~ Famous Psychologists ~

[MysteRy]

Herbert Simon



“There are no morals about technology at all. Technology expands our ways of thinking about things, expands our ways of doing things. If we’re bad people we use technology for bad purposes and if we’re good people we use it for good purposes” – Herbert Simon.

Herbert Alexander Simon was a notable and learned personality. He was an accomplished psychologist, economist, sociologist as well as an American politician. Born on June 15th, 1916, he was also a well-known professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His published works consists of over one thousand research papers on various fields comprising of sociology, management, economics, cognitive science and philosophy of science. He is also regarded as one of the most prominent social scientists of the 20th century. Herbert Simon was also known for creating the terms of satisficing and bounded rationality

Simon was a very intelligent child. He acquired his early education from a public school in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. As a school student, he was very interested in science. He also enjoyed doing schoolwork. He became interested in studying social sciences through reading his uncle’s books of economics and psychology at an early age. His uncle was a student of economics at University of Madison, Wisconsin at that time. Simon acquired his BA and Ph.D. in political science from University of Chicago in 1936 and 1943, respectively. He studied there under the supervision of Charles Edward Merriam and Harold Lasswell. Later, he was also awarded an honorary doctorate degree in law from Harvard University. He started his academic career from University of California, Berkeley by attaining the position of a director in a research group. After that, he served as a professor of political science at the Illinois Institute of Technology where he taught from 1942 to 1949. He was also the chairman of political science department of the institute during the same period. He studied mathematical economics with David Hawkins and created Hawkins-Simon theorem through which he proved the conditions for the existence of positive solution vectors for input-output matrices. This accomplishment led him to creating the best way of studying problem solving. He proposed that that simulating problem solving with computer programs is the most innovative method to study it. He also became interested in developing computer simulation to study human cognition. Following that, he became one of the founding members of The Society for General Systems Research. Simon’s profound works on decision making was also the foundation stone of his research works. He invented Logic theory machine and general problem solver in 1956 and 1957, respectively. He was also the pioneer of “Artificial Intelligence”.

He had been bestowed with numerous honors and awards including the “ACM’S Tuning Award” for his valuable contributions in the psychology of human cognition, artificial intelligence and list processing. Other awards include the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, National Medal of Science as well as the Award for outstanding contributions to psychology from the prestigious American Psychological Association. He died on February 9th, 2001, at the age of 84.

[MysteRy]

Hermann Ebbinghaus



“Mental states of every kind, – sensations, feelings, ideas, – which were at one time present in consciousness and then have disappeared from it, have not with their disappearance absolutely ceased to exist.”- Herman Ebbinghaus

Herman Ebbinghaus was a known German psychologist. He was the pioneer in the experimental study of memory as well as discovering spacing effect and the forgetting curve. Born on January 24th, 1850, in Barmen, Germany he was the son of a rich merchant. He acquired his early education from town gymnasium ant then attended University of Bon in 1867 at the age of 17. He studied philology and history as his main subjects at this university at which time he became interested in studying philosophy. He wasn’t able continue pursuing philosophy as a proper degree because Franco-Prussian war broke out. He served in the Prussian army during this war. After serving for a brief time span in the army, he completed his thesis on “Philosophy of The Unconscious”. He acquired his doctorate at the age of 23 on August 16th, 1873. After the completion of his PhD he started tutoring students in England and France to earn his living.

Herman Ebbinghaus made a profound impact on study of memory and intelligence testing. He used the experimentation to study higher mental processes. He also studied learning curve and analyzed that maintenance rehearsal and acoustic encoding should be applied for effective learning though he faced certain limitations in the process of conducting his ground-breaking research on memory. The major limitation was that he was the only subject in the study. Naturally, this was an obstacle in studying the trends of the whole population. Also, this was a major shortcoming in proving the external validity of the study, despite, the fact that it was internally valid. Ebbinghaus tried to restrict his personal significance to keep the experiment free from biases but failed to do so. This also proved that it is a tough job to be the researcher as well as the subject at the same time. It is next to impossible in experimentation to maintain neutrality in this situation. The studies on the learning curve conducted by Ebbinghaus proved that the learning pattern of individuals showed a sharp decline after their first attempt. An individual’s capacity to retain information begins to slow down after the first trial. The learning curve shows an exponential increase similar to the forgetting curve. Ebbinghaus also gave the concept of serial position effect which consists of recency and primacy as its major ideas. The recency effect described the recalling of the latest information stored in the short term memory, whereas, the primacy effect is related to information retrieval from long term memory

Ebbinghaus was also the pioneer of sentence completion exercises. It was developed by to gauge the mental abilities of schoolchildren in sentence structuring. He also discovered optical illusion which occurs due to the relative size perception. This concept is used in conducting studies on cognitive psychology. Ebbinghaus was an accomplished psychologist who laid firm foundations for intelligence testing through his ground breaking researches on memory. He died on February 26th, 1909.

