Wilhelm Josef Revers

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Wilhelm Josef Revers (born August 18, 1918 in Mülheim-Wichterich , † April 5, 1987 in Salzburg ) was a German - Austrian psychologist .

Revers was full professor of psychology at the University of Salzburg (1965–1987) and Rector of the University of Salzburg (1977–1979).

Life

Revers was married to the opera singer Erna Revers (1919-2004), the couple had four children (Rainer, Michael, Peter , Sigrid, married to Georg von Opel ).

After attending elementary school and the humanistic grammar school in Brühl during the first years of World War II, Revers studied psychology, musicology and philosophy in Bonn alongside his military service . He received his doctorate on March 19, 1941 at the University of Bonn , from the cultural anthropologist Erich Rothacker , who played a major role in determining the cultural-psychological and anthropological orientation of Revers' understanding of the subject of psychology. After returning from captivity, he worked as an assistant to Gustav Kafka at the Psychological Institute in Würzburg. Revers completed his habilitation there in 1948, was a private lecturer at the University of Würzburg from 1949 , adjunct professor from 1958 and full professor from December 1964 at the University of Würzburg. From 1953 to 1965 he headed the psychological counseling service at the youth welfare office in the city of Würzburg. He was also a member of the city council of Würzburg.

Since 1965 full professor and thus founding professor of the Institute for Psychology at the University of Salzburg. With the appointment of Revers, the idea of ​​a Christian conservative university in Salzburg should be supported. At the University of Salzburg, Revers took the position of dean of the Philosophical Faculty, later of the Faculty of Culture and Social Sciences from 1972–1973. 1977–1979 he was rector of the University of Salzburg. Revers was also one of the founding members of the "Foundation and Promotion Agency of the Paris-Lodron University Salzburg", and he was elected secretary at the constituent general assembly on August 10, 1966.

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Revers's work related to a cultural anthropologically and phenomenologically oriented psychology. In the German-speaking area, he stood at a critical distance from the empirical-experimental psychology that had been developing since the mid-1950s. Typical of him is the saying, "Even if psychology is right in many things what it claims about people, it is still wrong about what it withholds from people" . It was through him that the projective psychological test method of the TAT ( thematic apperception test according to Murray) was made known in Germany. He was particularly interested in the ideographic description of the individual case; he was more interested - in keeping with Burrhus Frederic Skinner's motto - examining a subject for 1,000 hours than examining 1,000 subjects for an hour.

Revers’s pragmatic openness to various interdisciplinary connections is supported by the fact that he has secured Erwin Roth’s appointment to the second chair for psychology as a counterpart to his own scientific-theoretical orientation . In the early days of the institute, there was already a laboratory for animal research (e.g. studies on learning and forgetting were carried out in axolotins ); in this respect Lienert is wrong , who locates the first animal experimental laboratory in 1968 at the University of Düsseldorf and the second at Freeman at the University of Konstanz . The animal psychology internships that Revers held at Hellbrunn Zoo are also unforgettable . Revers also advocated teaching statistics and an empirical-experimental methodology for psychologists, as well as future-oriented technical equipment of the institute with computers (at that time the famous Olivetti Programma , also a machine from Digital Equipment that could only be programmed in machine code) and Experimental control equipment (Massey-Dickenson). Pharmacological tests were also carried out at the institute, e.g. B. on the effects of sedatives relevant to traffic psychology .

Revers was able to use a distinguished team of assistants, a number of lecturers (Joachim Schacht, Alfred Bremhorst, Ernst Bornemann ), psychoanalytically oriented lecturers ( Eduard Grünewald , Igor Caruso , Sepp Schindler) and other professors from psychiatry ( Heimo Gastager , Gerhart Harrer , Kurt Eckel ) as well as through internationally renowned guest lecturers design the courses at the Salzburg Psychological Institute in an attractive way for the students.

In 1969, Revers founded the Research Institute for Experimental Music Psychology at the Psychological Institute of the University of Salzburg with Gerhart Harrer and Walther CM Simon as part of the Herbert von Karajan Foundation .

In the clinical area, he was instrumental in the founding of the “Yearbook for Psychology and Psychotherapy”, later renamed “Zeitschrift für Klinische Psychologie und Psychotherapie”, and also took over the editing of this on behalf of the Görres Society by Victor von Gebsattel and Gustav Kafka published "Central Organ of Anthropological Psychology".

Predestined by his work at the youth welfare office of the city of Würzburg, Revers was always open to clinical-advisory work for the psychologist class, which ultimately led to the establishment of a counseling and assessment center at the Institute for Psychology; At that time, however, this was a legal gray area, as there were no legal bases for a therapeutic and healing activity by psychologists at that time. Revers was proud to have given the first lecture on “Freud, Adler and Jung” after the Second World War in Austria - the birthplace of psychoanalysis - as a contribution to clinical psychology for the students. However, he did not allow himself to be taken in by psychoanalysis, but also represented an independent direction in the clinical-psychological area.

selected Writings

• Psychology of boredom . Meisenheim 1949 (habilitation thesis)
• Character formation and formation of conscience . Nuremberg 1951.
• The thematic apperception test . Huber, Bern 1958.
• Ideological horizons of psychology. Pustet, Munich 1962.
• Paths of interpretation in graphology . Otto Müller, Salzburg 1966.
• Frustrated youth (cases and situations). Otto Müller, Salzburg 1968.
• The music experience. Econ, Düsseldorf 1972.
• Psyche and time. The problem of the experience of time in psychology. Pustet, Salzburg 1985.
• (with Christian G. Allesch): Handbook for the thematic design test (Salzburg). Beltz, Weinheim 1985.

literature

• Christian G. Allesch: Wilhelm J. Revers's contribution to cultural psychology. Memorial lecture on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of Wilhelm J. Revers's death († April 5, 1987). Salzburg texts on cultural psychology 1/1997.
• Christian G. Allesch: Psyche and time - the importance of the historicity of the soul with Wilhelm J. Revers . In: G. Jüttemann (Ed.): Wegbereiter der historical Psychologie (pp. 349–355). Beltz, Munich 1988.
• Dieter Rüdiger, Meinrad Perrez (ed.): Anthropological aspects of psychology. Festschrift for Wilhelm Josef Revers. Otto Müller, Salzburg 1979.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ biologist Dr. Rainer Revers
2. ↑ Homepage of Michael Revers
3. ^ Georg von Opel
4. ↑ Foundation and support company of the Paris Lodron University Salzburg [1]
5. ^ Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1953): Science and human behavior. NY: The Free Press.
6. ^ Gustav A. Lienert (1992). In: EK Wehner (Ed.): Psychology in Self-Representations , Vol. 3 (pp. 163–174). Huber: Bern, p. 168.
7. ↑ During the Nazi era, however, he was the leading psychologist at DINTA , later head of the Office for Vocational Education and Management at DAF , cf. Ulfried Geuter (1984): The Professionalization of German Psychology in National Socialism. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​p. 566.

Web links

• Literature by and about Wilhelm Josef Revers in the catalog of the German National Library