Relational Therapy and the Feminist Movement
The Personal Is, Indeed, Political by Susan Gutwill “First become a blessing to yourself that you may be a blessing to others.” -Samson Raphael Hirsch For thirty years now, whenever I enter my office,...
View ArticleSeptember 23: Freud’s Last Day
After suffering multiple surgeries over the course of sixteen years for cancer of the jaw, Sigmund Freud committed suicide with morphine injections in London on this date in 1939, with the help of a...
View ArticleDecember 7: Noam Chomsky
Linguist, philosopher, and political radical Noam Chomsky was born in Philadelphia on this date in 1928. A professor at MIT for 55 years and the author of more than 100 books, Chomsky opened up a...
View ArticleMarch 24: Wilhelm Reich
Radical psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who tried to integrate Freudian and Marxist theory but ended his career pursuing pseudoscientific theories and being harassed and ultimately imprisoned by the U.S....
View ArticleMay 13: Preventing Suicide
Edwin S. Shneidman, a psychologist who co-founded America’s first comprehensive suicide prevention center in Los Angeles, was born in York, Pennsylvania on this date in 1918. Shneidman was a pioneer in...
View ArticleMarch 22: A Father of Psychopharmacology
Nathan S. Kline, a psychiatrist credited with founding the field of psychopharmacology, was born on this date in 1916. In 1953, he explored the use of reserpine, a new tranqilizer, to treat...
View ArticleMarch 30: Psychoanalysis for Kids
Melanie Klein, the first person to use traditional psychoanalysis with young children, was born in Austria on this date in 1882. Klein became a psychoanalyst after World War I and moved to Great...
View ArticleApril 13: CIA Mind Control — and Sidney Gottlieb
The Central Intelligence Agency launched MK-Ultra, a covert investigation into the behavioral manipulation of human beings through drugs, hypnosis, abuse, sensory deprivation, and torture on this date...
View ArticleMay 12: Erik Erikson
Erik 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...
View ArticleJune 11: The Social Roots of Thinking
Soviet 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...
View ArticleSeptember 27: A Founder of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy
Albert 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...
View ArticleOctober 1: Jerome Bruner and Cognitive Psychology
Psychologist 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,...
View ArticleOctober 20: Dr. Joyce Brothers
America’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...
View ArticleRational Emotive Behavioral Therapy and Jewish Thought
by Ronald Pies, MD drawing by Sarah Glidden “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...
View ArticleApril 27: The First International Psychoanalytic Congress
A 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...
View ArticleMay 10: Margaret Mahler’s Child Psychology
Psychoanalyst 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...
View ArticleJuly 22: Augusta Fox Bronner and Juvenile Deliquency
Psychologist 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...
View ArticleNovember 8: Therese Benedek and the Psychosexual Life of Women
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...
View ArticleFebruary 12: Kurt Lewin and Social Psychology
Kurt Lewin, a German founder of social psychology and experimental psychology, and one of the first psychologists to write about group dynamics and organizational development, died at 56 on this date...
View ArticleThe Urge for Fame: Does It Fade?
by Dusty Sklar “Yet when I surveyed all that my hands had done and what I had toiled to achieve, everything was meaningless, a chasing after the wind; nothing was gained under the sun.”...
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