[MysteRy]

Hugo Münsterberg



Hugo Munsterberg was the pioneer of applied psychology. He was a prominent German-American psychologist whose ground-breaking works in applied psychology comprised of various researches on legal, medical, clinical, educational and industrial fields. Born on June 1st, 1863, into a Jewish family, as a child he showed interests in various fields including music, poetry, literature, foreign languages and acting. He acquired his early education from gymnasium of Dazing from where he graduated in 1882. He obtained his PhD in physiological psychology from University of Leipzig in 1885, under the supervision of Wilhelm Wundt. He then decided to study medicine following the advice of Wilhelm Wundt. He studied at University of Heidelberg for his medical degree and graduated in 1887 from there. He started his academic career at the University of Freiberg as a P.D. lecturer. He initiated a psychology laboratory at the University of Freiberg as well. Then, he began publishing research papers on various topics comprising of learning, perception, memory and attention processes. He got promoted to the designation of assistant professor at the University of Freiberg in 1891. He attended of the first international congress of psychology in the same year where he met the famous American psychologist, William James. William James invited him to Harvard University to serve as a chair of psychology for a term of three years. Hugo Munsterberg accepted his invitation. He attained the responsibility of supervising the psychology graduate students as well. He became a remarkably renowned teacher in the university who was liked by most of his graduate psychology students. He came back to Freiberg in 1895 due to the love of his homeland.

Hugo Munsterberg was a well-known personality among the scientific community, academic world and general public due to his extensive range of works in the field of applied psychology. He studied and researched the implications of practical situations through the field of applied psychology. According to the views of Munsterberg it is the foremost responsibility of psychologists to reveal the applications of psychological aspects in the real life situations. Hugo Munsterberg was also the first psychologist to apply the concepts of psychology to the legal field. This led him to the development of forensic psychology. His contributions to psychology also included the application of psychological principles to clinical psychology.

Hugo Munsterberg published a book entitled as “On the Witness Stand” in 1908 which stirred a lot of controversies. This book is a collection of his previously published researches related to forensic psychology. He analyzed different psychological factors that are responsible for altering the outcomes of trials, in this book. His work on clinical psychology consisted of theories regarding psychophysical parallelism. Munsterberg proposed the parallel connection between brain process and physical processes. He asserted that certain types of mental illnesses occur through cellular- metabolic causation. These illnesses were diagnosed through Munsterberg’s behavioristic observations which were formed by conducting interviews from the subjects. He also worked on industrial psychology and penned down books including ‘Vocation and Learning’ and ‘Psychology and Industrial Efficiency’ in 1912 and 1913 respectively. He died on December 19th, 1916, at the age of 53.

[MysteRy]

Ivan Pavlov



“It goes without saying that the desire to accomplish the task with more confidence, to avoid wasting time and labour, and to spare our experimental animals as much as possible, made us strictly observe all the precautions taken by surgeons in respect to their patients.” -Ivan Pavlov

Ivan Pavlov was one of the most eminent Russian physiologists. He was known for his ground breaking works in classical conditioning, transmarginal inhibition and behavior modification. Born on 26th September, 1849. He was intellectually gifted since his childhood. He was the father of modern Russian physiology. His intellectual giftedness was accompanied with the very unusual energy that he possessed known famously as “the instinct for research”. He decided to leave behind his career in a religious center and decided to study science. After that, he decided to study mathematics and physics and enrolled himself at the University of St. Petersburg for studying the field of natural science. He discovered many aspects of sciences and physiology through his keen observations that were transferred from one generation to the next generation. Pavlov also has the honor of winning Nobel Prize for physiology as well as medicine in the year 1904.

He did his early schooling from Ryazan church school. After which, he attended the local theological seminary but left it without completion to attend the University of St. Petersberg. He got a job as a laboratory assistant to with professor Ustimovich at the veterinary institute in the physiological department. Ivan Pavlov examined the human circulatory system as a requirement to complete his medical dissertation for a time period of two years. Following that, he was invited by a very well-known Russian clinician in 1878 to work as the chief of the clinic in his physiological laboratory. Ivan Pavlov graduated with a first class distinction and a gold medal from the medical military academy achieved by his research work. Then, he also earned a fellowship at the Academy for his postgraduate work. He researched extensively in the fields of neurological and physiological sciences.

