List of notable or famous psychologists from Austria, with bios and photos, including the top psychologists born in Austria and even some popular psychologists who immigrated to Austria. If you're trying to find out the names of famous Austrian psychologists then this list is the perfect resource for you. These psychologists are among the most prominent in their field, and information about each well-known psychologist from Austria is included when available.
Examples of people on this list include Sigmund Freud and Otto Rank.
This historic psychologists from Austria list can help answer the questions "Who are some Austrian psychologists of note?" and "Who are the most famous psychologists from Austria?" These prominent psychologists of Austria may or may not be currently alive, but what they all have in common is that they're all respected Austrian psychologists.
Use this list of renowned Austrian psychologists to discover some new psychologists that you aren't familiar with. Don't forget to share this list by clicking one of the social media icons at the top or bottom of the page.
Alfred Adler (; German: [หaหdlษ]; 7 February 1870 โ 28 May 1937) was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology. His emphasis on the importance of feelings of inferiority, the inferiority complex, is recognized as an isolating element which plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, therefore he called his psychology "Individual Psychology" (Orgler 1976).
Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and who carried psychiatry into the community. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.
Age: Dec. at 67 (1870-1937)
Birthplace: Rudolfsheim-Fรผnfhaus, Vienna, Austria
Anna Freud (3 December 1895 โ 9 October 1982) was an Austrian-British psychoanalyst. She was born in Vienna, the sixth and youngest child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays. She followed the path of her father and contributed to the field of psychoanalysis. Alongside Melanie Klein, she may be considered the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.Compared to her father, her work emphasized the importance of the ego and its normal "developmental lines" as well as incorporating a distinctive emphasis on collaborative work across a range of analytical and observational contexts.After the Freud family were forced to leave Vienna in 1938, with the advent of the Nazi regime in Austria, she resumed her psychoanalytic practice and her pioneering work in child psychology in London, establishing the Hampstead Child Therapy Course and Clinic in 1952 (now renamed the Anna Freud National Centre for Children and Families) as a centre for therapy, training and research work.
Bruno Bettelheim (August 28, 1903 โ March 13, 1990) was an Austrian-born self-proclaimed psychologist, public intellectual and author who spent most of his academic and clinical career in the United States. An early writer on autism, Bettelheim's work focused on the education of emotionally disturbed children, as well as Freudian psychology more generally. Imprisoned by the Nazis in the 1930s, he arrived in the United States as a refugee under a program for scholars fleeing Europe. In the U.S., he later gained a position as professor at the University of Chicago and director of the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School for Disturbed Children, and after 1973 taught at Stanford University.Bettelheim theorized that children with behavioral and emotional disorders were not born that way, and could be "cured" through extended psychoanalytic therapy, treatment that rejected the use of psychotropic drugs and shock therapy. During the 1960s and 1970s he had an international reputation in such fields as autism, child psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Much of his work was discredited after his death due to fraudulent academic credentials, allegations of abusive treatment of patients under his care, and accusations of plagiarism. Bettelheim's ideas, which grew out of Freud's, about alleged subconscious injury caused by mothers of troubled children are now seen as particularly damaging.
The University of Chicago was later criticized for not providing their normal oversight during Bettelheim's tenure. Chicago area psychiatrists were also later criticized for knowing at least some of what was occurring regarding the physical abuse of patients, and not taking effective action.
Egon Brunswik Edler von Korompa (18 March 1903, Budapest โ 7 July 1955, Berkeley, California) was a psychologist who made contributions to functionalism and the history of psychology.
Else Frenkel-Brunswik (August 18, 1908 in Lemberg โ March 31, 1958 in Berkeley, California, USA) was a Polish-Austrian Jewish psychologist. She was forced to leave Poland and later Austria as a result of anti-Jewish persecution. She is best known for her contributions to The Authoritarian Personality (1950), her collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. It is considered a milestone work in personality theory and social psychology.
Ernest Dichter (14 August 1907 โ 21 November 1991) was an American psychologist and marketing expert known as the "father of motivational research." Dichter pioneered the application of Freudian psychoanalytic concepts and techniques to business โ in particular to the study of consumer behavior in the marketplace. Ideas he established were a significant influence on the practices of the advertising industry in the twentieth century. Dichter promised the "mobilisation and manipulation of human needs as they exist in the consumer". As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas.
