Tag: Psychologist

On This Day … 23 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1933 – Benedict Groeschel, American priest, psychologist, and talk show host (d. 2014).

Benedict Groeschel

Benedict Joseph Groeschel, C.F.R. (23 July 1933 to 03 October 2014) was an American Franciscan friar, Catholic priest, retreat master, author, psychologist, activist, and television host. He hosted the television talk programme Sunday Night Prime (originally Sunday Night Live) broadcast on the Eternal Word Television Network, as well as several serial religious specials.

He founded the Office for Spiritual Development for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. He was Associate Director of the Trinity Retreat House for clergy and executive director of St. Francis House. He was professor of pastoral psychology at St. Joseph’s Seminary in New York and an adjunct professor at the Institute for Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia. He was one of the founders of the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal and among his close friends were Mother Teresa, Mother Angelica and Alice von Hildebrand.

On This Day … 22 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1881 – Augusta Fox Bronner, American psychologist, specialist in juvenile psychology (d. 1966).
  • 1893 – Karl Menninger, American psychiatrist and author (d. 1990).

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – George Armitage Miller, American psychologist and academic (b. 1920).

Augusta Fox Bronner

Augusta Fox Bronner (22 July 1881 to 11 December 1966) was an American psychologist, best known for her work in juvenile psychology.

She co-directed the first child guidance clinic, and her research shaped psychological theories about the causes behind child delinquency, emphasizing the need to focus on social and environmental factors over inherited traits.

In 1913, while taking a summer course at Harvard University, Bronner met Chicago neurologist and professor William Healy. Healy was equally interested in the study of child delinquency, and subsequently hired Bronner to work as a psychologist at his Chicago Juvenile Psychopathic Institute. In 1914, the institute was renamed the Psychopathic Clinic of the Juvenile Court, and Bronner soon became the assistant director. Bronner and Healy proceeded to shape the study and treatment of delinquent youth, contributing to the scientific understanding that most juvenile crime stemmed from “mental repressions, social conflicts, and family relations”, not hereditary factors. Among other research, Bronner identified that delinquency often arose as a result of placing children with learning disabilities or special abilities in the wrong kinds of educational environments.

In 1917, Bronner and Healy took up new positions at the Judge Baker Foundation of Boston (later the Judge Baker Children’s Centre), a new publicly funded child guidance clinic attached to the Boston juvenile court. Bronner handled most of the psychological examinations of youth, as well as interviews with girls and the youngest children. In 1927, Bronner and Healy wrote the influential Manual of Individual Mental Tests and Testing, a comprehensive guide to assessing a patient’s mental state. Although Healy was originally given the full position of director, with Bronner acting as assistant director, Bronner eventually became co-director of the Foundation in 1930. The Judge Baker Foundation soon became a model for other child guidance clinics across the country, with its co-directors developing important psychiatric practices such as the “team” method, in which psychologists worked together with social workers and physicians to treat a patient.

On 19 November 1930, Bronner and Healy were invited by President Herbert Hoover to attend the White House Conference on Child Health and Protection.

During the 1930s, Bronner also worked briefly in New Haven, Connecticut, as Director of the short-lived Research Institute of Human Relations at Yale University. She was president of the American Orthopsychiatric Association in 1932.

Karl Menninger

Karl Augustus Menninger (22 July 1893 to 18 July 1990) was an American psychiatrist and a member of the Menninger family of psychiatrists who founded the Menninger Foundation and the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas.

George Armitage Miller

George Armitage Miller (03 February 1920 to 22 July 2012) was an American psychologist who was one of the founders of cognitive psychology, and more broadly, of cognitive science. He also contributed to the birth of psycholinguistics. Miller wrote several books and directed the development of WordNet, an online word-linkage database usable by computer programs. He authored the paper, “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two,” in which he observed that many different experimental findings considered together reveal the presence of an average limit of seven for human short-term memory capacity. This paper is frequently cited by psychologists and in the wider culture. Miller won numerous awards, including the National Medal of Science.

Miller began his career when the reigning theory in psychology was behaviourism, which eschewed the study of mental processes and focused on observable behaviour. Rejecting this approach, Miller devised experimental techniques and mathematical methods to analyse mental processes, focusing particularly on speech and language. Working mostly at Harvard University, MIT and Princeton University, he went on to become one of the founders of psycholinguistics and was one of the key figures in founding the broader new field of cognitive science, circa 1978. He collaborated and co-authored work with other figures in cognitive science and psycholinguistics, such as Noam Chomsky. For moving psychology into the realm of mental processes and for aligning that move with information theory, computation theory, and linguistics, Miller is considered one of the great twentieth-century psychologists. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Miller as the 20th most cited psychologist of that era.