Many of his research works were in the field of involuntary reflex actions, temperament and conditioning. The experiments for his research works were conducted on the digestive system of animals to examine keenly the anatomy and functioning of different parts making up the digestive system. Pavlov’s studies and observations on reflex actions were his major accomplishments in his research works, but the concept which was originally developed by Pavlov and his assistant Ivan Filippovitch Tolochinov  is “conditioned reflex”. Pavlov learnt this concept about conditioned reflex while experimenting on the phenomena of salivation rate among dogs. He learnt that when the dog was given food he would actually salivate when he saw the food despite the fact that the bell was rung. Later, due to the phenomena of conditioned reflex the dog started salivating with the bell ring rather than the sight of the food. Ivan Pavlov was the pioneer of ground breaking discoveries in the field of physiology. He had an energetic personality that helped him develop his intellectual brilliance in research. He died on 27th February, 1936.

[MysteRy]

Jacques Lacan



Jacques Lacan is considered as one of the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud. He was born on April 13, 1901. He remained one of the most influential figures in Parisian academic circles for most part of the twentieth century. His ideas have had a major influence on critical theory, literary theory, 20th-century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis. Lacan went to medical school and later studied psychoanalysis. He studied patients suffering from automatism, a psychological ailment in which the patient believes that his movements and speech are being controlled by an external force. For his doctorate in 1932, he wrote a paper drawing a connection between psychiatric medicine and psychoanalysis which became his practice throughout his lifetime.

In the early stages of his career, from 1926-53, Lacan progressed from conventional psychiatric treatment to gradual inclusion of clinical psychoanalysis. Published in 1936, the “Mirror Stage” was Lacan’s first formal contribution to the field of psychoanalysis. The essay concerns infants aged 6 to 18 months and notes that when an infant recognizes its own image in the mirror, it does not see the image as merely a reflection but as a unified being instead of “bits and pieces” that it perceives itself to be, due to motor incapacity. This, Lacan believes, leads to the formation of ego and acts as a stimulant to the child’s development.

Jacques Lacan came up with the “Theory of Three Orders”: the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real. The theory formed the backbone of the psychical subjectivity according to Lacan and his whole career revolved around developing this theory. The Imaginary consists of how we perceive others and how we perceive what they mean when they communicate with us and how we perceive from someone else’s perspective. This idea is central to the “ego formation” in the “Mirror Stage”. Symbolic order was the second idea in the theory. Lacan described it as the order of symbols, illustrations and imagery, where the individual is formed as a subject. He argued that the subconscious is governed by the order of the signifier as opposed to suppressed desires which was a common belief at the time. The Real is much more difficult to grasp. Throughout the 1960s until his death, the Real took on ever increasing number of aspects and associations. It is that which is excluded from Imaginary- Symbolic reality, elusive by nature, impossibility.

Although Jacques Lacan claimed: “It is up to you to be Lacanians if you wish. I am a Freudian”, in the years 1964-73, he drifted further from Freud and traditional psychoanalysis. His dissertation became distinctively “Lacanian”, as he became known for his neologisms and complex diagrams. Lacan endeavored to form a more exact mathematically based theory in his last years: A “meta-theory” of psychoanalysis using mathematics, casting the trio he conceived earlier (the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary) in the language of mathematics rather than linguistics. By the time of his death in 1981, Lacan had become one of the most dominant and controversial intellects in the world. His work has a profound impact not only on philosophy and psychoanalysis but even on literature and film studies.

[MysteRy]

Jean Piaget



“The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.” – Jean Piaget, The Origins of Intelligence in Children, 1953.

Jean Piaget was a well-known Swiss psychologist. Born on 9th August, 1896, he was a philosopher as well as a developmental psychologist who laid great emphasis on educating children. He emphasized that education is the savior of the future generations as well as a necessity for healthy upbringing of the entire society. He studied natural history and philosophy. While working with Alfred Binet, developer of Binet intelligence tests, Piaget noticed a pattern in a set of questions that young children consistently answered wrong. This inspired him to delve further into children’s mind. Having realized the limitations of traditional research methods when conducting psychoanalysis on children, Piaget came up with a new method of examination.  He conducted interviews where he would ask a series of standard questions and then based on their response, some non-standard questions. He reached the conclusion that the chain of reasoning in children and adults differs significantly. He observed that the knowledge that children acquire is grouped into schemas. Each new piece of information is either merged into the same schema, modifies the existing schema or creates a new schema altogether. He is mostly remembered for his contribution to research in children’s cognitive development.

