Tag: Psychiatrist

On This Day … 02 December

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People (Deaths)

  • 1957 – Manfred Sakel, Ukrainian-American neurophysiologist and psychiatrist (b. 1902).
  • 1986 – John Curtis Gowan, American psychologist and academic (b. 1912).

Manfred Sakel

Manfred Joshua Sakel (06 June 1900 to 02 December 1957) was an Austrian-Jewish (later Austrian-American) neurophysiologist and psychiatrist, credited with developing insulin shock therapy in 1927.

Sakel was born on 06 June 1900, in Nadvirna (Nadwórna), in the former Austria-Hungary Empire (now Ukraine), which was part of Poland between the world wars. Sakel studied Medicine at the University of Vienna from 1919 to 1925, specialising in neurology and neuropsychiatry. From 1927 until 1933 Sakel worked in hospitals in Berlin. In 1933 he became a researcher at the University of Vienna’s Neuropsychiatric Clinic. In 1936, after receiving an invitation from Frederick Parsons, the state commissioner of mental hygiene, he chose to emigrate from Austria to the United States of America. In the USA, he became an attending physician and researcher at the Harlem Valley State Hospital.

Dr. Sakel was the developer of insulin shock therapy from 1927 while a young doctor in Vienna, starting to practice it in 1933. It would become widely used on individuals with schizophrenia and other mental patients. He noted that insulin-induced coma and convulsions, due to the low level of glucose attained in the blood (hypoglycaemic crisis), had a short-term appearance of changing the mental state of drug addicts and psychotics, sometimes dramatically so. He reported that up to 88% of his patients improved with insulin shock therapy, but most other people reported more mixed results and it was eventually shown that patient selection had been biased and that it didn’t really have any specific benefits and had many risks, adverse effects and fatalities. However, his method became widely applied for many years in mental institutions worldwide. In the USA and other countries it was gradually dropped after the introduction of the electroconvulsive therapy in the 1940s and the first neuroleptics in the 1950s.

Dr. Sakel died from a heart attack on 02 December 1957, in New York City, NY, USA.

John Curtis Gowan

John Curtis Gowan (21 May 1912 to 02 December 1986) was a psychologist who studied, along with E. Paul Torrance, the development of creative capabilities in children and gifted populations.

John Curtis Gowan was born 21 May 1912 in Boston, Massachusetts. Graduating from Thayer Academy, Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1929, John Gowan was only 17 when he entered Harvard University, earning his undergraduate degree four years later. A master’s degree in mathematics followed; he then moved to Culver, Indiana, where he was employed as a counsellor and mathematics teacher at Culver Military Academy from 1941 to 1952. Earning a doctorate from UCLA, he became a member of the founding faculty at the California State University at Northridge, where he taught as a professor of Educational Psychology from 1953 until 1975, when he retired with emeritus status.

Dr. Gowan became interested in gifted children after the Russians gained superiority in space with the 1957 launch of Sputnik. He formed the National Association for Gifted Children the following year. He was the group’s executive director and president from 1975 to 1979 and over the years wrote more than 100 articles and fourteen books on gifted children, teacher evaluation, child development, and creativity.

While at Northridge, he developed a programme to train campus counsellors, was nominated in 1973 as outstanding professor, and had been a counsellor, researcher, Fulbright lecturer, and visiting professor at various schools including the University of Singapore, the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, the University of Hawaii, and Connecticut State College. He was a fellow of the American Psychological Association and was also a colleague of the Creative Education Foundation.

Besides his work in Educational Psychology as specifically related to gifted children, he also had an interest in psychic (or psychedelic) phenomena as it relates to human creativity. His work in this area was inspired by the writings of Aldous Huxley and Carl Jung. Based on his work in creativity and with gifted children, Dr. Gowan developed a model of mental development that derived from the work of Jean Piaget and Erik Erikson, but also included adult development beyond the ordinary adult successes of career and family building, extending into the emergence and stabilization of extraordinary development and mystical states of consciousness. He described the entire spectrum of available states in his classic Trance, Art, & Creativity (1975), with its different modalities of spiritual and aesthetic expression. He also devised a test for self-actualisation, (as defined by Abraham Maslow), called the Northridge Developmental Scale.