On This Day … 20 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1925 – Frantz Fanon, French-Algerian psychiatrist and philosopher (d. 1961).
  • 1927 – Ian P. Howard, English-Canadian psychologist and academic (d. 2013).

People (Deaths)

  • 2009 – Mark Rosenzweig, American psychologist and academic (b. 1922).

Frantz Fanon

Frantz Omar Fanon (20 July 1925 to 06 December 1961), also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West Indian psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a French department).

His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies, critical theory and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonisation and the human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonisation.

In the course of his work as a physician and psychiatrist, Fanon supported Algeria’s War of independence from France and was a member of the Algerian National Liberation Front.

Fanon has been described as “the most influential anticolonial thinker of his time.” For more than five decades, the life and works of Fanon have inspired national-liberation movements and other radical political organisations in Palestine, Sri Lanka, South Africa, and the United States. He formulated a model for community psychology, believing that many mental-health patients would do better if they were integrated into their family and community instead of being treated with institutionalized care. He also helped found the field of institutional psychotherapy while working at Saint-Alban under Francois Tosquelles and Jean Oury.

Fanon published numerous books, including The Wretched of the Earth (1961). This influential work focuses on what he believed is the necessary role of violence by activists in conducting decolonisation struggles.

Ian P. Howard

Ian Porteus Howard (20 July 1927 to 01 June 2013) was a Canadian psychologist and researcher in visual perception at York University in Toronto.

Ian Howard was born in Lancashire, England, close to the Yorkshire border. He studied for a BSc at Manchester University, graduating in 1952. Howard held academic positions in Departments of Psychology at Durham University (1953-1964) (from which he obtained his PhD in 1965), at New York University (1965), and at York University in Toronto (1966-2013). At York University, he contributed to the development of the Department of Psychology and, in 1992 founded the Centre for Vision Research (CVR).

Mark Rosenzweig

Mark Richard Rosenzweig (12 September 1922 to 20 July 2009) was an American research psychologist whose research on neuroplasticity in animals indicated that the adult brain remains capable of anatomical remodelling and reorganisation based on life experiences, overturning the conventional wisdom that the brain reached full maturity in childhood.

On This Day … 17 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1911 – Heinz Lehmann, German-Canadian psychiatrist and academic (d. 1999).
  • 1923 – Jeanne Block, American psychologist (d. 1981).

People (Deaths)

  • 1991 – John Patrick Spiegel, American psychiatrist and academic (b. 1911).

Heinz Lehmann

Heinz Edgar Lehmann OC FRSC (17 July 1911 to 07 April 1999) was a German-born Canadian psychiatrist best known for his use of chlorpromazine for the treatment of schizophrenia in 1950s and “truly the father of modern psychopharmacology.”

In 1973, he was a member of the Nomenclature Committee of the American Psychiatric Association that decided to drop homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), i.e. to depathologise it.

Jeanne Block

Jeanne Lavonne Humphrey Block (17 July 1923 to 04 December 1981) was an American psychologist and expert on child development.

She conducted research into sex-role socialisation and, with her husband Jack Block, created a person-centred personality framework. Block was a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and conducted her research with the National Institute of Mental Health and the University of California, Berkeley. She was an active researcher when she was diagnosed with cancer in 1981.

John Patrick Spiegel

John Paul Spiegel (17 March 1911 to 17 July 1991) was an American psychiatrist, and expert on violence and combat stress and the 103rd President of the American Psychiatric Association (APA).

As president-elect of the APA in 1973, he helped to change the definition of homosexuality in the DSM which had previously described homosexuality as sexual deviance and that homosexuals were pathological.

On This Day … 16 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1902 – Alexander Luria, Russian psychologist and physician (died 1977).
  • 1923 – Chris Argyris, American psychologist, theorist, and academic (died 2013).

Alexander Luria

Alexander Romanovich Luria (Russian: Алекса́ндр Рома́нович Лу́рия; 16 July 1902 to 14 August 1977) was a Soviet neuropsychologist, often credited as a father of modern neuropsychology.