Piaget observed the cognitive development of his own children and came up with a model to describe the stages that children pass through in the development of intelligence and reasoning. The theory consists of four stages; (1) the sensorimotor stage (2) the preoperational stage, (3) the concrete operational stage, and (4) the formal operation stage. He concluded that children’s reasoning was not faulty but when compared to adults it was erroneous due to the limited experiences of the children about the natural and social world. Jean Piaget believed that knowledge didn’t mean to learn some facts and be able to repeat them but to make connections and to understand how it all fits together. Thus he concluded that efforts to introduce abstract concepts to children at a young age would not result in conceptual learning but would only lead to memorization (rote learning). Although Piaget did not know how to apply his theories to education, he was a proponent of hands-on learning.

Numerous teachers have adopted his philosophy, moving on from traditional teaching methods to more interactive tactics for subjects such as science, math, languages and social studies. Overall, his work in child cognition transformed how children, their mental capabilities and their reasoning are perceived. Piaget died at the age of 84, having given birth to new fields in science including genetic epistemology, cognitive theory, and developmental psychology among others. During his lifetime, Piaget authored numerous books and papers including The Child’s Conception of the World (1926), The Origin of Intelligence in Children (1936), and The Early Growth of Logic in the Child (1958).

[MysteRy]

Jerome Bruner



Jerome Seymour Bruner is a well-known psychologist who has made immensely meaningful contributions to cognitive learning theory and human cognitive psychology in the field of educational psychology. His other fields of interest include general philosophy of education as well as history. Born on 1st October, 1915 in New York, he did B.A in psychology from Duke University. After that, he completed master’s degree in psychology followed by a doctorate degree from Harvard University. Jerome Bruner’s first article was published in 1939 which discussed the effect of thymus on the rat’s behavior. His academic career started as a professor of psychology at the Harvard University where he served as an ardent researcher in the fields of educational and cognitive psychology. After serving at Harvard for 15 years he was offered to teach at University of Oxford in England. He accepted the offer and taught there for ten years. He came back to the United States to conduct researches in the field of developmental psychology in 1980. After that, he got an opportunity to join the faculty at the prestigious New York University. He still teaches at the university.

Bruner is one of the most influential psychologists who has laid the foundation for ground-breaking researches in cognitive psychology. He identified that sensation and perception are active processes rather than passive ones conducting a series of experiments on perception which posed a challenge to psychologists in terms of interpreting the organism’s response to stimulus externally as well as internally. The obvious result of cognitive development is thinking. The intelligent mind creates itself from experience “generic coding systems that permit one to go beyond the data to new and possibly fruitful predictions” (Bruner, 1957, p. 234). Bruner presented the view that children must adapt to the “recurrent regularities” present in their surroundings. So, according to Bruner the significant outcomes of learning must incorporate the ability to adapt and learn through personal experiences in an individual besides the formal education.  After working on these experiments he shifted his attention and time towards studying actual cognitions in the perception studies. Bruner presented his research that sheds light on the cognitive development of children in 1966 which suggests three phases of representation in cognitive development.

He has awarded with many awards and honors in recognition of his profound works in the field of psychology. Most prominently, he was awarded with distinguished scientific research award by the American Psychological Association. He has also published numerous books that reflect his varied accomplishments as a researcher and psychologist. His literary works consist of several books on cognitive psychology, educational psychology and language development. Currently he is serving as a research fellow at the New York University School of Law.

[MysteRy]

John Bowlby



John Bowlby was a notable British psychologist, psychoanalyst and psychiatrist, well known for his works on child development and the development of attachment theory. He strongly believed that behavioural problems as well as mental health issues have its deep roots in problematic early childhood. Born on 26th February, 1907 in London,  he was raised by a nanny. He belonged to an upper middle class family, so he did his schooling from a boarding school as was very common for the boys of his social status. He spent a particularly hard time at the boarding school where he suffered from lack of parental care and affection. It was this childhood suffering that led him to develop the theories on child development.

Bowlby attended Trinity College at Cambridge where he studied pre-clinical sciences and psychology. He graduated from there winning the title for outstanding intellectual performance. After that, he started studying at University College Hospital in London at the age of twenty-two. He gained his degree of medicine at the age of twenty-six. While studying medicine he enrolled at the Institute of Psychoanalysis. He graduated from there in 1937 as a qualified psychoanalyst. He was also trained in adult psychiatry from Maudsley Hoapital.

