Tag: Psychologist

On This Day … 21 October

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People (Deaths)

  • 1980 – Hans Asperger, Austrian physician and psychologist (b. 1906).

Hans Asperger

Johann Friedrich Karl Asperger (18 February 1906 to 21 October 1980) was an Austrian physician.

Noted for his early studies on atypical neurology, specifically in children, he is the namesake of the autism spectrum disorder Asperger syndrome. He wrote over 300 publications on psychological disorders that posthumously acquired international renown in the 1980s. His diagnosis of autism, which he termed “autistic psychopathy”, has also garnished controversy. Further controversy arose during the late 2010s over allegations that Asperger referred children to a Nazi German clinic responsible for murdering disabled patients, although his knowledge and involvement remains unknown.

On This Day … 20 October

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People (Births)

  • 1859 – John Dewey, American psychologist and philosopher (d. 1952).
  • 1927 – Joyce Brothers, American psychologist, author, and actress (d. 2013).

People (Deaths)

  • 2015 – Arno Gruen, German-Swiss psychologist and psychoanalyst (b. 1923).

John Dewey

John Dewey (20 October 1859 to 01 June 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He was one of the most prominent American scholars in the first half of the twentieth century.

The overriding theme of Dewey’s works was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism. As Dewey himself stated in 1888, while still at the University of Michigan, “Democracy and the one, ultimate, ethical ideal of humanity are to my mind synonymous.” Dewey considered two fundamental elements – schools and civil society – to be major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. He asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by communication among citizens, experts and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.

Dewey was one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the fathers of functional psychology. His paper “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” published in 1896, is regarded as the first major work in the (Chicago) functionalist school. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Dewey as the 93rd-most-cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Dewey was also a major educational reformer for the 20th century. A well-known public intellectual, he was a major voice of progressive education and liberalism. While a professor at the University of Chicago, he founded the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where he was able to apply and test his progressive ideas on pedagogical method. Although Dewey is known best for his publications about education, he also wrote about many other topics, including epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics, art, logic, social theory, and ethics.

Joyce Brothers

Joyce Diane Brothers (20 October 1927 to 13 May 2013) was an American psychologist, television personality, advice columnist, and writer. She first became famous in 1955 for winning the top prize on the American game show The $64,000 Question. Her fame from the game show allowed her to go on to host various advice columns and television shows, which established her as a pioneer in the field of “pop (popular) psychology”.

Brothers is often credited as the first to normalise psychological concepts to the American mainstream. Her syndicated columns were featured in newspapers and magazines, including a monthly column for Good Housekeeping, in which she contributed for nearly 40 years. As Brothers quickly became the “face of psychology” for American audiences, she often appeared in various television roles, usually as herself. From the 1970s onward, she also began to accept fictional roles that parodied her “woman psychologist” persona. She is noted for working continuously for five decades across various genres. Numerous groups recognised Brothers for her strong leadership as a woman in the psychological field and for helping to destigmatise the profession overall.

Arno Gruen

Gruen was born in Berlin in 1923, and emigrated to the United States as a child in 1936 when his parents, James and Rosa Gruen, fled Germany to save their lives.

He studied at the City College of New York. Then, after completing his graduate studies in psychology at New York University, he trained in psychoanalysis under Theodor Reik at one of the first psychoanalytic training centres for psychologists, the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis in New York City.

Gruen held many teaching posts, including seventeen years as professor of psychology at Rutgers University. From 1979 on, he lived and practiced in Switzerland. Widely published in German, his groundbreaking first book to be released in English, The Betrayal of the Self, was published by Grove Press in 1988.

On This Day … 18 October

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 1911 – Alfred Binet, French psychologist and author (b. 1857).

Martha Burk

Martha Gertrude Burk (born 18 October 1941) is an American political psychologist, feminist, and former Chair of the National Council of Women’s Organisations.

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.

On This Day … 16 October

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People (Births)

  • 1888 – Paul Popenoe, American founder of relationship counselling (d. 1979).

People (Deaths)

  • 2015 – James W. Fowler, American psychologist and academic (b. 1940).

Paul Popenoe

Paul Bowman Popenoe (16 October 1888 to 19 June 1979) was an American agricultural explorer and eugenicist. He was an influential advocate of the compulsory sterilisation of the mentally ill and the mentally disabled, and the father of marriage counselling in the United States.

James W. Fowler

James William Fowler III (12 October 1940 to 16 October 2015) was an American theologian who was Professor of Theology and Human Development at Emory University. He was director of both the Centre for Research on Faith and Moral Development, and the Centre for Ethics until he retired in 2005. He was a minister in the United Methodist Church. Fowler is best known for his book Stages of Faith, published in 1981, in which he sought to develop the idea of a developmental process in “human faith”.

On This Day … 12 October

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Events

People (Births)

  • 1925 – Denis Lazure, Canadian psychiatrist and politician (d. 2008).
  • 1929 – Robert Coles, American psychologist, author, and academic.

People (Deaths)

  • 1948 – Susan Sutherland Isaacs, English psychologist and psychoanalyst (b. 1885).

