Eysenck, Hans Jürgen

   (1916–1997)

   Born in Berlin, the child of an actor father (who was Protestant) and a film-star Protestant mother (who was Jewish by ethnicity), Eysenck was denied admission to the University of Berlin and in 1934 emigrated to England, where from 1936 to 1940 he studied psychology under the tutelage of Sir Cyril Burt (1883–1971) in London; he received a Ph.D. in psychology in 1940, briefly served as an air-raid warden, then from 1942 to 1946 did research in psychology at Mill Hill Emergency Hospital (an extension of the Maudsley Hospital) in London. In 1946, he joined the Maudsley proper and in 1947 became director of the hospital’s psychology division. When in 1948 the postgraduate medical federation of the University of London enlarged the academic unit at the Maudsley, so that it became the Institute of Psychiatry, Eysenck became head of its psychology department; from 1955 he was professor of psychology until being emerited in 1983.

   Rejecting Freudian doctrines in favor of biology and behaviorism, Eysenck is associated with shifting the discipline of psychology in England from psychological testing to clinical psychology, genetic research, and statistical methods. He is said to have been the founder of clinical psychology in the United Kingdom and to be the mostcited mental-health writer after Freud. His theory of behavioral therapy was based on personality types involving extraversion and introversion among others. (See Personality Disorders: Eysenck’s dimensions of personality [1948].)

   Together with American psychologist Burrhus Frederick Skinner (1904–1990), Eysenck presided over a massive expansion of clinical psychology, so that behaviorism passed from the hands of such Russian researchers as the physiologist Ivan Petrovich Pavlov (1849–1936), who in 1904 received the Nobel Prize for his discovery of the conditioned reflex, to a corps of office-practice psychologist–therapists. His many books and articles made him popular with the public, but such academic landmarks as The Biological Basis of Personality (1967) made him a towering scientific figure as well, despite his controversial approaches to such matters as hereditarianism in crime and the link between IQ and race, as well as to feminism and left-wing politics. His views about the "general intelligence factor," which in 1939 he called "g," and about what in 1952 he termed "psychoticism" ("P"), gave grist for research to a generation of psychologists. In 1964, he introduced the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, based on his Maudsley Personality Inventory of 1959; the "EPQ" became a standard instrument in psychological testing. In propagating behavior therapy, Eysenck adopted the position that neurosis stems from learning experiences originally acquired to avoid anxiety, and what is learned can be unlearned. In 1965, he and Canadian psychologist Stanley Rachman published The Causes and Cures of Neurosis: An Introduction to Modern Behaviour Therapy Based on Learning Theory and the Principles of Conditioning.

   (See Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy [from 1963].)