Famous Psychologists

Soren Kierkegaard

(1813-1855) Danish philosopher, theologian, poet, social critic and religious author who is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.He critiqued much of the dominant Christian ideology of the day and undertook ideological explorations seen as the birth of existentialism.

Francis Galton

(1822-1911) English Victorian progressive, polymath, sociologist, psychologist, anthropologist, eugenicist, tropical explorer, geographer, inventor, meteorologist, proto-geneticist, psychometrician, and statistician. He also created the statistical concept of correlation and widely promoted regression toward the mean. He was the first to apply statistical methods to the study of human differences and inheritance of intelligence, and introduced the use of questionnaires and surveys for collecting data on human communities, which he needed for genealogical and biographical works and for his anthropometric studies.

Wilhelm Wundt

(1832-1920) German physician, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He, who noted psychology as a science apart from biology and philosophy, was the first person to ever call himself a psychologist He is known as the "father of experimental psychology".

William James

(1842-1910) American philosopher and psychologist who was also trained as a physician. The first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States, he was one of the leading thinkers of the late nineteenth century and is believed by many to be one of the most influential philosophers the United States has ever produced, while others have labelled him the "Father of American psychology".

G. Stanley Hall

(1846-1924) American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory.

Ivan Pavlov

(1849-1936) Russian psychologist known for his works in classical conditioning, transmarginal inhabition, and behavior modification. He was also known as the father of physiology and his "instinct for research".

Hermann Ebbinghaus

(1850-1909) German psychologist who pioneered the experimental study of memory, and is known for his discovery of the forgetting curve and the spacing effect. He was also the first person to describe the learning curve.

Sigmund Freud

(1856-1939) Austrian neurologist best known for developing the theories and techniques of psychoanalysis; a method through which an analyst unpacks unconscious conflicts based on the free associations, dreams and fantasies of the patient. His theories on child sexuality, libido and the ego, among other topics, were some of the most influential academic concepts of the 20th century.

Alfred Binet

(1857-1911) French psychologist who invented the first practical intelligence test, the ___-Simon scale. His main goal was to identify students who needed special help with the school curriculum.

John Dewey

(1859-1952) American philosopher, psychologist, Georgist, and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. He is one of the primary figures associated with the philosophy of pragmatism and is considered one of the founders of functional psychology.

Hugo Münsterburg

(1863-1916) German-American psychologist who was one of the pioneers in applied psychology, extending his research and theories to industrial, organizational, legal, medical, clinical, educational and business settings. Münsterberg encountered hardship during the World War I due to battling between his loyalty to America and his homeland.

Charles Spearman

(1863-1945) English psychologist known for work in statistics, as a pioneer of factor analysis, and for his rank correlation coefficient. He also did seminal work on models for human intelligence, including his theory that disparate cognitive test scores reflect a single General intelligence factor and coining the term g factor.

Alfred Adler

(1870-1937) Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology who emphasized the importance of the inferiority complex. He considered human beings as an individual whole, calling his psychology "Individual Psychology".

Edward Thorndike

(1874-1949) American psychologist whose work on Comparative psychology and the learning process led to the theory of connectionism and helped lay the scientific foundation for modern educational psychology. He also worked on solving industrial problems, such as employee exams and testing.

Carl Gustav Jung

(1875-1961) Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. His work has been influential not only in psychiatry but also in philosophy, anthropology, archaeology, literature, and religious studies. He was a prolific writer, though many of his works were not published until after his death. He created some of the best known psychological concepts, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and extraversion and introversion.

John Watson

(1878-1958) American psychologist who established the psychological school of behaviorism. He promoted a change in psychology through his address "Psychology as the Behaviorist Views it". Through his behaviorist approach, Watson conducted research on animal behavior, child rearing, and advertising and conducted the controversial "Little Albert" experiment

Ernest Jones

(1879-1958) British neurologist and psychoanalyst, and Sigmund Freud's official biographer. Jones was the first English-speaking practitioner of psychoanalysis and became its leading exponent in the English-speaking world

Henri Wallon

(1879-1962) French psychologist who fostered the concept of dialectical materialism in psychological studies. He is most known for his theory of child development and his Marxist ideology.

