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Psychoanalyst Therese Benedek, who left Germany for the U.S. in 1935 and became a researcher about the psychosexual development of women, including their emotional and psychological responses to hormonal fluctuations and motherhood, was born in Hungary on this date in 1892. Shortly after her lifelong marriage began, she underwent five months of psychoanalysis with Sandor […]
Read MorePsychologist Augusta Fox Bronner, who redirected the study of juvenile delinquency to social and environmental rather than biological causes, and to character rather than intelligence, was born in Louisville, Kentucky on this date in 1881. After training at Columbia University’s Teachers College and spending several rewarding years as a classroom teacher, Bronner attended a Harvard […]
Read MorePsychoanalyst Margaret Schönberger Mahler, a refugee from Vienna after the Anschluss in 1938 who became an expert on mother-toddler relationships and an important figure in child psychology, was born in Sopron, Hungary on this date in 1897. Schönberger pursued her higher education in Budapest, where she met the pioneering psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi and became familiar […]
Read MoreA group of Sigmund Freud’s followers and associates met formally for the first time at the Hotel Bristol in Salzburg, Austria on this date in 1908, calling their convocation “The First International Psychoanalytic Congress” (Carl Jung called it the “First Congress for Freudian Psychology,” and so it was known until the IPC was actually established […]
Read Moreby Ronald Pies, MD drawing by Sarah Glidden From the Winter 2013-2014 issue of Jewish Currents “The entire purpose of our existence is to overcome our negative habits.” —Rabbi Eliyahu, the Gaon of Vilna (1720-1797) I REALLY HAVE TO BLAME MY MOTHER for the way I turned out. Coming from a psychiatrist, that […]
Read MoreAmerica’s first media psychologist, Dr. Joyce Brothers (née Bauer), was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1927. She earned her Ph.D. from Columbia in 1952, and became nationally known three years later by becoming the only woman to win the top prize on television’s $64,000 Question quiz show. Brothers wrote a daily newspaper advice […]
Read MorePsychologist Jerome Seymour Bruner, who created techniques for investigating the perceptions of infants and formally initiated the study of cognitive psychology with his 1956 book, A Study of Thinking, was born in New York on this date in 1915. He received his doctorate from Harvard in 1941 and returned to teach there after serving in […]
Read MoreAlbert Ellis, a key founder of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, which seeks to shift the self-harming beliefs and behaviors of patients without the deep analytic procedures of psychoanalysis, was born in Pittsburgh on this date in 1913. Ellis began his career as a Freudian but was influenced by the writings of Karen Horney, Erich Fromm, Harry […]
Read MoreSoviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who embedded human psychology in social reality only to have his thought repressed in the USSR, died of tuberculosis in Moscow at age 37 on this date in 1934. Vygotsky proposed that reasoning and higher cognitive functions emerge in children not only because of brain development and other universal processes, but […]
Read MoreErik Erikson (Homberger), the German-born (to a Danish Jewish mother) psychoanalyst who coined the phrase “identity crisis” and postulated nine stages of human development from infancy until the end of life, died at 91 on this date in 1994. He trained as a child psychologist under Anna Freud and also studied Montessori education. In 1930 […]
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