Hubert Rohracher

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Hubert Rohracher (born April 24, 1903 in Lienz , † December 18, 1972 in Kitzbühel ) was an Austrian psychologist and lawyer.

Life

Childhood and youth

Hubert Rohracher's father came from a humble background, but had worked his way up from a farm servant to a clerk's position at a notary to a real estate agent. The mother, Rosa von Hibler, came from an ennobled Tyrolean merchant family, which also included several university professors. Both parents encouraged their eldest son to do intellectual work. After a year of Latin lessons in the Franciscan monastery in Lienz, Rohracher came to Brixen in 1914 to attend the grammar school run by the Augustinian order. Since the "Introductory Philosophical Lessons" was also taught as a subject in Brixen, which at that time still belonged to Austria, Rohracher came into contact with Hermann Ebbinghaus' textbook and Max Verworn's physiology textbook during his high school days , as well as with Immanuel Kant's "Critique of pure reason ”or Schopenhauer's “ The world as will and concept ”. When the Italian front collapsed in 1918, Rohracher went home on foot to Lienz with a classmate. After that, however, he could not finish the grammar school in Bressanone, as this school had lost its public rights in the course of the annexation of South Tyrol by Italy . Instead, he spent the rest of the school years in Innsbruck, where he graduated from high school in 1922 .

Studies and academic background

After graduating from high school, he made the decision to study two subjects, namely law as a career and psychology out of real interest. A double degree was forbidden, however, which is why Rohracher studied law at the Law Faculty in Innsbruck and philosophy with a major in psychology in Munich . In Munich he received his doctorate in philosophy on March 12, 1926 with a thesis on "The theory of knowledge and methodology of G. Th. Fechner " and on January 22, 1929 in Innsbruck he was awarded a doctorate in law. Formative university teachers were the philosopher Erich Becher and the experimental psychologist Richard Pauli . He also came into contact with the music psychologist Kurt Huber , who was later executed by the National Socialists.

In 1927 Rohracher began as a court intern to prepare for the profession of lawyer. Since the professorship for philosophy in Innsbruck with the affiliated institute for experimental psychology was filled by Erismann at around the same time , Rohracher asked him to work there voluntarily, which he was immediately granted. He began a series of experiments to analyze the will, whereby the phenomena of the will were described in situations indicative of this through self-observation. He also took part in the experiments with reversible glasses, which then brought Ivo Kohler international recognition. In 1930 Rohracher became a research assistant at Erismann and finally gave up his previous intention to become a lawyer. In 1932 Rohracher completed his habilitation with Erismann with the thesis "Theory of will on an experimental basis" . Between 1934 and 1937 Rohracher enrolled at the Medical Faculty of the University of Innsbruck to study the anatomy and physiology of the nervous system in more detail. In addition, motivated by the studies of Hans Berger , he began with brain-electrical experiments. He was not only interested in the derivations of brain waves, but also the question of what happens when you stimulate the brain with similar currents. In a self-experiment, he determined subjective light phenomena. Since he worked with colleagues at the Technical University in Vienna to perfect his equipment , he stayed in Vienna for a long time. He came into friendly contact with Karl Bühler and his wife Charlotte Bühler , as well as Egon Brunswik and his later wife Else Frenkel . There was no contact with Sigmund Freud despite the physical proximity, as he was not part of the group of psychologists.

Rohracher says of himself that he was never a member of a political party, however idea Europe felt very attracted to and therefore the 1928 Pan-European Union of Coudenhove-Kalergi joined. In 1938 Rohracher was dismissed from the university because of critical comments made in public, and his teaching license was revoked. He was also forbidden from continuing his medical studies. The board of directors of the anatomical institute allowed him to continue his dissection exercises. With the consent of Erismann, he was also able to continue his work in the psychological institute, albeit without payment.

From 1939 Rohracher was called up for military service, namely as an army psychologist at the "Department for aptitude tests" at the General Command in Salzburg. His superior was Heinrich Roth . On the basis of several letters to his father, in which he expressed his conviction and hope that Germany would lose the war, the Gestapo, which had monitored all of his correspondence, demanded his release from the Wehrmacht and transfer to a concentration camp in the late autumn of 1940 . Rohracher evaded access by "voluntarily" reporting to a training force for front service. After a month he was transferred to a reserve battalion in his hometown of Lienz. The surveys against him were apparently stopped at that time. In the following months he was able to successfully lift his suspension from university service and reassign his teaching license to the University of Innsbruck. Due to the lack of teaching staff, he was hired in May 1941 as a "diet lecturer". In that year he married a pediatrician who was born in Lienz and worked at the University Children's Clinic in Vienna.

According to Peter Goller , Rohracher's portrayal of his anti-Nazi attitude is countered by a letter he wrote to the rector of the University of Innsbruck Harold Steinacker on January 13, 1941 : "I have taken the necessary steps for my admission to the NSDAP."

On April 1, 1943 Rohracher moved to Vienna on an a. o. professorship appointed. The background to this was that Wehrmacht circles expected his EEG examinations to produce results that could be used for war purposes. In order to continue his research, he received an exceptionally high annual research grant of 10,000 Reichsmarks from the Berlin Reich Ministry. In September 1944, bombs destroyed the main university building and the building of the Institute for Psychology in Vienna. When university operations came to a complete standstill as the front approached, Rohracher and his wife moved, their Vienna apartment had been bombed out, to Tyrol, where they waited for the war to end near Innsbruck. He was only able to return to Vienna in September. As a private citizen, without being given a mandate from the Austrian Ministry of Education, Rohracher contacted Karl Bühler to offer him a return to the chair in Vienna. Bühler was definitely interested. However, nobody in the Austrian education administration really advocated a reappointment. In the end, Bühler stayed in the United States; However, Rohracher was able to present him with the Wilhelm Wundt Medal at the International Congress of Psychologists in Bonn in 1960 .