Max Wertheimer

(1880-1943) Austro-Hungarian psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. Wertheimer is also known for his work Productive Thinking, as well as his idea of Phi Phenomenon. Both contributed to his collaboration on Gestalt psychology.

Melanie Klein

(1882-1960) Austrian-British psychoanalyst who devised novel therapeutic techniques for children that had an impact on child psychology and contemporary psychoanalysis. She was a leading innovator in theorizing object relations theory.

Otto Rank

(1884-1939) Austrian psychoanalyst, writer, teacher, and one of Sigmund Freud's closest colleagues for 20 years, a prolific writer on psychoanalytic themes, an editor of the two most important analytic journals, managing director of Freud's publishing house and a creative theorist and therapist. Rank had a successful career as a lecturer, writer and therapist in France and the United States for the last 14 years of his life.

Sabina Speilrein

(1885-1942) Russian physician and one of the first female psychoanalysts known for her relation with Jung, Freud, and Piaget. Her best known and perhaps most influential published work in the field of psychoanalysis is the essay titled "Destruction as the Cause of Coming Into Being", written in German in 1912. Although she has been mainly remembered on account of her romantic relationship with Jung, she is now increasingly recognized as an important and innovative thinker who was marginalized in history because of her unusual eclecticism, refusal to join factions, feminist approach to psychology, and her death in the Holocaust.

Karen Horney

(1885-1952) German psychoanalyst whose theories questioned some traditional Freudian views. This was particularly true of her theories of sexuality and of the instinct orientation of psychoanalysis. She is credited with founding feminist psychology in response to Freud's theory of penis envy. She disagreed with Freud about inherent differences in the psychology of men and women, and she traced such differences to society and culture rather than biology.

Kurt Lewin

(1890-1947) German-American psychologist, known as one of the modern pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. Kurt Lewin, exiled from the land of his birth, made a new life for himself, defining himself and his contributions within three lenses of analysis; applied research, action research, and group communication were his major offerings to the field of communication.

Fritz Perls

(1893-1970) German-born psychiatrist and psychotherapist. His approach to psychotherapy is related to, but not identical to, Gestalt psychology, and it is different from Gestalt theoretical psychotherapy; The core of the Gestalt Therapy process is enhanced awareness of sensation, perception, bodily feelings, emotion, and behavior, in the present moment. Relationship is emphasized, along with contact between the self, its environment, and the other.

Alfred Kinsey

(1894-1956) American biologist, professor of entomology and zoology, and sexologist who, in 1947, founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University, now known as the ____ Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. He is best known for writing Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), also known as the ____ Reports, as well as the ____ scale. His research on human sexuality, the foundation of the field of sexology, provoked controversy in the 1940s and 1950s. His work has influenced social and cultural values in the United States, as well as internationally.

Anna Freud

(1895-1982) Following in the footsteps of her father, she has majorly contributed to the world of psychoanalysis. Similar to Melanie Klein, she is considered to be founder of psychoanalytic child psychology and emphasized the importance of the ego and its ability to be trained socially.

Lev Vygotsky

(1896-1934) Soviet psychologist, the founder of a theory of human cultural and bio-social development commonly referred to as cultural-historical psychology, and leader of the ____Circle. His main work was in developmental psychology, and he proposed a theory of the development of higher cognitive functions in children that saw reasoning as emerging through practical activity in a social environment.

Jean Piaget

(1896-1980) Swiss psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".

Gordon Allport

(1897-1967) American psychologist who was one of the first psychologists to focus on the study of the personality, and is often referred to as one of the founding figures of personality psychology.

Margaret Mahler

(1897-1985) Hungarian physician, who later became interested in psychiatry. She was a central figure on the world stage of psychoanalysis. Her main interest was in normal childhood development, but she spent much of her time with psychiatric children and how they arrive at the "self." She developed the separation-individuation theory of child development.

Erich Fromm

(1900-1980) German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was associated with the Frankfurt School of critical theory.

Milton Erickson

(1901-1980) American psychiatrist and psychologist specializing in medical hypnosis and family therapy. He is noted for his approach to the unconscious mind as creative and solution-generating. He is also noted for influencing brief therapy, strategic family therapy, family systems therapy, solution focused brief therapy, and neuro-linguistic programming.