Dr. Gowan died on 02 December 1986. He was survived by his adult twin children from his first marriage, John Gowan Jr. of Albany, NY and Ann Gowan Curry, of Anchorage, Alaska as well as seven grandchildren and his second wife Jane Thompson Gowan. His godson, Cameron Scott Matheson sang at his memorial service which was attended by friends and colleagues.

On This Day … 01 December

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People (Births)

  • 1930 – Marie Bashir, Australian psychiatrist, academic, and politician, 37th Governor of New South Wales.
  • 1937 – Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga, Latvian psychologist and politician, President of Latvia.

Marie Bashir

Dame Marie Roslyn Bashir AD CVO (born 01 December 1930) is the former and second longest-serving Governor of New South Wales. Born in Narrandera, New South Wales, Bashir graduated from the University of Sydney in 1956 and held various medical positions, with a particular emphasis in psychiatry. In 1993 Bashir was appointed the Clinical Director of Mental Health Services for the Central Sydney Area Health Service, a position she held until appointed governor on 01 March 2001. She has also served as the Chancellor of the University of Sydney (2007-2012).

Bashir retired on 1 October 2014 and was succeeded as governor by General David Hurley.

Vaira Vike-Freiberga

Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga (born 1 December 1937) is a Latvian politician who served as the sixth President of Latvia from 1999 to 2007. She is the first woman to hold the post. She was elected President of Latvia in 1999 and re-elected for the second term in 2003.

Dr. Vaira Freiberga is a professor and interdisciplinary scholar, having published eleven books and numerous articles, essays and book chapters in addition to her extensive speaking engagements. As President of the Republic of Latvia 1999-2007, she was instrumental in achieving membership in the European Union and NATO for her country. She is active in international politics, was named Special Envoy to the Secretary General on United Nations reform and was official candidate for UN Secretary General in 2006.

She remains active in the international arena and continues to speak in defence of liberty, equality and social justice, and for the need of Europe to acknowledge the whole of its history. She is a well-known pro-European, as such, in December 2007 she was named vice-chair of the Reflection group on the long-term future of the European Union. She is also known for her work in psycholinguistics, semiotics and analysis of the oral literature of her native country.

After her presidency Vaira Vīķe-Freiberga serving as Co-Chair Nizami Ganjavi International Centre, served as the President of Club of Madrid, the world’s largest forum of former Heads of State and Government, from 2014 to 2020. She is also a member of the International Programme Board of the Prague European Summit.

What is Persona (Psychology)?

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Introduction

The persona, for Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung, was the social face the individual presented to the world – “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.”

Jung’s Persona

Identification

According to Jung, the development of a viable social persona is a vital part of adapting to, and preparing for, adult life in the external social world. “A strong ego relates to the outside world through a flexible persona; identifications with a specific persona (doctor, scholar, artist, etc.) inhibits psychological development.” For Jung, “the danger is that [people] become identical with their personas—the professor with his textbook, the tenor with his voice.” The result could be “the shallow, brittle, conformist kind of personality which is ‘all persona’, with its excessive concern for ‘what people think'” – an unreflecting state of mind “in which people are utterly unconscious of any distinction between themselves and the world in which they live. They have little or no concept of themselves as beings distinct from what society expects of them.” The stage was set thereby for what Jung termed enantiodromia – the emergence of the repressed individuality from beneath the persona later in life: “the individual will either be completely smothered under an empty persona or an enantiodromia into the buried opposites will occur.”

Disintegration

“The breakdown of the persona constitutes the typically Jungian moment both in therapy and in development” – the “moment” when “that excessive commitment to collective ideals masking deeper individuality—the persona—breaks down… disintegrates.” Given Jung’s view that “the persona is a semblance… the dissolution of the persona is therefore absolutely necessary for individuation.” Nevertheless, the persona’s disintegration may lead to a state of chaos in the individual: “one result of the dissolution of the persona is the release of fantasy… disorientation.” As the individuation process gets under way, “the situation has thrown off the conventional husk and developed into a stark encounter with reality, with no false veils or adornments of any kind.”