John Bowlby was the pioneer behind the development of attachmenmt theory. He presented his work entitled as “A Secure base” in 1988 in which he emphasized on the need of parental love and care for a child. Besides that, he also developed understandings in the field of evoloutionary biology, cognitive science, control systems theory, developmental psychology and biology. He worked with  renowned scientists such as Konrad Lorenz and Niko Tinbergen in the field of ethology. He developed explanatory hypothesis about human attachment behaviour by researching extensively on the ethology literature. He gave the concepts of human behavior that are environmentally stable and rejected the cupboard love attachment theory. John Bowlby described the concept of attachment as the lasting psychological connectedness between human beings. He shared his psychoanalytic view that early childhood experiences have a significant impact on the development and behavior of children in their later life. He believed that attachment also helps in survival, suggesting that children are biologically pre-programmed to create attachments with others around them in order survive in this world. He believed that attachment behaviors are present in instincts that are activated when a child faces any threatening conditions to his survival like fear, insecurity and separation.

Bowlby’s  attachment theory is very crucial in understanding social development in early childhood as it highlights factors that relate to the formation of a child’s relationships. His attachment theory consists of monotropy which reflects a child’s inborn need to form a primary bond with his mother. He also suggested that there should be a deep and intimate attachment between a child and his mother for the first two years so that the child does not face maternal deprivation in his later life. Bowlby’s last work consisted of a biography of Charles Darwin. He died on 2nd September 1990.

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John Dewey



“The good man is the man who, no matter how morally unworthy he has been, is moving to become better.”- John Dewey

John Dewey was a well-known American psychologist, western philosopher as well as an education reformer whose ideology is of exceptional significance in the social and educational reforms. He was one who laid down the foundation for the development of functional psychology. Also, he was a significant representative of the liberalism and progressive educational philosophy. Born on October 20th, 1859 in Burlington, Vermont he attended and graduated from the University of Vermont in 1879. After that, he served as a teacher at a high school in oil city in Pennsylvania. He completed PhD. from the School of Arts & Sciences at Johns Hopkins University and later accepted a position as faculty at the University of Michigan with the assistance of George Sylvester Morris. His unpublished and missing dissertation was entitled as “The Psychology of Kant.” After serving there for ten years, Dewey joined University of Chicago. He served at the university till 1904.

John Dewey was a reflective thinker. The major locus of Dewey’s philosophical pursuits throughout his research career was epistemology. This subject of philosophy is alternatively known as theory of knowledge. John Dewey was the foremost proponent of the American school of thought known as pragmatism. It is an ideology that dismisses the theory of dualistic epistemology as well as metaphysics concerning modern philosophy in approval of a naturalistic approach. The naturalistic approach viewed knowledge as coming from an active transformation of the human species to their environment. According to this view, a person should inquire about his environment and observe the world actively to drawing ideas and check if their ideas correspond to reality or not. The naturalistic approach is a process which starts off with a check or an impediment to fruitful human action, proceeds to active manipulation of the environment to test hypotheses. After the hypothesis is tested a re-adaptation of organism is issued to actively participate in the environment that permits once again for the beginning of human action. John Dewey designed and developed a wide body of work that encompasses virtually all of the major areas of philosophical concern of his time, with this ideology as his beginning point. He also wrote extensively on social issues in popular publications such as the New Republic, eventually gaining a distinction of being a top-notch social commentator.

John Dewey earned notable honors due to his flawless works in various fields. There is a school in Brooklyn named after him known as John Dewey High School. There is another charter school named after him known as the John Dewey Academy of Learning in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Dewey published several books and researches in the fields of psychology, philosophy and education. This great intellectual left the world on June 1st, 1952 at the age of 92.

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John Watson



Born on 9 January 1878 in North-Carolina, John Broadus Watson was an American psychologist who popularized behaviorism as an approach to psychology. As a student, Watson was not particularly gifted having been through a rough childhood after his father left him. His teacher, Gordon Moore, at Furman University helped him get his life back together. John moved on to University of Chicago for his doctorate. At that time, University of Chicago was a hotbed of psychology and this was where the foundation for John’s ideas about behaviorism was laid. He studied philosophy with giants like John Dewey, Moore and Tufts and became interested with psychology and animal behavior. Watson wanted to transform psychology into a science; he wanted to introduce a methodology that would make it more exact. After completing his PhD, he was offered a faculty position at the prestigious John Hopkins University where he was elevated to the chair of psychology department.

In 1913, John Watson published an article “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It”. In it he argued that psychology had become stagnant because the psychologists were focusing at inappropriate subject matters: introspection and consciousness. He proposed objective psychology of behavior that studied people’s actions or behavior and the ability to predict and manipulate it. The article came to be known as “The Behaviorist Manifesto”. Watson believed behaviorism would take psychology to the same level as other sciences. He maintained that external behavior and reaction to a particular stimuli, rather than internal mental state, provided an insight into a person’s actions. Although the article did little to sway conventional psychologists, it paved way for further development in the field.