Jacques Lacan

(1901-1981) French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist who has been called "the most controversial psycho-analyst since Freud". His ideas had a significant impact on critical theory, literary theory, linguistics, 20th-century French philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, film theory and clinical psychoanalysis.

Carl Rogers

(1902-1987) American psychologist and among the founders of the humanistic approach (or client-centered approach) to psychology. Rogers is widely considered to be one of the founding fathers of psychotherapy research and his person-centered approach, his own unique approach to understanding personality and human relationships, found wide application in various domains such as psychotherapy and counseling (client-centered therapy), education (student-centered learning), organizations, and other group settings.

Rensis Likert

(1903-1981) American administrator and organizational psychologist best known for survey research methods and for the ____ Scale, a psychometric scale commonly involved in research using questionnaires. He was also known for his support of interdisciplinary collaborations and emphasis on using social science research to effect positive change.

Konrad Lorenz

(1903-1989) Austrian zoologist, ethologist, and ornithologist. He shared the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch. He is often regarded as one of the founders of modern ethology, developing an approach that began with an earlier generation.

B. F. Skinner

(1904-1990) American psychologist, behaviorist, author, inventor, and social philosopher. He considered free will an illusion and human action the result of consequences of the same action. If the consequences are bad, there is a high chance that the action will not be repeated; however if the consequences are good, the actions that led to it will become more probable, this is called principle of reinforcement.

George Kelly

(1905-1967) American psychologist, therapist, educator and personality theorist. He is considered the father of cognitive clinical psychology and best known for his theory of personality, Personal Construct Psychology.

Harry Harlow

(1905-1981) American psychologist best known for his maternal-separation, dependency needs, and social isolation experiments on rhesus monkeys, which manifested the importance of care-giving and companionship in social and cognitive development. Harlow's experiments were controversial; they included cultivating infant monkeys in isolation chambers for up to 24 months, from which they emerged intensely disturbed. Some researchers cite the experiments as a factor in the rise of the animal liberation movement in the United States.

Viktor Frankl

(1905-1997) Austrian neurologist and psychiatrist as well as a Holocaust survivor. He was the founder of logotherapy, which is a form of existential analysis, the "Third Viennese School of Psychotherapy".

John Bowlby

(1907-1990) British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst, notable for his interest in child development and for his pioneering work in attachment theory. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Bowlby as the 49th most cited psychologist of the 20th century.

Solomon Asch

(1907-1996) Polish gestalt psychologist and pioneer in social psychology in the United States. He created seminal pieces of work in impression formation, prestige suggestion, conformity, and many other topics in social psychology.

Abraham Maslow

(1908-1970) American psychologist who was best known for creating ____'s hierarchy of needs, a theory of psychological health predicated on fulfilling innate human needs in priority, culminating in self-actualization. He stressed the importance of focusing on the positive qualities in people, as opposed to treating them as a "bag of symptoms."

Rollo May

(1909-1994) American existential psychologist and author of the influential book Love and Will. Alongside Viktor Frankl, he is often associated with humanistic psychology, existentialist philosophy and was a major proponent of existential psychotherapy.

Roger Sperry

(1913-1994) American neuropsychologist, neurobiologist and Nobel laureate who, with David Hunter Hubel and Torsten Nils Wiesel, won the 1981 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for his work with split-brain research. He also pioneered the inception of the Chemoaffinity Hypothesis; neurons make connections with their targets based on interactions with specific molecular markers and, therefore, that the initial wiring diagram of an organism is (indirectly) determined by its genotype.

Mary Ainsworth

(1913-1999) American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in early emotional attachment with the Strange Situation design, as well as her work in the development of attachment theory.

Albert Ellis

(1913-2007) American psychologist who, in 1955, developed Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy. He is considered to be one of the originators of the cognitive revolutionary paradigm shift in psychotherapy and the founder of cognitive-behavioral therapies.

Jerome Bruner

(1915-PRESENT) American psychologist who has made significant contributions to human cognitive psychology and cognitive learning theory in educational psychology. He is currently a senior research fellow at the New York University School of Law.

Virginia Satir

(1916-1988) American author and social worker, known especially for her approach to family therapy and her work with family reconstruction. She is known as the "Mother of Family Therapy"

Hans Eysenck

(1916-1997) German psychologist who spent his professional career in Great Britain. He is best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, although he worked in a wide range of areas within psychology.