Eastern State Hospital (Virginia)

Eastern State Hospital is a psychiatric hospital in Williamsburg, Virginia. Built in 1773, it was the first public facility in the present-day United States constructed solely for the care and treatment of the mentally ill. The original building had burned but was reconstructed in 1985.

Denis Lazure

Denis Lazure (12 October 1925 to 23 February 2008) was a Canadian psychiatrist and politician. Lazure was a Member of the National Assembly of Quebec (MNA) from 1976 to 1984 and from 1989 to 1996. He is the father of actress Gabrielle Lazure.

Lazure attended Université de Montréal and was a doctorate in medicine. He also attended the University of Pennsylvania in psychiatry as well as the University of Toronto in which he was bachelor in hospital administration.

Lazure was the founder of the infant psychiatry department of Saint-Justine Hospital in 1957. He was also the director of this hospital as well as those of Riviere-des-Prairies and Louis-Hippolyte Lafontaine all in the Montreal region. He would later be the director in 1974 of the first psychiatric hospital in Haiti. He was also a teacher at Université de Montréal and was the President of the Canadian Association of Psychiatrists.

Robert Coles

Robert Coles (born 12 October 1929) is an American author, child psychiatrist, and professor emeritus at Harvard University.

Born Martin Robert Coles in Boston, Massachusetts on 12 October 1929, to Philip Coles, an immigrant from Leeds, England, United Kingdom, and Sandra Young Coles, originally from Sioux City, Iowa. Robert Coles attended Boston Latin School where he played tennis, ran track, and edited the school literary magazine. He entered Harvard College in 1946, where he studied English literature and helped to edit the undergraduate literary magazine, The Harvard Advocate. He graduated magna cum laude and earned Phi Beta Kappa honours in 1950.

Coles originally intended to become a teacher or professor, but as part of his senior honours thesis, he interviewed the poet and physician William Carlos Williams, who promptly persuaded him to go into medicine. He studied medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, graduating in 1954. After residency training at the University of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois (the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine), Coles moved on to psychiatric residencies at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, and McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts (the two hospitals are affiliates of Harvard University and the Harvard University Medical School in Cambridge, Massachusetts).

Knowing that he was to be called into the US Armed Forces under the Doctor Draft, Coles joined the Air Force in 1958 and was assigned the rank of captain. His field of specialisation was psychiatry, his intention eventually to sub-specialise in child psychiatry. He served as chief of neuropsychiatric services at Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi, and was honourably discharged in 1960. He returned to Boston and finished his child psychiatry training at the Children’s Hospital. In July 1960, he was married to Jane Hollowell, and the couple moved to New Orleans.

Susan Sutherland Isaacs

Susan Sutherland Isaacs, CBE (née Fairhurst; 24 May 1885 to 12 October 1948; also known as Ursula Wise) was a Lancashire-born educational psychologist and psychoanalyst. She published studies on the intellectual and social development of children and promoted the nursery school movement. For Isaacs, the best way for children to learn was by developing their independence. She believed that the most effective way to achieve this was through play, and that the role of adults and early educators was to guide children’s play.

In 1907, Isaacs enrolled to train as a teacher of young children (5 to 7-year-olds) at the University of Manchester. Isaacs then transferred to a degree course and graduated in 1912 with a first class degree in Philosophy. She was awarded a scholarship at the Psychological Laboratory in Newnham College, Cambridge and gained a master’s degree in 1913.

Isaacs also trained and practised as a psychoanalyst after analysis by the psychoanalyst John Carl Flugel (1884-1955). She became an associate member of the newly formed British Psychoanalytical Society in 1921, becoming a full member in 1923. She began her own practice that same year. She later underwent brief analysis with Otto Rank and in 1927 she submitted herself to further analysis with Joan Riviere, to get personal experience and understanding of Melanie Klein’s new ideas on infancy. Isaacs also helped popularise the works of Klein, as well as the theories of Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud. She was initially enthusiastic for Jean Piaget’s theories on the intellectual development of young children, though she later criticised his schemas for stages of cognitive development, which were not based on the observation of the child in their natural environment, unlike her own observations at Malting House School.

Between 1924 and 1927, she was the head of Malting House School in Cambridge, which is an experimental school founded by Geoffrey Pyke. The school fostered the individual development of children. Children were given greater freedom and were supported rather than punished. The teachers were seen as observers of the children who were seen as research workers. Her work had a great influence on early education and made play a central part of a child’s education. Isaacs strongly believed that play was the child’s work.

Between 1929 and 1940, she was an ‘agony aunt’ under the pseudonym of Ursula Wise, replying to readers’ problems in several child care journals, notably The Nursery World and Home and School.

In 1933, she became the first Head of the Child Development Department at the Institute of Education, University of London, where she established an advanced course in child development for teachers of young children. Her department had a great influence on the teaching profession and encouraged the profession to consider psychodynamic theory with developmental psychology.

On This Day … 10 October

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Events

  • World Mental Health Day.

People (Deaths)

  • 1979 – Christopher Evans, English psychologist, computer scientist, and author (b. 1931).

