Heinz Ludwig Ansbacher

From Philosopedia

Ansbacher, Heinz Ludwig (21 October 1904 - 22 June 2006)

A psychologist who was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, Ansbacher was encouraged by Felix Adler to go to graduate school. He attended Adler's seminars and met Rowena Ripin, who had a doctorate from the University of Vienna. The two married a year later, after which and without a bachelor's degree he pursued his doctorate at Columbia University, his advisor being R. S. Woodward - Ansbacher's 1937 doctoral dissertation was about the perception of number as it affected the monetary value of objects.

Ansbacher taught at Brown University from 1940 through 1943, then worked for the Office of War Information where he wrote air-drop leaflets encouraging German soldiers to give up and surrender.

He taught at the University of Vermont (UVM) in Burlington in 1947. In 1958 he became editor of The Individual Psychology News, renaming it the Journal of Individual Psychology and saying it was devoted to "a holistic, phenomenological, teleological, field theoretical, and socially oriented approach to psychology and related fields, endeavoring to "continue the tradition of Alfred Adler`s Individual Psychology." He and his wife worked directly with Adler, their major work being The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (1956). He and his wife published Superiority and Social Interest in 1964 and Cooperation Between the Sexes in 1978. He and his wife were jointly awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa by UVM in 1980.

Rowen died in 1996, and Heinz at the age of 101 died in 2006.

When a member of the psychology department of the University of Vermont, he wrote Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism:

• "I am much in sympathy with the humanistic orientation in psychology which, fortunately, has been gaining ground in recent years. Allport, Fromm, Horney, and Maslow are all colleagues whose work I very much appreciate."

{WAS, 29 September 1956}