In his early ears, Watson studied behavior of animals. Later, he turned to human behavior and emotions. One of his most controversial experiments is the “Little Albert” where he conditioned an 11 month old boy to fear a white rat by accompanying the rat with a loud clanging sound every time. The experiment was morally objectionable because the child was never deconditioned. The result of the study would have strengthened Watson’s theories but it came to light that “Albert” portrayed as a young, healthy boy was in fact mentally ill. Questions arose whether Watson knew the child’s disabilities would skew the result.

In 1915, John Watson served as the president of American Psychological Association (APA) and in 1957, he was awarded APA’s award for contribution to psychology. By 1930s, Behaviorism became the dominant approach to psychology. However, by then it was too late for John Watson who, in 1920, was caught having an affair with one of his students and was forced to resign from his post at John Hopkins. After leaving academia, John started working in an advertising agency where he applied his theories of Behaviorism and quickly rose to the ranks of vice-presidency at the agency. Although by 1950, Behaviorism began to lose its hold on psychology but some of it ideas and principles are used even today. Conditioning is still very popular for treatment of destructive behavior and to learn new skills.

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Julia Kristeva



Julia Kristeva was born on 24 July 1941 in Sliven, Bulgaria. Completing her early education in Bulgaria, Kristeva moved to Paris when she was offered a research fellowship in 1965 and has lived there ever since. Although her original interests lay in linguistics, she was deeply moved by the texts of Roland Barthes, Lacan, Todorv and Goldmann. In 1965, she became an active member of the “Tel Quel” group, publishing political interpretation of historical events. She became interested in psychoanalysis, earning her degree in 1979. Kristeva studied the analysis of Freud and Lacan and, like her contemporaries, began working as an analyst and an academic.

One of the most important contributions of Julia Kristeva is her ideas about the two components of signification in language: semiotic and symbolic. Kristeva’s semiotic, distinct from the “semiotics”, is similar to pre-Opedial infantile of Freud or pre-Mirror stage of Lacan. She believed that emotions lie in the stress, rhythm and intonation of speech or text rather than the meaning of words. As the earliest source of rhythm and tones is the maternal body, the semiotic is considered “feminine” and is associated with poetry and music. When the child enters the “Mirror Stage”, he learns to distinguish between the self and other, forming a sense of identity distinct from his mother. This is the process of separation and entry into the world of culture and language or the “symbolic”. The symbolic is associated with grammar and syntax of the language. It is the symbolic which gives the words meaning. Kristeva, moving away from Lacan’s discourse, maintains that even after entering the symbolic; the subject continues to oscillate between the two states. Moreover, she argued that female children usually identify more closely with maternal figure and in turn may retain a closer connection with the semiotic.

Kristeva’s unique background also sets the base for her work: being a Bulgarian woman in male-dominated French intellectual society drew her interest in the politics of marginalization. Her ideas had a major impact on feminism. She claims that there are three phases of feminism. The first phase, which she rejects, seeks equality of sexes disregarding the inherent sexual differences. She also rejects the second phase which terms language and culture as masculine and calls for their total abandonment. In her defense, Kristeva maintains that language and culture are what makes us speaking beings and women, being part of this group, have no need for this abandonment. The third phase, which is endorsed by Kristeva, seeks to reconceive identity and difference and their relationship.

Julia Kristeva’s contributions were recognized in the fields of psychoanalysis, linguistics, political and culture analysis and culminated in her being awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 and Hannah Arendt Award for Political Thought in 2006. She accepted the chair of linguistics at University of Paris and remains visiting faculty at Columbia University in New York. She was also bestowed with the title of “Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters” by the French government in 1990.

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Karen Horney



Karen Horney, a leading German psychoanalyst, was born 16 September 1885. She graduated from University of Berlin in 1913 with a degree in medicine. This was a time when higher education for women was not common and Karen had to face a lot of opposition in order to join the program. She had a difficult childhood. By nine, she did not consider herself pretty and decided she would have to rely on her intellect, rather than her looks, to prove herself. This made her ambitious and rebellious. She was attracted towards her brother who rebuffed her advances, sending her into first of her many bouts of depression. In 1909, Karen married Oskar Horney and had three daughters. In 1920, Karen started teaching at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Berlin. In 1926, Oskar suffered losses in his business. He soon came down with meningitis and became quite embittered. As Karen’s marriage fell apart, she fell into depression again and even considered committing suicide. By 1930, she, along with her children, moved to Brooklyn due to its large intellectual community. By this time, Karen had proven herself to be a gifted psychoanalyst, and she was offered Associate Directorship for Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis which she accepted.

