Adler, Alfred (06 February 1870–28 May 1937), physician and psychological theorist, was born in Rudolfsheim, near Vienna, Austria, the son of Leopold Adler, a grain merchant, and Pauline Beer. Adler was born into a lower middle-class, religiously nonobservant, and ethnically assimilated Jewish family in Austria. The death of a close younger brother in early childhood and Adler’s own near-death from illness the following year, at the age of five, seem to have inspired his interest in a medical career. A mediocre student, he attended several Viennese private schools and then began study at the University of Vienna in the fall of 1888....
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Ainsworth, Mary (01 December 1913–21 March 1999), developmental psychologist, who devised an experimental procedure called the Strange Situation to investigate attachment patterns in young children, was born Mary Dinsmore Salter in Glendale, Ohio, the daughter of Charles Salter, a successful businessman, and Mary Dinsmore Salter. She spent most of her childhood in Toronto, Canada, where she attended the University of Toronto, which awarded her a B.A. (1935), an M.A. (1936), and a Ph.D. (1939), the last two for work at the Department of Psychology. She mainly worked with the child psychologist William E. Blatz, whose security theory, research on children's emotional development, and use of naturalistic observation methods inspired her subsequent work on attachment. Mary Salter was a lecturer at the Department of Psychology at the University of Toronto from 1939 until 1942, when she was commissioned in the Canadian Women's Army Corps, attaining the rank of major. In 1946 she returned to the University of Toronto as assistant professor and further developed her psychodiagnostic skills (co-authoring a book on the evaluation of results obtained with the Rorschach inkblot test in the process). In 1950 she married Leonard Ainsworth, a graduate student in psychology, and moved with him to London, England. There, she worked with the psychoanalytically trained child psychiatrist John Bowlby at the Tavistock Institute. At that time, Bowlby was investigating the detrimental effects on young children of being placed in institutions providing foster care and of prolonged separation from primary caregivers in general. Breaking with then-prevalent psychoanalytic assumptions, Bowlby intended to investigate the effects of actual life events on the course of child development. Ainsworth and Bowbly initiated a lifelong collaborative association; Ainsworth contributed two chapters to Bowlby's seminal ...
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Allport, Floyd Henry (22 August 1890–15 October 1978), psychologist, was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, the son of John Edward Allport, a small businessman and country doctor, and Nellie Edith Wise, a former schoolteacher described by her son as a rather pious woman. Allport grew up in Indiana and Ohio, where he attended many camp meetings and revivals. He received an A.B. from Harvard University in 1914 and two years later began graduate work there in anthropology, later shifting to psychology. When the country entered World War I, he joined the army. Shortly before his field artillery unit left for France in October 1917, Allport married Ethel Margaret Hudson, a nurse; the couple had three children....
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M. Brewster Smith
Allport, Gordon Willard (11 November 1897–09 October 1967), psychologist, was born in Montezuma, Indiana, the son of John Edwards Allport, a physician, and Nellie Wise. He grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and, following the example of his older brother Floyd Henry Allport, who also became an eminent psychologist, he attended Harvard University. As an undergraduate, he concentrated on both psychology and social ethics (the predecessor of sociology at Harvard), and he spent much of his spare time in social service during World War I. Upon his graduation in 1919, he spent a year teaching English and sociology at Robert College in Constantinople (now Boğaçızı University in Istanbul). Returning to Harvard, he continued to be influenced by his brother Floyd, then an instructor, and by Herbert Langfeld, who encouraged him to follow his own sense of direction. Allport received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1922....
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Harold Takooshian
Anastasi, Anne (19 Dec. 1908–4 May 2001), psychologist, psychometrician, educator, and author, was born into a tight-knit Sicilian immigrant family in the Bronx, New York. She was the only child of Theresa (Gaudiosi) and Anthony Anastasi, a city employee who died when Anne was age one. Anastasi recalled being home-schooled until age nine by her colorful three-person household—her single mother Theresa (who also worked as an office manager at ...
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Dan A. Oren
Angell, James Rowland (08 May 1869–04 March 1949), academic psychologist and fourteenth president of Yale University, was born in Burlington, Vermont, the son of James Burrill Angell, president of the University of Vermont and later the president of the University of Michigan, and Sarah Swope Caswell, daughter of ...
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Robert H. Wozniak
Baldwin, James Mark (12 January 1861–08 November 1934), psychologist and philosopher, was born in Columbia, South Carolina, the son of Cyrus Hull Baldwin, a businessman and sometime federal official, and Lydia Eunice Ford. Baldwin entered Princeton as a sophomore in 1881. There, under President ...
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Barker, Roger G. (31 Mar. 1903–10 Sept. 1990), child psychologist and pioneer in the naturalistic study of human development in community settings, was born in Macksburg, Iowa, the second of five children of Guy and Cora Barker, whose homesteader families arrived in the Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. Guy Barker held a series of jobs: he was a farmer; served as the manager of a town’s general store; and then worked as a mid-level executive for a small insurance company in Des Moines, before returning to farming in eastern Alberta, Canada. Shortly after his Roger Barker’s birth, his family moved to the small town of Plover, Iowa, where he spent the first seven years of his life. Children growing up in small towns would later become his professional focus....
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Donald A. Dewsbury
Beach, Frank Ambrose, Jr. (13 April 1911–15 June 1988), psychologist and educator, was born in Emporia, Kansas, the son of Frank Ambrose Beach, professor of music, and Bertha Robinson. He received a B.S. in education in 1932 from the Kansas State Teachers College in Emporia, where his father taught. Although he had already developed an interest in psychology, he planned to be a high school English teacher. Because of the depression, however, Beach was unable to find a job and so continued in school at Emporia, receiving an M.S. in psychology in 1933. His thesis project was a search for color vision in rats....