World Mental Health Day

World Mental Health Day (10 October) is an international day for global mental health education, awareness and advocacy against social stigma.

Christopher Evans

Christopher Riche Evans (29 May 1931 to 10 October 1979) was a British psychologist, computer scientist, and author.

Born in Aberdyfi, Christopher Evans spent his childhood in Wales and was educated at Christ College, Brecon (1941-1949). He spent two years in the RAF (1950-1952), and worked as a science journalist and writer until 1957, when he began a B.A. course in Psychology at University College, London, graduating with honours in 1960.

After a summer fellowship at Duke University in the United States, where he first met his American wife, Nancy Fullmer, he took up a Research Assistant post in the Physics Laboratory, University of Reading, working on eye movements under Professor R. W. Ditchburn. Upon receiving his PhD (the title of his thesis was “Pattern Perception and the Stabilised Retinal Image”), he went to the Division of Computer Science, National Physical Laboratory, Teddington, in 1964, where he remained until his death from cancer in 1979.

He had two children, Christopher Samuel Evans and Victoria Evans-Theiler.

On This Day … 06 October

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People (Births)

  • 1915 – Carolyn Goodman, American psychologist and activist (d. 2007).
  • 1934 – Marshall Rosenberg, American psychologist and author (d. 2015).

Carolyn Goodman

Carolyn Elizabeth Goodman (née Drucker; 06 October 1915 to 17 August 2007) was an American clinical psychologist who became a prominent civil rights advocate after her son, Andrew Goodman and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered by the Ku Klux Klan in Neshoba County, Mississippi, in 1964.

Politically active until age 90, Goodman came to wide public attention again in 2005. Traveling to Philadelphia, Mississippi, she testified at the murder trial of Edgar Ray Killen, a former Klan leader recently indicted in the case. On 21 June 2005, the 41st anniversary of the killings, a jury acquitted Killen of murder but found him guilty of manslaughter in the deaths of Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner.

Marshall Rosenberg

Marshall Bertram Rosenberg (06 October 1934 to 07 February 2015) was an American psychologist, mediator, author and teacher. Starting in the early 1960s he developed Nonviolent Communication, a process for supporting partnership and resolving conflict within people, in relationships, and in society. He worked worldwide as a peacemaker and in 1984 founded the Centre for Nonviolent Communication, an international non-profit organisation for which he served as Director of Educational Services.

According to his biographer, Marjorie C. Witty, “He has a fierce face – even when he smiles and laughs. The overall impression I received was of intellectual and emotional intensity. He possesses a charismatic presence.”

On This Day … 03 October

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People (Deaths)

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

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 program 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 … 02 October

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People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – J. Philippe Rushton, English-Canadian psychologist, theorist, academic (b. 1943).

J. Philippe Rushton

John Philippe Rushton (03 December 1943 to 02 October 2012) was a Canadian psychologist and author. He taught at the University of Western Ontario and became known to the general public during the 1980s and 1990s for research on race and intelligence, race and crime, and other purported racial correlations.

Rushton’s work was heavily criticised by the scientific community for the questionable quality of his research, with many academics arguing that it was conducted under a racist agenda. From 2002 until his death, he served as the head of the Pioneer Fund, an organisation that was founded in 1937 to promote eugenics and that in its early years supported Nazi ideology, for example, by funding the distribution in US churches and schools of a Nazi propaganda film about eugenics. The Pioneer Fund has been described as a white supremacist organization and designated as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Centre.

Rushton was a Fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and a onetime Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. In 2020 the Department of Psychology of the University of Western Ontario released a statement stating that “much of his research was racist” and his work was “deeply flawed from a scientific standpoint”. As of 2021, Rushton has had six research publications retracted.

On This Day … 01 October

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People (Births)

  • 1915 – Jerome Bruner, American psychologist and author (d. 2016).
  • 1940 – Phyllis Chesler, American feminist psychologist, who wrote Women and Madness (1972).

Jerome Bruner

Jerome Seymour Bruner (01 October 1915 to 05 June 2016) was an American psychologist who made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology.

Bruner was a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law. He received a B.A. in 1937 from Duke University and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941. He taught and did research at Harvard University, the University of Oxford, and New York University. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bruner as the 28th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Phyllis Chesler

Phyllis Chesler (born 01 October 1940) is an American writer, psychotherapist, and professor emerita of psychology and women’s studies at the College of Staten Island (CUNY).

She is known as a feminist psychologist, and is the author of 18 books, including the best-seller Women and Madness (1972), With Child: A Story of Motherhood (1979) and An American Bride in Kabul: A Memoir (2013). Chesler has written on topics such as gender, mental illness, divorce and child custody, surrogacy, second-wave feminism, pornography, prostitution, incest, and violence against women.

In more recent years, Chesler has written several works on such subjects as anti-Semitism, Islam, and honour killings. Chesler argues that many western intellectuals, including leftists and feminists, have abandoned Western values in the name of multicultural relativism, and that this has led to an alliance with Islamists, an increase in anti-Semitism, and to the abandonment of Muslim women and religious minorities in Muslim-majority countries.