Horney’s deviation from Freudian psychology led to her resigning from the post. She took up teaching at New York Medical College. Karen Horney’s theories about neurosis are considered the best that exist today. She said that neurosis was not a medical ailment, which it was considered at the time, rather a continuous process occurring occasionally during one’s lifetime. She thought it was greatly dependent on the childhood and behavior of parents towards the child, as perceived by the child, determined his/her neurosis. From her clinical practices, she identified three broad categories of a person’s neurotic needs: compliance, aggression and detachment. In “compliance” stage, a person sought affection and approval of his peers. He may also seek a partner, someone he could share his feelings with. A person in “aggression” stage may display anger or hostility to those around him. He seeks power and control. A person in “detachment” category may strive to become self-dependent, considering isolation and independence as the only way forward.

She although agreed with many of Sigmund Freud’s theories, deviated from some of them. She laid the foundations of Neo-Freudian discipline. Horney believed that sex and aggression were not the primary determinants of one’s personality, a view held by Freud. Rather, she believed in the holistic approach, maintaining that environment and social differences played a major role in the development of one’s personality. She also developed the “Self theory” to explain neurosis: a person suffering from neurosis splits himself into a despised self and an ideal self. Ideal self being unrealistic, the neurotic becomes alienated from himself and fails to reach his true potential. She founded American Institute for Psychoanalysis where her own views on psychoanalysis were taught. She kept on teaching and writing until her death in 1952. To honor her contributions to the field of psychoanalysis, Karen Horney Clinic was established in New York in 1955.

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Kay Redfield Jamison



Kay Redfield Jamison, an American psychologist and leading authority on bipolar disorder, was born on June 22, 1946. She completed her Master’s from University of California, Los Angeles in 1971 and her Ph.D. in 1975. She is credited with founding the Mood Disorders Clinic at UCLA. After teaching for several years at UCLA, she went to the John Hopkins University School of Medicine where she was offered a post as Professor of Psychiatry, the first time such a post had been offered to a psychologist.

Unbeknownst to her colleagues, Jamison herself was suffering from manic-depressive illness or bipolar disorder. It was her disorder in part that motivated her to choose this occupation. She co-authored the standard medical text on bipolar disorder, titled Manic-Depressive Illness which the American Association of Publishers nominated in 1990 as “Most Outstanding Book in Biomedical Science”. In 1995, Kay Redfield Jamison published An Unquiet Mind: Memoirs of Moods and Madness detailing her own personal experiences with the illness. The book stayed on The New York Times Bestsellers List for five months and was translated into 15 languages. By revealing her condition, Jamison took a huge professional and personal risk. She was aware that it would raise questions about her competence and professional responsibility, but she wanted to inform and educate the people. The book’s success lay in part with the simple and straightforward narrative style that she used, describing in graphic detail what it was like to live with the illness, her initial denial, resistance to treatment and spells of mania and depression and sometimes, even psychosis.

What makes Jamison stand out is not her perseverance during the affliction but her effort to overcome and reach out to others who are undergoing similar disease and giving them hope. She also authored Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and Artistic Temperament in which she studies the relation between bipolar disorder and creativity. She speaks of various great minds who, by today’s standards, would be considered bipolar or mentally ill. She talks about the seductiveness of manic state: the energy and intensity it brought. Despite the negative consequences, she said that if given a choice, she would not live without it.

Although being a psychologist herself, she often talks about her experiences with the disorder and reluctance to take lithium sometimes. It is this frankness and self-disclosure, along with her work in the field, which has made Jamison well-loved in the bipolar community and respected all over the world. Kay Redfield Jamison penned more than 100 scientific papers on mood disorders, creativity and pharmacology. She is the recipient of various national and international scientific honors and awards, and has been visiting faculty at Harvard University and University of Oxford. She is a John P. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellow. She was selected by Times Magazine as “Hero of Medicine” and was one of the five people selected for the public television series “Great Minds of Medicine”. Even for an ordinary person, her accomplishments are amazing but for a person suffering from bipolar disorder, she is a living inspiration, a beacon of hope.

[MysteRy]

Ken Wilber



“What is it in you that brings you to a spiritual teacher in the first place? It’s not the spirit in you, since that is already enlightened, and has no need to seek. No, it is the ego in you that brings you to a teacher.”- Ken Wilber

Kenneth Earl ”Ken” Wilber II is a well known American writer, public speaker and neoplatonic. Born on January 31st, 1949, he is a lecturer in a variety of versatile fields. These fields range from philosophy, developmental psychology, ecology to mysticism. He is also the pioneer behind “integral theory”, founding the Integral Institute in 1998.