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Bettelheim, Bruno (28 August 1903–13 March 1990), therapist, educator, and author, was born in Vienna, Austria, the son of Anton Bettelheim, a lumber merchant, and Pauline Seidler. Following his father’s death in 1926, he dropped out of the university to take over the family firm. Although successful in business, he re-enrolled ten years later to become, in February 1938, one of the last Jews to obtain a Ph.D. from Vienna University before World War II. While he was a philosophy student, aesthetics was his main subject, but he also studied psychology under ...
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Richard T. von Mayrhauser
Bingham, Walter Van Dyke (20 October 1880–07 July 1952), psychologist, was born in Swan Lake City, Iowa, the son of Lemuel Rothwell Bingham, a merchant and mining investor, and Martha Evarts Tracy. Bingham entered college at the University of Kansas at sixteen but transferred after a year to Beloit College, where he discovered the new experimental psychology. Bingham learned how to test sensory and motor abilities under Guy Allen Tawney, a student of Wilhelm Wundt, founder of the psychological research laboratory. After graduating in 1901, Bingham taught high school math and physics before enrolling in the University of Chicago’s psychology program....
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James W. Reed
Boring, Edwin Garrigues (23 October 1886–01 July 1968), psychologist, was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Edwin McCurdy Boring, a pharmacist, and Elizabeth Garrigues. Boring was reared in cramped quarters above the family drugstore and was not allowed to play with other children. He grew up with an intense desire to escape the stifling confines of the Moravian-Quaker household in which he was viewed as a problem child because of his hyperactivity. Although kept out of school until the age of nine and physically awkward, Boring excelled at the Friends Select School and found electrical engineering first an exciting hobby and then a rationale for escaping his father’s hope that he would follow him into the pharmacy. Boring entered Cornell in 1904 and earned his M.E. in 1908, but he struggled to earn ordinary grades. He quit his first job with the Bethlehem Steel Company when offered a promotion, fearing that he might remain an engineer for the rest of his life. An elective psychology course at Cornell, taught by the charismatic ...
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Gary D. Saretzky
Brigham, Carl Campbell (04 May 1890–24 January 1943), educational psychologist, was born in Marlboro, Massachusetts, the son of Charles Francis Brigham and Ida Campbell, occupations unknown. Brigham did not become a serious student until his junior year at Princeton University, when he became deeply interested in experimental psychology. After completing two years of psychology course work in one, he spent much of his senior year performing experiments in Professor ...
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Karl Tilman Winkler
Bronner, Augusta Fox (22 July 1881–11 December 1966), psychologist and expert in juvenile delinquency, was born in Louisville, Kentucky, the daughter of Gustave Bronner, a wholesale milliner, and Hanna Fox. Both of his parents were of German ancestry. Bronner’s maternal grandfather had been the founder of Louisville’s Reform Jewish Temple, and the Bronner family was active in the town’s Jewish community. Augusta, the middle child of three, was encouraged by her open-minded family to pursue a career instead of confining herself to housework....
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Joyce Brothers. Dr. Joyce Brothers, half-length portrait, facing slightly left, holding a book she wrote, 1957. Photographic print by Phyllis Twacht. Courtesy of the Library of Congress (LC-USZ62-117953).
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Bruce J. Evensen
Brothers, Joyce (20 October 1927–13 May 2013), psychologist, television and radio personality, and columnist, was born Joyce Diane Bauer in Brooklyn, New York, to Morris K. Bauer and Estelle Rappaport Bauer, a Jewish couple who shared a law practice. She and sister, Elaine, were raised in Queens, where Joyce was an honors student at Far Rockaway High School....
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Benjamin Harris
Brown, Junius Flagg (03 August 1902–14 October 1970), psychologist, was born in Denver, Colorado, the son of Harry Kilbourne Brown, an investment banker, and Susan Gaylord. After receiving a B.S. from Yale University (1925), Brown spent two years at the University of Berlin working under ...
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Alfred H. Fuchs
Brown, Warner (02 February 1882–06 February 1956), experimental psychologist, was born in Greensboro, Georgia, the son of Jacob Conklin Brown and Alida Robins Warner. His early education consisted of informal tutoring. In his teenage years “he read the Greek classics in Greek, the Latin classics in Latin, French literature in French, and had a wide acquaintance with English literature.” He was also well informed about botany and the law....
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Bryan, William Lowe (11 November 1860–21 November 1955), philosopher, psychologist, and educator, was born William Julian Bryan on a farm near Bloomington, Indiana, the son of John Bryan, a Presbyterian minister, and Eliza Jane Philips. In 1876 he entered the preparatory department of Indiana University in Bloomington, which served as the local high school, and the next year he matriculated as a university student. As an undergraduate he developed his skills in public speaking and helped to revive the ...
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Mitchell G. Ash
Bühler, Charlotte (20 December 1893–03 February 1974), psychologist and psychotherapist, was born Charlotte Bertha Malachowski in Berlin, Germany, the daughter of Hermann Malachowski, a successful architect, and Rose Kristeller, a former opera singer. Born into an assimilated Jewish family, she attended school in Berlin and then studied psychology and philosophy at the Universities of Freiburg, Berlin, and Munich, completing her doctorate at the latter institution with research on thought experiments in 1918. She met ...