Herbert Simon

(1916-2001) American political scientist, economist, sociologist, psychologist, and computer scientist whose research ranged across the fields of cognitive psychology, cognitive science, computer science, public administration, economics, management, philosophy of science, sociology, and political science, unified by studies of decision-making. With almost a thousand highly cited publications, he was one of the most influential social scientists of the twentieth century.

David McClelland

(1917-1998) American psychologist, noted for his work on Need Theory. He published a number of works during the 1950s and the 1990s and developed new scoring systems for the Thematic Apperception Test and its descendants.

Urie Bronfenbrenner

(1917-2005) Russian-American developmental psychologist who is most known for his ecological systems theory of child development. His research and his theory was key in changing the perspective of developmental psychology by calling attention to the large number of environmental and societal influences on child development.

Leon Festinger

(1919-1989) American social psychologist, perhaps best known for cognitive dissonance and social comparison theory. His theories and research are credited with repudiating the previously dominant behaviorist view of social psychology by demonstrating the inadequacy of stimulus-response conditioning accounts of human behavior.

Timothy Leary

(1920-1996) American psychologist and writer known for advocating psychedelic drugs. He conducted experiments under the Harvard Psilocybin Project during American legality of LSD and psilocybin, resulting in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment.

Paul Watzlawick

(1921-2007) Austrian-American family therapist, psychologist, communications theorist, and philosopher. A theoretician in communication theory and radical constructivism, he commented in the fields of family therapy and general psychotherapy, also believing that people create their own suffering in the very act of trying to fix their emotional problems.

Aaron Beck

(1921-PRESENT) American psychiatrist regarded as the father of cognitive therapy and for his pioneering theories that have been used widely in the treatment of clinical depression. He also developed self-report measures of depression and anxiety including ___ Depression Inventory, ____ Hopelessness Scale, ____ Scale for Suicidal Ideation, ____ Anxiety Inventory, and ____ Youth Inventories.

Alice Miller

(1923-2010) Swiss psychologist who is noted for her books on parental child abuse. Her book "The Drama of the Gifted Child" caused a sensation and became an international bestseller in 1981. Her views on the consequences of child abuse became highly influential. In her books she departed from psychoanalysis, charging it with being similar to the poisonous pedagogies.

William Glasser

(1925-2013) American psychologist who developed of Reality Therapy and Choice Theory. His ideas, which focus on personal choice, personal responsibility and personal transformation, are considered controversial by mainstream psychiatrists, who focus instead on classifying psychiatric syndromes as "illnesses", and who often prescribe psychotropic medications to treat mental disorders.

Lawrence Kohlerg

(1927-1987) American psychologist best known for his theory of stages of moral development. Even though it was considered unusual in his era, he decided to extend Jean Piaget's account of children's moral development from twenty-five years earlier.

R. D. Laing

(1927-1989) Scottish psychiatrist who wrote extensively on mental illness - in particular, the experience of psychosis. His views on the causes and treatment of serious mental dysfunction, greatly influenced by existential philosophy, ran counter to the psychiatric orthodoxy of the day by taking the expressed feelings of the individual patient or client as valid descriptions of lived experience rather than simply as symptoms of some separate or underlying disorder. He was associated with the anti-psychiatry movement, although he rejected the label and politically regarded as a thinker of the "New Left."

Edgar Schein

(1928-PRESENT) American psychologist and professor at MIT that has made a notable mark on the field of organizational development in many areas, including career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture. The three distinct levels are artifacts and behaviors, espoused values, and assumptions.

Nathaniel Branden

(1930-2014) Canadian-American psychotherapist and writer known for his work in the psychology of self-esteem. A former associate and romantic partner of Ayn Rand, Branden also played a prominent role in the 1960s in promoting Rand's philosophy, Objectivism. Rand and Branden split acrimoniously in 1968, after which Branden focused on developing his own psychological theories and modes of therapy.

Stanley Milgram

(1933-1984) American social psychologist, best known for his controversial experiment on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale.

Philip Zimbardo

(1933-PRESENT) American psychologist and a professor emeritus at Stanford University. He became known for his 1971 Stanford prison experiment and has since authored various introductory psychology books, textbooks for college students, and other notable works, including The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox and the The Time Cure. He is also the founder and president of the Heroic Imagination Project.