He developed an extensive and original battery of neuropsychological tests during his clinical work with brain-injured victims of World War II, which are still used in various forms. He made an in-depth analysis of the functioning of various brain regions and integrative processes of the brain in general. Luria’s magnum opus, Higher Cortical Functions in Man (1962), is a much-used psychological textbook which has been translated into many languages and which he supplemented with The Working Brain in 1973.

It is less known that Luria’s main interests, before the war, were in the field of cultural and developmental research in psychology. He became famous for his studies of low-educated populations of nomadic Uzbeks in the Soviet Uzbekistan arguing that they demonstrate different (and lower) psychological performance than their contemporaries and compatriots under the economically more developed conditions of socialist collective farming (the kolkhoz). He was one of the founders of Cultural-Historical Psychology, and a leader of the Vygotsky Circle, also known as “Vygotsky-Luria Circle”. Apart from his work with Vygotsky, Luria is widely known for two extraordinary psychological case studies: The Mind of a Mnemonist, about Solomon Shereshevsky, who had highly advanced memory; and The Man with a Shattered World, about Lev Zasetsky, a man with a severe traumatic brain injury.

During his career Luria worked in a wide range of scientific fields at such institutions as the Academy of Communist Education (1920-1930s), Experimental Defectological Institute (1920-1930s, 1950-1960s, both in Moscow), Ukrainian Psychoneurological Academy (Kharkiv, early 1930s), All-Union Institute of Experimental Medicine, and the Burdenko Institute of Neurosurgery (late 1930s). A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Luria as the 69th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Chris Argyris

Chris Argyris (16 July 1923 to 16 November 2013) was an American (of Greek ancestry) business theorist and professor emeritus at Harvard Business School.

Argyris, like Richard Beckhard, Edgar Schein and Warren Bennis, is known as a co-founder of organisation development, and known for seminal work on learning organisations.

On This Day … 15 July [2022]

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Events

  • 1910 – In his book Clinical Psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin gives a name to Alzheimer’s disease, naming it after his colleague Alois Alzheimer.

People (Births)

  • 1904 – Rudolf Arnheim, German-American psychologist and author (d. 2007).
  • 1918 – Brenda Milner, English-Canadian neuropsychologist and academic.

People (Deaths)

  • 1940 – Eugen Bleuler, Swiss psychiatrist and physician (b. 1857).

Emil Kraepelin

Emil Wilhelm Georg Magnus Kraepelin (15 February 1856 to 07 October 1926) was a German psychiatrist.

H.J. Eysenck’s Encyclopaedia of Psychology identifies him as the founder of modern scientific psychiatry, psychopharmacology and psychiatric genetics.

Kraepelin believed the chief origin of psychiatric disease to be biological and genetic malfunction. His theories dominated psychiatry at the start of the 20th century and, despite the later psychodynamic influence of Sigmund Freud and his disciples, enjoyed a revival at century’s end. While he proclaimed his own high clinical standards of gathering information “by means of expert analysis of individual cases”, he also drew on reported observations of officials not trained in psychiatry.

His textbooks do not contain detailed case histories of individuals but mosaic-like compilations of typical statements and behaviours from patients with a specific diagnosis. He has been described as “a scientific manager” and “a political operator”, who developed “a large-scale, clinically oriented, epidemiological research programme”.

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.

Rudolf Arnheim

Rudolf Arnheim (15 July 1904 to 09 June 2007) was a German-born writer, art and film theorist, and perceptual psychologist.

He learned Gestalt psychology from studying under Max Wertheimer and Wolfgang Köhler at the University of Berlin and applied it to art. His magnum opus was his book Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye (1954). Other major books by Arnheim have included Visual Thinking (1969), and The Power of the Centre: A Study of Composition in the Visual Arts (1982). Art and Visual Perception was revised, enlarged and published as a new version in 1974, and it has been translated into fourteen languages. He lived in Germany, Italy, England, and America where he taught at Sarah Lawrence College, Harvard University, and the University of Michigan. He has greatly influenced art history and psychology in America.

In Art and Visual Perception, Arnheim tries to use science to better understand art. In his later book Visual Thinking (1969), Arnheim critiqued the assumption that language goes before perception. For Arnheim, the only access to reality we have is through our senses. Arnheim argued that perception is strongly identified with thinking, and that artistic expression is another way of reasoning. In The Power of the Centre, Arnheim addressed the interaction of art and architecture on concentric and grid spatial patterns. He argued that form and content are indivisible, and that the patterns created by artists reveal the nature of human experience.

