Heinz Ludwig Ansbacher

Heinz Ludwig Ansbacher (born October 21, 1904 in Frankfurt am Main , Germany; † June 22, 2006 in Burlington , Vermont , USA) was a German - American psychologist and representative of individual psychology .

Life

After graduating from high school in Frankfurt, Ansbacher worked in a brokerage firm. On October 26th 1924 he emigrated to the USA on the steamship "Mount Clay", on which he also worked as a dishwasher. After arriving in New York City , he worked for a brokerage firm on Wall Street and from 1930 attended evening lectures by Alfred Adler , which aroused his interest in psychology. He once turned to Adler for personal advice because he was not satisfied with his work and a relationship had ended shortly before. Adler encouraged him to study at a graduate school .

Through Adler he met Rowena Ripin , who had studied at the University of Vienna with Charlotte and Karl Bühler and whom he married in 1934.

Despite not having a bachelor's degree, Ansbacher was admitted to Columbia University for doctoral studies . In 1937 he received the Ph.D. with his dissertation under Robert S. Woodworth on the influence of the monetary value of objects on the perception of numbers .

Ansbacher worked from 1940 to 1943 at Brown University as an editor for Psychological Abstracts . From 1943 he investigated the effects of American war propaganda in Europe for the United States Office of War Information and created leaflets to call on the German soldiers to surrender. In 1945 Ansbacher traveled through Germany in order to document the results of psychology that could still be determined after the war during the Nazi era in Germany. This also resulted in his first personal encounter with the German Gestalt psychologist Wolfgang Metzger (due to Ansbacher's recommendation, the denazification negotiations with Metzger that took place shortly afterwards only lasted a few minutes).

After the war, Ansbacher taught from 1947 to 1970 at the University of Vermont in Burlington. During this time he also corresponded with Albert Einstein . In 1958 he took over the editing of the journal Journal of Individual Psychology , which was renamed "Individual Psychology" in 1981 and again to Journal of Individual Psychology in 1998 and received international attention among individual psychologists . As editor he was responsible for the high academic standard of the newspaper and its approach in the tradition of Alfred Adler's individual psychology until 1974.

In 1969 Ansbacher accepted honorary membership in the Alfred Adler Society (AAG) founded in 1962 by Oliver Brachfeld , Wolfgang Metzger and others. That year he also presented the AAG with a report "on the occasion of the planned establishment of an institute for the training of psychotherapists".

Ansbacher, whose wife Rowena had died in 1996, left behind four sons when he died in 2006 at the age of 101: Max, Benjamin, Theodore and Charles Ansbacher (1942-2010), who made a name for himself as an American conductor. The four brothers jointly founded the "Ansbacher Lecture", to which a well-known personality has been invited annually to the Annual Meeting of the North American Society of Adlerian Psychology , whose president was Heinz Ludwig Ansbacher.

plant

The encounter with Alfred Adler was formative for Ansbacher's life's work. In 1974 he wrote about the teleological approach of individual psychology in his memoir:

“ The five-year-old has already formed a goal in life . The question is whether it is a desirable goal. The goal must be communal and the ability to cooperate is the result of proper training. The task of individual psychology is to observe what goal a child is pursuing and how it tackles the life problems that we all have to solve. "

- Heinz Ansbacher

Heinz and Rowena Ansbacher worked directly with Alfred Adler, as his students and editors. For 30 years they wrote together on their most famous work, the trilogy of Alfred Adlers Individualpsychologie , in which they systematically analyzed and commented on Adler's work. The first edition, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler , was published in 1956 by Basic Books, New York. This book has also become a standard work on individual psychology in German-speaking countries - the fifth edition of the German-language edition was published in 2004. The couple were also well acquainted with the correspondences between individual psychology and Gestalt theory , which was expressed in the decades of continuous contact and exchange with renowned Gestalt psychologists, especially Wolfgang Metzger and Abraham S. Luchins .

literature

• Alfred Adler's individual psychology. A systematic presentation of his teaching in excerpts from his writings . Edited and explained by Heinz. L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher. 5th edition: Ernst Reinhardt Verlag, Munich Basel 2004, ISBN 978-3497017331 .
• Alfred Adler's sex theories . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1989, ISBN 3-596-26793-5 .
• Methods and process of individual psychological therapy and counseling . E. Reinhardt, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-497-01268-8 .
• Alfred Adler: Neuroses. Case histories for diagnosis and treatment . Edited by Heinz L. Ansbacher and Robert F. Antoch. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1994, ISBN 3-596-26735-8 .
• Alfred Adler: Psychotherapy and Education - Selected essays . Volume 1-3. 1919-1937. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-596-26746-3 , ISBN 3-596-26747-1 , ISBN 3-596-26748-X .

Web links

• Literature by and about Heinz Ludwig Ansbacher in the catalog of the German National Library
• Heinz L. Ansbacher 1965: Sensus Privatus versus sensus Communis (On the relationship between the ideas of Adler and Kant )
• The University of Vermont: Heinz L. Ansbacher
• The New York Times: Obituary

Individual evidence

1. ↑ University of Vermont: Curriculum Vitae ( Memento of the original from November 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  
2. ↑ 1939 cited by the American Psychological Association Presidential Address
3. ↑ after Michael Stadler and Heinrich Crabus, Wolfgang Metzger (1899-1979) - life, work and effect , in: Wolfgang Metzger, Gestalt-Psychologie , Frankfurt: Verlag Waldemar Kramer, 1986, p. 16.
4. ↑ see Einstein Archives Online .
5. ↑ see en: North American Society of Adlerian Psychology .
6. ↑ see German Society for Individual Psychology eV (DGIP)  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
7. ↑ see: Dr Heinz Ludwig Ansbacher , accessed on July 3, 2015.
8. ↑ see Heinz Ansbacher's obituary (1979) for Wolfgang Metzger in: Individual Psychology News Letter , 29 (3), pp. 45-47.
9. ↑ see also: Gerhard Stemberger , On the 100th birthday of Heinz L. Ansbacher, Gestalt Theory, 26 (3), 192–193.