Negative Restoration

One possible reaction to the resulting experience of archetypal chaos was what Jung called “the regressive restoration of the persona,” whereby the protagonist “laboriously tries to patch up his social reputation within the confines of a much more limited personality… pretending that he is as he was before the crucial experience.” Similarly in treatment there can be “the persona-restoring phase, which is an effort to maintain superficiality;” or even a longer phase designed not to promote individuation but to bring about what Jung caricatured as “the negative restoration of the persona” – that is to say, a reversion to the status quo.

Absence

The alternative is to endure living with the absence of the persona – and for Jung “the man with no persona… is blind to the reality of the world, which for him has merely the value of an amusing or fantastic playground.” Inevitably, the result of “the streaming in of the unconscious into the conscious realm, simultaneously with the dissolution of the ‘persona’ and the reduction of the directive force of consciousness, is a state of disturbed psychic equilibrium.” Those trapped at such a stage remain “blind to the world, hopeless dreamers… spectral Cassandras dreaded for their tactlessness, eternally misunderstood.”

Restoration

Restoration, the aim of individuation, “is not only achieved by work on the inside figures but also, as conditio sine qua non, by a readaptation in outer life” – including the recreation of a new and more viable persona. To “develop a stronger persona… might feel inauthentic, like learning to ‘play a role’… but if one cannot perform a social role then one will suffer.” One goal for individuation is for people to “develop a more realistic, flexible persona that helps them navigate in society but does not collide with nor hide their true self.” Eventually, “in the best case, the persona is appropriate and tasteful, a true reflection of our inner individuality and our outward sense of self.”

Later Developments

The persona has become one of the most widely adopted aspects of Jungian terminology, passing into almost common vocabulary: “a mask or shield which the person places between himself and the people around him, called by some psychiatrists the persona.” For Eric Berne, “the persona is formed during the years from six to twelve, when most children first go out on their own… to avoid unwanted entanglements or promote wanted ones.” He was interested in “the relationship between ego states and the Jungian persona,” and considered that “as an ad hoc attitude, persona is differentiated also from the more autonomous identity of Erik Erikson.” Perhaps more contentiously, in terms of life scripts, he distinguished “the Archetypes (corresponding to the magic figures in a script) and the Persona (which is the style the script is played in).”

Post-Jungians would loosely call the persona “the social archetype of the conformity archetype,” though Jung always distinguished the persona as an external function from those images of the unconscious he called archetypes. Thus, whereas Jung recommended conversing with archetypes as a therapeutic technique he himself had employed – “For decades I always turned to the anima when I felt my emotional behavior was disturbed, and I would speak with the anima about the images she communicated to me” – he stressed that “It would indeed be the height of absurdity if a man tried to have a conversation with his persona, which he recognized merely as a psychological means of relationship.”

Jordan Peterson

University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, a well-known as an admirer of Jung’s work, uses Jungian terminology but reconfigures it into a model that divides the psychological world into the domains of nature and culture. The Great Father of culture is an archetypal force that shapes the potential of chaos into the actuality of order. In this framework, the persona would be the aspect of the personality that has been adapted to culture, more specifically to the social dominance hierarchy, which Peterson refers to as the competency hierarchy. People who refuse to submit to this social discipline or carry the responsibility inherent in having a role in the world remain as undifferentiated potential, known in more Jungian terms as Peter Pan syndrome, or the negative aspect of the puer aeternus.

Though Jung does not reference dominance hierarchies specifically, the above is broadly in accordance with his conception of the persona as defined in his Two Essays on Analytical Psychology:

“We can see how a neglected persona works, and what one must do to remedy the evil. Such people can avoid disappointments and an infinity of sufferings, scenes, and social catastrophes only by learning to see how men behave in the world. They must learn to understand what society expects of them; they must realize that there are factors and persons in the world far above them; they must know that what they do has a meaning for others.”

On This Day … 24 November

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People (Births)

Claudio Naranjo

Claudio Benjamín Naranjo Cohen (24 November 1932 to 12 July 2019) was a Chilean-born psychiatrist of Arabic/Moorish, Spanish and Jewish descent who is considered a pioneer in integrating psychotherapy and the spiritual traditions.

He was one of the three successors named by Fritz Perls (founder of Gestalt Therapy), a principal developer of Enneagram of Personality theories and a founder of the Seekers After Truth Institute. He was also an elder statesman of the US and global human potential movement and the spiritual renaissance of the late 20th century. He was the author of various books.