Brenda Milner

Brenda Milner CC GOQ FRS FRSC (née Langford; 15 July 1918) is a British-Canadian neuropsychologist who has contributed extensively to the research literature on various topics in the field of clinical neuropsychology. Milner is a professor in the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery at McGill University and a professor of Psychology at the Montreal Neurological Institute. As of 2005, she holds more than 20 honorary degrees and continues to work in her nineties. Her current work covers many aspects of neuropsychology including her lifelong interest in the involvement of the temporal lobes in episodic memory. She is sometimes referred to as “the founder of neuropsychology” and has proven to be an essential key in its development. She received the Balzan Prize for Cognitive Neuroscience, in 2009, and the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, together with John O’Keefe, and Marcus E. Raichle, in 2014. She turned 100 in July 2018 and at the time was still overseeing the work of researchers.

Eugen Bleuler

Paul Eugen Bleuler (30 April 1857 to 15 July 1939) was a Swiss psychiatrist and humanist most notable for his contributions to the understanding of mental illness.

He coined several psychiatric terms including “schizophrenia”, “schizoid”, “autism”, depth psychology and what Sigmund Freud called “Bleuler’s happily chosen term ambivalence”.

On This Day … 12 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1947 – Richard C. McCarty, American psychologist and academic.
  • 1959 – Karl J. Friston, English psychiatrist and neuroscientist.

Richard C. McCarty

Richard C. McCarty (born 12 July 1947) is a professor of psychology and the former provost and vice chancellor of academic affairs at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Prior to serving as provost, he was dean of Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science.

McCarty grew up in Portsmouth, Virginia, and earned both his bachelor’s and his master’s degrees from Old Dominion University. He earned his Ph.D. in pathobiology from what is now the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland in 1976.

McCarty began his career at the National Institute of Mental Health, where he worked as a research associate in pharmacology. He also served as a lieutenant commander in the US Public Health Service. In 1978, he was appointed assistant professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, where he remained until 1998. During his time at Virginia, he served as chair of the Department of Psychology from 1990-1998.

In 1998, McCarty was named Executive Director for Science at the American Psychological Association in Washington, D.C., where he helped the APA launch the “Decade of Behaviour”. The Decade of Behaviour, a nickname for the 2000s and successor to the 1990s’ “Decade of the Brain”, was a public education campaign – endorsed by more than 70 professional associations across a variety of disciplines – to bring attention to the importance of behavioural and social science research. McCarty also spent time visiting universities and regional psychological associations to discuss how the APA might better represent psychologists nationally.

Vanderbilt’s College of Arts and Science named McCarty as its new dean in 2001. In addition to his decanal duties, McCarty taught a psychology seminar for first-year undergraduate students entitled “Stress, Health, and Behaviour” and had a dual appointment in the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine. On 06 May 2008, McCarty was elevated to the university provostship, replacing Nicholas S. Zeppos, who was himself elevated to the university chancery. McCarty stepped down from the position of provost on 30 June 2014; he joined the Vanderbilt Psychology Department faculty after a yearlong leave.

Much of McCarty’s research has centred on behavioural and physiological adaptations to stress, and he has written more than 30 chapters and 150 articles for various publications. In addition, McCarty served as the editor of American Psychologist and was the founding editor-in-chief of Stress. In 2020, his monograph, Stress and Mental Disorders: Insights From Animal Models, was published by Oxford University Press. He is currently working on a textbook, Stress, Health, and Disease, which is under contract with Guilford Press and has an expected publication date of 2022.

Karl J. Frsiton

Karl John Friston FRS, FMedSci, FRSB, is a British neuroscientist at University College London and an authority on brain imaging. He gained reputation as the main proponent of the free energy principle, active inference and predictive coding theory.

On This Day … 11 July [2022]

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People (Births)

  • 1943 – Howard Gardner, American psychologist and academic.

Howard Gardner

Howard Earl Gardner (born 11 July 1943) is an American developmental psychologist and the John H. and Elisabeth A. Hobbs Research Professor of Cognition and Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. He is currently the senior director of Harvard Project Zero, and since 1995, he has been the co-director of The Good Project.

Gardner has written hundreds of research articles and thirty books that have been translated into more than thirty languages. He is best known for his theory of multiple intelligences, as outlined in his 1983 book Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences.

Gardner retired from teaching in 2019. In 2020, he published his intellectual memoir A Synthesizing Mind.

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.