analyse the degree of connectedness, including the six degrees of separation concept. Later in his career, Milgram developed a technique for creating interactive hybrid social agents (called cyranoids), which has since been used to explore aspects of social- and self-perception.

He is widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the history of social psychology. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Milgram as the 46th-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.

On This Day … 19 December

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People (Births)

  • 1925 – William Schutz, American psychologist and academic (d. 2002).

People (Deaths)

  • 1915 – Alois Alzheimer, German psychiatrist and neuropathologist (b. 1864).

William Schultz

William Schutz (19 December 1925 to 09 November 2002) was an American psychologist.

Schutz was born in Chicago, Illinois. He practiced at the Esalen Institute in the 1960s. He later became the president of BConWSA International. He received his Ph.D. from UCLA. In the 1950s, he was part of the peer-group at the University of Chicago’s Counselling Centre that included Carl Rogers, Thomas Gordon, Abraham Maslow and Elias Porter. He taught at Tufts University, Harvard University, University of California, Berkeley and the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and was chairman of the holistic studies department at Antioch University until 1983.

In 1958, Schutz introduced a theory of interpersonal relations he called Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation (FIRO). According to the theory three dimensions of interpersonal relations were deemed to be necessary and sufficient to explain most human interaction: Inclusion, Control and Affection. These dimensions have been used to assess group dynamics.

Schutz also created FIRO-B, a measurement instrument with scales that assess the behavioural aspects of the three dimensions. His advancement of FIRO Theory beyond the FIRO-B tool was most obvious in the change of the “Affection” scale to the “Openness” scale in the “FIRO Element-B”. This change highlighted his newer theory that behaviour comes from feelings (“FIRO Element-F”) and the self-concept (“FIRO Element-S”). “Underlying the behaviour of openness is the feeling of being likable or unlikeable, lovable or unlovable. I find you likable if I like myself in your presence, if you create an atmosphere within which I like myself.”

W. Schutz authored more than ten books and many articles. His work was influenced by Alexander Lowen, Ida Pauline Rolf and Moshe Feldenkrais. As a body therapist he led encounter group workshops focussing on the underlying causes of illnesses and developing alternative body-centred cures. His books, “Profound Simplicity” and “The Truth Option,” address this theme. He brought new approaches to body therapy that integrated truth, choice (freedom), (self) responsibility, self-esteem, self-regard and honesty into his approach.

In his books one encounters the concept of energy cycles (e.g. Schutz 1979) which a person goes through or call for completion. The single steps of the energy cycles are: motivation – prepare – act – feel.

Schutz died at his home in Muir Beach, California in 2002.

Influences

While teaching and doing research at Harvard, the University of Chicago, the University of California at Berkeley, and other institutions, Schutz focused on psychology but also studied philosophy – in particular, the scientific method, the philosophy of science, logical empiricism, and research design (with both Hans Reichenbach and Abraham Kaplan). He also worked with Paul Lazarsfeld, the well-known sociologist and methodologist and Elvin Semrad, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and clinical director in charge of psychiatric residency training at the Massachusetts Mental Health Centre. For Schutz, Semrad was a key figure, “a brilliant, earthy psychoanalyst who became my main mentor about groups.”

An avid student, Schutz also learned T-group methodology (“T” for training) at the National Training Laboratories (NTL) at Bethel, Maine, psychosynthesis, a spiritually oriented technique involving imagery, devised by an Italian contemporary of Freud named Roberto Assagioli, psychodrama with Hannah Weiner, bioenergetics with Alexander Lowen and John Pierrakos, Rolfing with Ida Rolf, and Gestalt Therapy with Paul Goodman. In his own words, “I tried everything physical, psychological, and spiritual – all diets, all therapies, all body methods, jogging, meditating, visiting a guru in India, and fasting for thirty-four days on water. These experiences counterbalanced my twenty years in science and left me with a strong desire to integrate the scientific with the experiential.”

Alois Alzheimer

Alois Alzheimer (14 June 1864 to 19 December 1915) was a German psychiatrist and neuropathologist and a colleague of Emil Kraepelin. Alzheimer is credited with identifying the first published case of “presenile dementia”, which Kraepelin would later identify as Alzheimer’s disease.

On This Day … 18 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1990 – Joseph Zubin, Lithuanian-American psychologist and academic (b. 1900).

Joseph Zubin

Joseph Zubin (09 October 1900 to 18 December 1990) was a Lithuanian born American educational psychologist and an authority on schizophrenia who is commemorated by the Joseph Zubin Awards.