Margaret Wetherell

Margaret Wetherell (born 24 November 1954), is a prominent academic in the area of discourse analysis.

Career

Wetherell worked for 23 years at the Open University, UK from which she retired as Emeritus Professor in 2011. She then took up a part-time post of Professor in Psychology at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Work

Wetherell has promoted a discursive approach to psychology. Her 1987 book, Discourse and Social Psychology: Beyond Attitudes and Behaviour, cowritten with Jonathan Potter, was very influential, particularly in social psychology, though also in other fields (e.g. Wood & Kroger, 2000). While discourse analysis has many different meanings, Wetherell’s approach has been quite catholic in line with other anglophone discourse analysts like Gilbert & Mulkay (1984).

In 2010/11 she led a collaboration on identity funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC).

On This Day … 23 November

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People (Births)

Keith Ablow

Keith Russell Ablow (born 23 November 1961) is an American author, television personality, and former psychiatrist. He is a former contributor for Fox News Channel and TheBlaze.

Formerly an assistant clinical professor at Tufts University School of Medicine, Ablow resigned as a member of the American Psychiatric Association in 2011. Ablow’s medical license was suspended in May 2019 by the Massachusetts Board of Registration in Medicine. The board concluded he posed an “immediate and serious threat to the public health, safety and welfare,” alleging that he had engaged in sexual and unethical misconduct towards patients.

According to the Associated Press, Ablow “freely mixes psychiatric assessments with political criticism, a unique twist in the realm of cable news commentary that some medical colleagues find unethical.”

Education

He graduated from Brown University in 1983, magna cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science degree in neurosciences. He received his Doctor of Medicine degree from Johns Hopkins Medical School in 1987 and completed his psychiatry residency at the Tufts-New England Medical Centre. He was Board Certified by the American Board of Psychiatry & Neurology in psychiatry in 1993 and forensic psychiatry in 1999.

While a medical student, he worked as a reporter for Newsweek and a freelancer for the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun and USA Today. After his residency, Ablow served as medical director of the Tri-City Mental Health Centres and then became medical director of Heritage Health Systems and Associate Medical Director of Boston Regional Medical Centre.

On This Day … 11 November

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People (Births)

  • 1743 – Carl Peter Thunberg, Swedish botanist, entomologist, and psychologist (d. 1828).
  • 1891 – Grunya Sukhareva, Ukrainian-Russian psychiatrist and university lecturer (d. 1981).

People (Deaths)

  • 2002 – Frances Ames, South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist (b. 1920).

Carl Peter Thunberg

Carl Peter Thunberg, also known as Karl Peter von Thunberg, Carl Pehr Thunberg, or Carl Per Thunberg (11 November 1743 to 08 August 1828), was a Swedish naturalist and an “apostle” of Carl Linnaeus.

After studying under Linnaeus at Uppsala University, he spent seven years travelling in southern Africa and Asia, collecting and describing many plants and animals new to European science, and observing local cultures. He has been called “the father of South African botany”, “pioneer of Occidental Medicine in Japan”, and the “Japanese Linnaeus”.

Grunya Sukhareva

Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva (11 November 1891 to 26 April 1981) was a Soviet child psychiatrist.

She was the first to publish a detailed description of autistic symptoms in 1925. The original paper was in Russian and published in German a year later. Sula Wolff translated it in 1996 for the English-speaking world.

She initially used the term “schizoid psychopathy”, “schizoid” meaning “eccentric” at the time, but later replaced it with “autistic (pathological avoidant) psychopathy” to describe the clinical picture of autism. The article was created almost two decades before the case reports of Hans Asperger and Leo Kanner, which were published while Sukhareva’s pioneering work remained unnoticed. This is possibly because of various political and language barriers at the time. Her name was transliterated as “Ssucharewa” when her papers appeared in Germany, and the autism researcher Hans Asperger likely chose not to cite her work, due to his affiliation with the Nazi Party and her Jewish heritage.

Frances Ames

Frances Rix Ames (20 April 1920 to 11 November 2002) was a South African neurologist, psychiatrist, and human rights activist, best known for leading the medical ethics inquiry into the death of anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who died from medical neglect after being tortured in police custody.

