Charlotte Bühler
German-born developmental psychologist and humanistic psychologist
German-born psychologist who built a child psychology programme in Vienna, studied development across the whole lifespan, and helped organise humanistic psychology in the United States after emigrating in 1940.
Why this person matters
Bühler studied development from infancy to old age and used diaries as evidence. She worked in Vienna with her husband Karl Bühler and assistants such as Hildegard Hetzer, and later helped organise humanistic psychology in North America.
Main contributions
Vienna child psychology school
From 1923 she worked at the Vienna Psychological Institute, studying development from infancy through adolescence. With her assistant Hildegard Hetzer she published Testing Children's Development from Birth to School Age (1935). She concluded that developmental age matters more psychologically than mental age or IQ.
Lifespan and autobiographical method
She pioneered the autobiographical method, using personal diaries to study adolescents' thinking. Her central thesis was that people develop throughout the lifespan; Der menschliche Lebenslauf als psychologisches Problem (1933) is described as the first German-language study to include old age.
Humanistic psychology
She served as president of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology in 1965 to 1966 and presided at the first International Conference on Humanistic Psychology in Amsterdam in 1970. The Course of Human Life (1968), written with Massarik and Bugental, studied life goals.
Context and limits
Neither source read gives a critique of her work, and the claim that developmental age outranks mental age or IQ is hers, not independently tested in the pages read. She left Vienna in 1938 after the Nazi invasion of Austria; her husband was arrested and later released, and the family reached the United States in 1940. The sources differ on the timing of the move through Norway.
In your introductory course
Lifespan development.Appears in lifespan development for the idea that development continues across life, and in the history of humanistic psychology alongside Rogers and Maslow.
Related course reading: Psychology 2e, section 9.1. This is course context rather than a biographical source.
Years of active work
- 1918
Received her PhD from the University of Munich, where she studied thought processes under Oswald Külpe.
- 1923
Joined the Vienna Psychological Institute.
- 1935
Published Testing Children's Development from Birth to School Age with Hildegard Hetzer.
- 1945
Began work as a clinical psychologist at Los Angeles County Hospital and as assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California.
- 1965
Became president of the American Association for Humanistic Psychology.
Sources
- Psychology's Feminist Voices, Charlotte BühlerSociety or association. Institutional biography inspected.
- Wikipedia, Charlotte BühlerReference work. Reference article inspected.