Zubin was born 09 October 1900 in Raseiniai, Lithuania, but moved to the US in 1908 and grew up in Baltimore. His first degree was in chemistry at Johns Hopkins University in 1921, and he earned a PhD in educational psychology at Columbia University in 1932. In 1934 he married Winifred Anderson (who survived him) and they had three children (2 sons, David and Jonathan, and a daughter, Winfred). At his death on 18 December 1990, he had seven grandchildren. In addition, his great-grandson is Adam Chapnik, counsellor of the Abbey Unit at Massachusetts Audubon Society’s Wildwood Camp.

Zubin was President of both the American Psychopathological Association (1951-1952) and the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology (1971-1972) and received numerous awards for his work. In 1946 he was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

On This Day … 17 December

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People (Births)

  • 1930 – Dorothy Rowe, Australian psychologist and author (d. 2019).
  • 1931 – James McGaugh, American neurobiologist and psychologist.

Dorothy Rowe

Dr. Dorothy Rowe (née Conn; 17 December 1930 to 25 March 2019) was an Australian psychologist and author, whose area of interest was depression. Born; Newcastle, NSW. Died Sydney, NSW.

Rowe came to England in her forties, working at Sheffield University and was the head of Lincolnshire Department of Clinical Psychology. In addition to her published works on depression, she was a regular columnist in the UK.

She spent her time working with depressed patients and, through listening to their stories, came to reject the medical model of mental illness, instead working within personal construct theory. She believed that depression is a result of beliefs which do not enable a person to live comfortably with themselves or the world. Most notably it is the belief in a “Just World” (that the bad are punished and the good rewarded) that exacerbates feelings of fear and anxiety if disaster strikes. Part of recovering is accepting that the external world is unpredictable and that we control relatively little of it.

In July 1989 Rowe made an extended appearance on the British television discussion programme After Dark alongside, among others, Steven Rose, Frank Cioffi, The Bishop of Durham and Michael Bentine.

The BBC were required to apologise to Dorothy Rowe in 2009 after the production editing of her radio interview misrepresented her views on the impact of religion in providing structure to people’s lives.

James McGaugh

James L. McGaugh (born 17 December 1931) is an American neurobiologist and author working in the field of learning and memory. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus in the Department of Neurobiology and Behaviour at the University of California, Irvine and a fellow and founding director of the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory.

Education and Positions

McGaugh received his B.A. from San Jose State University in 1953 and his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1959. He was briefly a professor at San Jose State and then did postdoctoral work in neuropharmacology with Nobel Laureate Professor Daniel Bovet at the Istituto Superiore di Sanitá in Rome, Italy. He then became a professor at the University of Oregon from 1961 to 1964. He was recruited to the University of California, Irvine, in 1964 (the year of the school’s founding) to be the founding chair of the Department of Psychobiology (now Neurobiology and Behaviour). He became dean (1967-1970) of the School of Biological Sciences and Vice Chancellor (1975-1977) and executive Vice Chancellor (1978-1982) of the university. In 1982, he founded the Centre for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory and remained director from 1982 to 2004.

Early Research Findings

McGaugh’s early work (in the 1950s and 1960s) demonstrated that memories are not instantly created in a long-term, permanent fashion. Rather, immediately after a learning event, the memory is labile and susceptible to influence. As time passes, the memory becomes increasingly resistant to external influences and eventually becomes stored in a relatively permanent manner, a process termed memory consolidation. McGaugh found that drugs, given to an animal shortly after a learning event, influence the subsequent retention of that event. The concept of such “post-training” manipulations is one of McGaugh’s greatest contributions to the field of learning and memory because it avoids many potential confounds, such as performance effects of the drug, that may occur when a drug or other treatment is given prior to the training.

Over the ensuing decades, McGaugh and his research colleagues and students extended the findings into a long-term investigation of emotionally influenced memory consolidation. As most people realise, they have stronger memories for long-ago events that were emotionally arousing in nature, compared with memories for emotionally neutral events (which may not be remembered well at all). McGaugh’s research examined how emotional arousal influences memory consolidation. In particular, he has found that stress hormones, such as epinephrine and cortisol, mediate much of the effects of emotional arousal on subsequent retention of the event. These hormones, in turn, activate a variety of brain structures, including the amygdala, which appears to play a key role in modulating memory consolidation. The amygdala, when activated, influences a variety of other brain structures, including the hippocampus, nucleus accumbens and caudate nucleus that process different aspects of memory. It is through this “orchestration” of brain structures that memories are eventually formed and stored, though the exact nature of memory storage remains elusive.