When the South African Medical and Dental Council (SAMDC) declined to discipline the chief district surgeon and his assistant who treated Biko, Ames and a group of five academics and physicians raised funds and fought an eight-year legal battle against the medical establishment. Ames risked her personal safety and academic career in her pursuit of justice, taking the dispute to the South African Supreme Court, where she eventually won the case in 1985.

Born in Pretoria and raised in poverty in Cape Town, Ames became the first woman to receive a Doctor of Medicine degree from the University of Cape Town in 1964. Ames studied the effects of cannabis on the brain and published several articles on the subject. Seeing the therapeutic benefits of cannabis on patients in her own hospital, she became an early proponent of legalisation for medicinal use. She headed the neurology department at Groote Schuur Hospital before retiring in 1985, but continued to lecture at Valkenberg and Alexandra Hospital. After apartheid was dismantled in 1994, Ames testified at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission about her work on the “Biko doctors” medical ethics inquiry. In 1999, Nelson Mandela awarded Ames the Star of South Africa, the country’s highest civilian award, in recognition of her work on behalf of human rights.

On This Day … 08 November

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 2007 – Chad Varah, English priest, founded The Samaritans (b. 1911).

Hermann Rorschach

Hermann Rorschach (08 November 1884 to 02 April 1922) was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. His education in art helped to spur the development of a set of inkblots that were used experimentally to measure various unconscious parts of the subject’s personality. His method has come to be referred to as the Rorschach test, iterations of which have continued to be used over the years to help identify personality, psychotic, and neurological disorders. Rorschach continued to refine the test until his premature death at age 37.

Education and Career

Rorschach, in his early years, attended Schaffhausen Cantonal School in Schaffhausen, Switzerland. Rorschach was a bright student from the beginning, and he often tutored other students at his school. After Ernst Haeckel suggested a career in science, Rorschach attended Academie de Neuchatel in 1904 studying geology and botany. After just a single term, he transferred to the Universite de Dijon to take French classes. The same year he enrolled in medical school at the University of Zurich. While studying, Rorschach began learning Russian, and in 1906, while studying in Berlin, he travelled to Russia for a holiday.

Travel was a large part of his life after medical school. On a trip to Dijon, in France, he met a man who taught him about Russian culture. Torn by the decision whether to stay in Switzerland or move to Russia, he eventually took a job as first assistant at a Cantonal Mental Hospital. While working at the hospital, Rorschach finished his doctoral dissertation in 1912 under the psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler, who had taught Carl Jung. The excitement in intellectual circles over psychoanalysis constantly reminded Rorschach of his childhood inkblots. Wondering why different people often saw entirely different things in the same inkblots, he began, while still a medical student, showing inkblots to schoolchildren and analysing their responses. This dissertation contained the origins for his ink blot experiment.

All the while, Rorschach remained fascinated by Russian culture. In 1913, he obtained a fellowship opportunity in Russia, where he continued to study contemporary psychiatric methods. Rorschach spent some time in the village of Kryukovo outside of Moscow, and in 1914 he returned to Switzerland to work at the Waldau University Hospital in Bern. In 1915, Rorschach took the position of assistant director at the regional psychiatric hospital at Herisau, and in 1921 he wrote his book Psychodiagnostik, which was to form the basis of the inkblot test.

Chad Varah

Edward Chad Varah CH CBE (12 November 1911 to 08 November 2007) was a British Anglican priest and social activist from England. In 1953, he founded the Samaritans, the world’s first crisis hotline, to provide telephone support to those contemplating suicide.

Life

Varah was born in the town of Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, the eldest of nine children of the vicar at the Anglican church of St Peter. His father, Canon William Edward Varah, a strict Tractarian, named him after St Chad, who, according to Bede, had founded the 7th-century monastery ad Bearum (“at Barrow”), which may have occupied an Anglo-Saxon enclosure next to Barton Vicarage.

He was educated at Worksop College in north Nottinghamshire and won an exhibition to study natural sciences at Keble College, Oxford, quickly switching to Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). He was involved in the university Russian and Slavonic clubs and was founder-president of the Scandinavian Club. He graduated with a third-class degree in 1933.