In June 1947 Hubert Rohracher was appointed professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna . He also worked as a lawyer for six years. After the Second World War, he was involved in the denazification measures at the University of Vienna as a member of two special political commissions. Politically, he was considered to be completely unencumbered and he was not only a philosopher and psychologist, but also a trained lawyer and therefore well acquainted with the practical legal questions that arise in the implementation of the denazification process; He was also involved as a member of the executive committee of the university professors' union in the union of public servants, and both the special commissions at the universities and the senates in the ministry of education were each to be assigned a professor appointed by the union. Rohracher had recognized that the denazification of the universities was more than just "cleaning up" the university of Nazi professors. They opened up room for action in science policy for those who were actively involved: Contacts with the political decision-makers in the Ministry of Education could be established, deepened and ultimately used to assert political interests.

Rohracher was head of the Psychological Institute at the University of Vienna for many years. He was a real member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences as well as founder and influential founding president of the Austrian Research Council, later renamed the Fund for the Promotion of Scientific Research (FWF). In 1960 he was President of the German Society for Psychology .

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In psychology, Rohracher took a scientific-experimental point of view and researched, for example, the connections between electrochemical brain processes and psychological processes. He describes his neuropsychological work "The way the brain works and the psychological processes" as his most important (see also neuropsychotherapy and memory inhibition ).

He represented a positivistic psychology, according to which psychological experience can only be scientifically researched via the detour of the brain-physiological processes on which the experience is based. Rohracher shared the rejection of psychoanalysis with many German colleagues , and he also took an extremely critical stance towards the various varieties of US behaviorism , which he described as heresy, which had inhibited the progress of psychological research for many years. But that did not prevent him from initiating a systematic reception of American psychology at his institute. It was thanks to his two post-war assistants, Walter Toman and Erich Mittenecker , who, through research stays in the USA, were predestined to import these topics and theories into the German-speaking area.

In 1944 he discovered the micro-vibrations of the muscles of warm-blooded animals and investigated their importance for psychological processes.

In his book Personality and Fate , published in 1926, he describes the first results of his characterological research. In 1953 the first edition of his book The Functioning of the Brain and the Psychic Processes appeared . His best-known work is the introduction to psychology , an extremely competent, ultimately also self-contained systematic presentation of the older tradition of German-language experiential psychology based on experiment and self-observation, which today no longer corresponds to professional standards.

Rohracher assumed a dominant position in the teaching of psychology at the University of Vienna, not only for psychologists but also for student teachers: his main lecture was the most popular course at the university. In addition to the Rigorosenfach Psychology, Rohracher also took the so-called Philosophikum, a compulsory examination for everyone who has the Dr. phil. wanted to acquire from.

Rohracher is also considered to be an extremely successful promoter of young scientists. A large number (around 40) of German and Austrian university professors emerged from his institute.

Honors

  • 1960 City of Vienna Prize for Natural Sciences
  • Honorary doctorate in medicine from the University of Innsbruck
  • Honorary Senator of the University of Vienna

selected Writings

  • Hubert Rohracher (1926). Personality and destiny. Vienna: Braumüller.
  • Hubert Rohracher (1942). The electrochemical processes in the human brain. Leipzig: Barth.
  • Hubert Rohracher (1956). Experimental and statistical contributions to psychological accident research. Vienna: Rohrer.
  • Hubert Rohracher (1961). Regulation processes in psychological events. Graz: Böhlau.
  • Hubert Rohracher (1967). The way the brain works and the psychological processes. (4th revised and expanded edition). Munich: JA Barth.
  • Hubert Rohracher (1975). Little character lore (13th edition). Munich: Urban and Schwarzenberg, ISBN 3-541-02383-X .
  • Hubert Rohracher (1988). Introduction to Psychology. (1st edition 1947, 13th edition). Munich: Psychologie-Verlags-Union, ISBN 3-621-27038-8 .
  • Hubert Rohracher & K. Inanaga (1969). The micro-vibration. Bern: Huber.

literature

  • Rudolf Langthaler : The reductionist "naturalism" in the Viennese psychologist and "brain researcher" Hubert Rohracher, in: ders. Why Dawkins is wrong. A polemic. Freiburg i. Br. 2015. pp. 243-255.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Oberkofler, Hubert Rohracher (1902–1972), years of teaching and research in Tyrol
  2. ↑ Hubert Rohracher . In Ludwig J. Pongratz, Werner Traxel & Ernst G. Wehner (eds.), Psychology in Self- Representations (pp. 256–287). Bern: Huber.
  3. ↑ Psychology and National Socialism: The Institute for Experimental Psychology at the University of Innsbruck. [1]
  4. ↑ Hubert Rohracher . In Ludwig J. Pongratz, Werner Traxel & Ernst G. Wehner (eds.), Psychology in Self-Representations (p. 73). Bern: Huber.
  5. ↑ Benetka, Gerhard (1998). Denazification and prevented return. On the personal situation of academic psychology in Austria after 1945. Austrian Journal of History, 9, 188–217.
  6. ↑ Peter Goller : The chairs for philosophy at the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Innsbruck (1848 to 1945). Research on Innsbruck University History 169. Innsbruck 1989. ISBN 3-900259-16-X , p. 172.
  7. ↑ Gerhard Benetka. History of the Faculty of Psychology. ( PDF ( Memento of February 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ))
personal data
SURNAME Rohracher, Hubert
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian psychologist and lawyer
DATE OF BIRTH April 24, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Lienz
DATE OF DEATH 18th December 1972
Place of death Kitzbühel