Paul Ekman

(1934-PRESENT) American psychologist who is a pioneer in the study of emotions and their relation to facial expressions. He has created an "atlas of emotions" with more than ten thousand facial expressions, and has gained a reputation as "the best human lie detector in the world".

Robert Hare

(1934-PRESENT) Canadian researcher in the field of criminal psychology. He developed the __ Psychopathy Checklist, used to assess cases of psychopathy.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

(1934-PRESENT) Croatian psychologist and distinguished professor noted for his work in the study of happiness and creativity, but is best known as the architect of the notion of flow and for his years of research and writing on the topic. His works were influential and frequently cited.

Daniel Kahneman

(1934-PRESENT) Israeli-American psychologist notable for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making, as well as behavioral economics, for which he was awarded the 2002 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. His empirical findings challenge the assumption of human rationality prevailing in modern economic theory.

Carol Gilligan

(1936-PRESENT) American feminist, ethicist, and psychologist best known for her work with and against Lawrence Kohlberg on ethical community and ethical relationships, and certain subject-object problems in ethics. Despite being Kohlberg's research assistant, she argued that his stages of moral development were male-oriented, which limited their ability to be generalized to women in particular. She thus proposed her theory of stages of female moral development based on her idea of the two kinds of moral voices; masculine and the feminine.

Julia Kristeva

(1941-PRESENT) Bulgarian-French philosopher, literary critic, psychoanalyst, sociologist, and feminist who became influential in international critical analysis, cultural theory and feminism after publishing her first book Semeiotikè in 1969. Her sizable body of work includes books and essays which address intertextuality, the semiotic, and abjection, in the fields of linguistics, literary theory and criticism, psychoanalysis, biography and autobiography, political and cultural analysis, art and art history.

Martin Seligman

(1942-PRESENT) American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books. Since the late 90's, he has been an avid promoter within the scientific community for the field of positive psychology. His theory of learned helplessness is popular among scientific and clinical psychologists.

Elizabeth Loftus

(1944-PRESENT) American cognitive psychologist and expert on human memory. She has conducted extensive research on the malleability of human memory.

Robert Cialdini

(1945-PRESENT) American psychologist, author, and speaker who is best known for his 1984 book on persuasion and marketing, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The book, that has been sold over two million copies and has been translated into twenty-six languages, focuses on his theory of influence, based on the principles of reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, authority, liking, and scarcity.

Kay Redfield Jamison

(1946-PRESENT) American clinical psychologist and writer. Her work has centered on bipolar disorder, which she has had since her early adulthood.

Robert Sternberg

(1949-PRESENT) American cognitive psychologist and professor. He is best known for his triarchic theory of intelligence and a triangular theory of love. He is the co-creator of the investment theory of creativity, which states that creative people buy low and sell high in the world of ideas, and a propulsion theory of creative contributions, which states that creativity is a form of leadership.

Ken Wilber

(1949-PRESENT) American writer, philosopher, and public speaker. He has written and lectured about philosophy, sociology, ecology, developmental psychology, spirituality, and mysticism.

Phil McGraw

(1950-PRESENT) American television personality, author, psychologist, and the host of the television show Dr. Phil, which debuted in 2002. He earned the name "Dr.Phil" and celebrity status from appearing on the Oprah Winfrey show.

David Buss

(1953-PRESENT) American professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, known for his evolutionary psychology research on human sex differences in mate selection.

Steven Pinker

(1954-PRESENT) Canadian-born American experimental psychologist and one of the world's foremost writers on language, mind, and human nature.

Simon Baron-Cohen

(1958-PRESENT) British professor, psychologist, and neurologist who has worked on autism, including the hypothesis that autism involves degrees of mind-blindness and his later hypothesis that autism is an extreme form of what he calls the "male brain", which involved a re-conceptualisation of typical psychological sex differences in terms of empathising-systemising theory.

Alhazen

(965 A.D-1040 A.D) Arab polymath and philosopher who made significant contributions to the principles of optics, astronomy, mathematics, meteorology, visual perception and the scientific method. He dealt at length with the theory of various physical phenomena like shadows, eclipses, the rainbow, and speculated on the physical nature of light and the first to describe accurately the various parts of the eye and give a scientific explanation of the process of vision among many other theories and discoveries.