Clerical Career

Varah was initially reluctant to follow his father’s vocation, but his godfather persuaded him to study at Lincoln Theological College, where he was taught by the Revd Michael Ramsey, later Archbishop of Canterbury. He was ordained deacon in the Church of England in 1935 and priest in 1936. He first served as curate at St Giles, Lincoln, from 1935 to 1938, then at St Mary’s, Putney, from 1938 to 1940 and Barrow-in-Furness from 1940 to 1942. He became vicar of Holy Trinity, Blackburn, in 1942 and moved to St Paul, Battersea, in 1949. He was also chaplain of St John’s Hospital, Battersea.

The Grocers’ Company offered him the living of St Stephen Walbrook in 1953. He became rector of the church, designed by Christopher Wren, adjacent to the Mansion House in the City of London. The church was closed for structural repairs from 1978 to 1987. His son, Andrew, built chairs to replace its pews. Great controversy followed the installation of a large circular altar in travertine marble by Henry Moore, commissioned by Varah and his churchwarden Peter Palumbo. The matter was finally settled by the Court of Ecclesiastical Causes Reserved in 1987, which granted a retrospective faculty for its installation.

He was a supporter of women priests, but preferred the traditional 16th century Book of Common Prayer (1549) to the liturgical changes authorised in 1966 (Book of Common Prayer (1928). Despite the absence of a permanent congregation, the church remained popular for weddings. He officiated at the marriage of Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, only daughter of Princess Margaret, to actor Daniel Chatto in 1994.

He was made an honorary prebendary of St Paul’s Cathedral in 1975, becoming senior prebendary in 1997. He retired in 2003, aged 92, by which time he was the oldest incumbent in the Church of England.

Samaritans

Varah began to understand the problems facing the suicidal when he was taking a funeral as an assistant curate in 1935, his first church service, for a fourteen-year-old girl who had taken her own life because she had begun to menstruate and feared that she had a sexually transmitted disease. He later said “Little girl, I didn’t know you, but you have changed the rest of my life for good.” He vowed at that time to encourage sex education, and to help people who were contemplating suicide and had nowhere to turn.

To that end, Chad Varah founded the Samaritans in 1953 in the crypt of his church, with the stated aim that it would be an organisation “to befriend the suicidal and despairing.” The phone line, MAN 9000 (for MANsion House), received its first call on 02 November 1953, and the number of calls increased substantially after publicity in the Daily Herald on 07 December 1953.

He was director of the central London branch of Samaritans until 1974, and president from 1974 to 1986. He was also founder chairman of Befrienders Worldwide (Samaritans International) from 1974 to 1983, and then its president from 1983 to 1986.

Break with Samaritans

Later in life, Varah became disillusioned with the Samaritans organisation. He announced in 2004 that “It’s no longer what I founded. I founded an organisation to offer help to suicidal or equally desperate people. The last elected chairman re-branded the organisation. It was no longer to be an emergency service. It was to be an emotional support.”

On This Day … 07 November

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People (Births)

  • 1929 – Eric Kandel, Austrian-American neuroscientist and psychiatrist, Nobel Prize laureate.

Eric Kandel

Eric Richard Kandel (born Erich Richard Kandel, 07 November 1929) is an Austrian-born American medical doctor who specialized in psychiatry, a neuroscientist and a professor of biochemistry and biophysics at the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University.

He was a recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his research on the physiological basis of memory storage in neurons. He shared the prize with Arvid Carlsson and Paul Greengard.

He is a Senior Investigator in the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. He was also the founding director of the Centre for Neurobiology and Behaviour, which is now the Department of Neuroscience at Columbia University. He currently serves on the Scientific Council of the Brain & Behaviour Research Foundation. Kandel’s popularised account chronicling his life and research, In Search of Memory: The Emergence of a New Science of Mind, was awarded the 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Science and Technology.

On This Day … 31 October

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People (Births)

  • 1918 – Ian Stevenson, American psychiatrist and academic (d. 2007).

People (Deaths)

  • 1939 – Otto Rank, Austrian psychologist, author, and educator (b. 1884).

Ian Stevenson

Ian Pretyman Stevenson (31 October 1918 to 08 February 2007) was a Canadian-born American psychiatrist.