Born in Oklahoma city in 1949, he started his professional education as a student of medicine at duke university. Later,during the course of his medical education he got inspired by the mesmerizing eastern literature. He left Duke to change his path and got enrolled in the University of Nebraska. He completed his bachelor’s in the fields of chemistry and biology as well as master’s in biochemistry. Wilber wrote his first book “The Spectrum of Consciousness”. The book is based on information and knowledge from various fields of study combined together. The book got published in 1977 by the company known as Quest books. Wilber also launched his journal ReVision in 1978.

Ken Wilber is an accomplished writer. He became one by keeping and maintaining a personal journal all his life. He wrote on a wide variety of topics. He wrote about sex, ecology and spirituality in 1995. The other books penned by him includes One Taste, A Theory of Everything as well as a novel entitled as Boomeritis. Wilber shifted to Boulder, Colorado, in 1987 where he worked on his Kosmos trilogy and supervised the work and functioning of the Integral Institute.

One of the most famous phenomenon developed by Wilber is AQAL. AQAL denotes the foundation of Wilber’s work. AQAL is an abbreviation for “all quadrants all levels”. It is also used as a connotation for ‘all lines’, ‘all states’ and ‘all types’. Basically, these represent the five categories of Wilber’s model of manifest existence.  Wilber believes that this model must include each of these five categories to represent completeness. He is also persistent on the idea that only such an account can be accurately called “integral”. In his essay, “Excerpt C: The Ways We Are in This Together”, Wilber elaborates AQAL as “one suggested architecture of the Kosmos”. The theory of AQAL is based on two truths doctrine that represents Buddhism. Wilber’s ideology is based on the idea, “the simple feeling of being”. Ken Wilber has a special interest in studying holons. According to Wilber’s theory, all holons have multiple lines of development or intelligence. They are comprised of cognitive, musical, spatial,aesthetic , spiritual, kinesthetic, ethical,  logical-mathematical and karmic intelligence.

Ken Wilber has also developed the concept of levels based on the lines of development . According to this theory the more highly developed you are in a particular line, the higher level you are at in that line. Wilber’s concept of the level is based on the theories of developmental psychology, including theory of cognitive development by Piaget, Kohlberg’s stages of moral development and among others. He currently works at integral spiritual center.

[MysteRy]

Konrad Lorenz



Nobel Prize Winner, dubbed the Father of Ethology, Konrad Zacharias Lorenz was an Austrian zoologist born in the November of 1903. From an early age, Lorenz fell in love with animals and by the time he reached high school, he was infatuated with the theory of evolution and wanted to pursue a career in zoology and paleontology. However, it was at the insistence of his father that Lorenz started pursuing medicine at Columbia University. It was later that he realized that embryology and comparative anatomy provided better access to the problems of evolution than paleontology ever could. During his research, Lorenz recorded observations about animal behavior of a jackdaw that he kept. The diary of his animal observation was published in 1927 in the prestigious Journal für Ornithologie. Seeing his interest, Professor Karl Buhler encouraged him to read books on animal behavior by two contradicting schools of thought: MacDougall and Watson. The study made him realize that none of these people were experts in the field of animal behavior, and it fell on him to take up the responsibility of devolving it into a new branch of science. He completed his degree from University of Vienna in 1928 and later completed Doctorate in zoology in 1933.

One of his seminal works in the field of Ethology is his studies on imprinting, an irreversible learning process early in life where visual and auditory stimuli from caregiver induces the young to emulate their guardian. Lorenz demonstrated the phenomenon by appearing before new-born ducklings and quacking like mother duck, upon which the ducklings regarded him as their mother and began tailing him. Konrad Lorenz was also responsible for putting forward an innate releasing mechanism theory. He maintained that some instinctive behavior patterns of an animal remain dormant until an external stimulus triggers it. In 1940, Lorenz joined the faculty of University of Konigsberg as Chair of Psychology. But as World War II engulfed Europe, Lorenz joined the army as a military psychologist in 1941. In 1944, he was sent to the Russian Front where he was arrested and held captive for 4 years.  In 1958, he was appointed as the Director of the Max Planck Institute for Behavior Physiology.

In 1973, Konrad Lorenz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology, along with two other early ethologists, for their discoveries in individual and social behavior patterns. At the award ceremony, Professor Borje Cronholm of Royal Karolinska Institute lauded the work done in Ethology. He said that while the understanding of lower organisms, animals and insects were significant, the new approaches to the study of the human mind and behavior that this would result in was the main reason for the Prize. It was in 1960s that Konrad’s career underwent a shift from solely study animal behavior to including human social behavior. In his book Civilized Man’s Eight Deadly Sins, he wrote that while the human race underwent development and progress, the technology did nothing to ease the suffering of mankind. He was one of the earliest scientists to point out the problem of overpopulation and its implications. His other works include King Solomon’s Ring and On Aggression. He died of kidney failure at the age of 85.