He worked for the University of Virginia School of Medicine for fifty years, as chair of the department of psychiatry from 1957 to 1967, Carlson Professor of Psychiatry from 1967 to 2001, and Research Professor of Psychiatry from 2002 until his death.

Otto Rank

Otto Rank (né Rosenfeld; 22 April 1884 to 31 October 1939) was an Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, and philosopher.

Born in Vienna, he was one of Sigmund Freud‘s closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, editor of the two leading analytic journals of the era, managing director of Freud’s publishing house, and a creative theorist and therapist.

In 1926, Rank left Vienna for Paris and, for the remainder of his life, led a successful career as a lecturer, writer, and therapist in France and the United States.

On This Day … 25 October

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People (Births)

  • 1918 – David Ausubel, American psychologist (d. 2008).
  • 1927 – Lawrence Kohlberg, American psychologist and author (d. 1987).
  • 1977 – Birgit Prinz, German footballer and psychologist.

People (Deaths)

  • 1826 – Philippe Pinel, French physician and psychiatrist (b. 1745).

David Ausubel

David Paul Ausubel (25 October 1918 to 09 July 2008) was an American psychologist. His most significant contribution to the fields of educational psychology, cognitive science, and science education learning was on the development and research on “advance organizers” since 1960.

He studied at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with honors in 1939, receiving a bachelor’s degree majoring in psychology. Ausubel later graduated from medical school in 1943 at Middlesex University where he went on to complete a rotating internship at Gouverneur Hospital, located in the lower east side of Manhattan, New York. Following his military service with the US Public Health Service, Ausubel earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in developmental psychology from Columbia University in 1950. He continued to hold a series of professorships at several schools of education.

In 1973, Ausubel retired from academic life and devoted himself to his psychiatric practice. During his psychiatric practice, Ausubel published many books as well as articles in psychiatric and psychological journals. In 1976, he received the Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association for “Distinguished Psychological Contributions to Education”.

Lawrence Kohlberg

Lawrence Kohlberg (25 October 1927 to 09 January 1987) was an American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development.

He served as a professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Chicago and at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to study the topic of moral judgment, extending Jean Piaget’s account of children’s moral development from twenty-five years earlier. In fact, it took Kohlberg five years before he was able to publish an article based on his views. Kohlberg’s work reflected and extended not only Piaget’s findings but also the theories of philosophers George Herbert Mead and James Mark Baldwin. At the same time he was creating a new field within psychology: “moral development”.

In an empirical study using six criteria, such as citations and recognition, Kohlberg was found to be the 30th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Birgit Prinz

Birgit Prinz (born 25 October 1977) is a German retired footballer, two-time FIFA Women’s World Cup champion and three-time FIFA World Player of the Year.

In addition to the German national team, Prinz played for 1. FFC Frankfurt in the Frauen-Bundesliga as well as the Carolina Courage in the Women’s United Soccer Association (WUSA), the first professional women’s league in the United States. Prinz remains one of the game’s most prolific strikers and is the second FIFA Women’s World Cup all-time leading scorer with 14 goals (second only to Marta from Brazil). On 12 August 2011, she announced the end of her active career.

She currently works as a sport psychologist for the men’s and women’s teams of 1. Bundesliga club TSG 1899 Hoffenheim.

Philippe Pinel

Philippe Pinel (20 April 1745 to 25 October 1826) was a French physician, precursor of psychiatry and incidentally a zoologist. He was instrumental in the development of a more humane psychological approach to the custody and care of psychiatric patients, referred to today as moral therapy. He worked for the abolition of the shackling of mental patients by chains and, more generally, for the humanisation of their treatment. He also made notable contributions to the classification of mental disorders and has been described by some as “the father of modern psychiatry”.

After the French Revolution, Dr. Pinel changed the way we look at the crazy (or “aliénés”, “alienated” in English) by claiming that they can be understood and cured. An 1809 description of a case that Pinel recorded in the second edition of his textbook on insanity is regarded by some as the earliest evidence for the existence of the form of mental disorder later known as dementia praecox or schizophrenia, although Emil Kraepelin is generally accredited with its first conceptualisation.

“Father of modern psychiatry”, he was credited with the first classification of mental illnesses. He had a great influence on psychiatry and the treatment of the alienated in Europe and the United States.