Who is Who in Psychology

The Universitas’s student counsellor — a composite simulacrum trained in person-centred practice. She is not a therapist and does not diagnose. She listens, she reflects, and she helps you work out what is going on. She is the first person to talk to when you are not sure who else to talk to.

Can help you study: Personal wellbeing, study stress, finding your bearings, talking things through, and being heard without being judged.

German physiologist who founded the first experimental psychology laboratory (Leipzig, 1879) and thereby turned psychology from a branch of philosophy into a science. He measured reaction times, trained observers to report their own mental states under controlled conditions, and defined the discipline’s methods. Every psychology department in the world descends from his.

Can help you study: The history of experimental psychology, introspection as method, apperception, reaction time studies, and how psychology became a science.

American philosopher and psychologist whose Principles of Psychology (1890) is the most readable great work in the field. He described consciousness as a stream, proposed the James-Lange theory of emotion (the body reacts first, then the mind interprets), and argued that ideas should be tested by their practical consequences. Harvard.

Can help you study: The stream of consciousness, pragmatism, the James-Lange theory, varieties of religious experience, habit, and the principle that a belief is true insofar as it works.

Austrian neurologist who invented psychoanalysis — the talking cure — and argued that the unconscious mind governs more of our behaviour than we like to admit. The id, the ego, and the superego. Repression, transference, the Oedipus complex, dream interpretation. Much of his theory has been superseded; his influence has not. Vienna until 1938, then London.

Can help you study: Psychoanalysis, the unconscious, dream interpretation, repression, transference, the structure of the psyche, and the argument that what we cannot say still speaks.

Austrian psychiatrist who broke with Freud and founded Individual Psychology. He argued that the primary human drive is not sex but the striving to overcome feelings of inferiority — and that mental health consists in directing that striving toward social interest (Gemeinschaftsgefühl). He treated patients sitting face to face, not lying on a couch. Vienna, then New York.

Can help you study: Individual psychology, the inferiority complex, social interest, lifestyle analysis, birth order, encouragement, and the argument that we are shaped not by what happened to us but by the meaning we gave it.

Swiss psychiatrist who broke with Freud and developed analytical psychology. The collective unconscious, archetypes, individuation, psychological types (introversion/extraversion), the shadow, the anima/animus, synchronicity. His work bridges psychology, mythology, and religion. Küsnacht, on the lake.

Can help you study: Analytical psychology, archetypes, the collective unconscious, individuation, the shadow, psychological types, and the process of becoming whole.

Austrian-British psychoanalyst who developed object relations theory by analysing children through play. She argued that the infant’s inner world is populated by “objects” — internal representations of people — that are split into good and bad. The paranoid-schizoid position and the depressive position. She moved the focus of psychoanalysis from drives to relationships. London, from 1926.

Can help you study: Object relations theory, the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, play technique, the inner world, envy, and the argument that the earliest relationships shape everything that follows.

English paediatrician and psychoanalyst who said there is no such thing as a baby — only a baby and someone. He invented the concepts of the good-enough mother, the holding environment, the transitional object (the teddy bear), the true self and false self, and potential space — the creative area between inner and outer reality. He broadcast on the BBC and made psychoanalysis accessible to ordinary parents.

Can help you study: The good-enough mother, the holding environment, transitional objects, true self and false self, potential space, and the argument that development requires a relationship, not perfection.

American behaviourist who argued that behaviour is shaped by its consequences — reinforcement and punishment — and that the inner life is not a useful explanatory construct. The Skinner box, schedules of reinforcement, operant conditioning, programmed instruction, Walden Two. He was the most controversial psychologist of the twentieth century and one of the most effective. Harvard.

Can help you study: Operant conditioning, reinforcement schedules, the Skinner box, programmed learning, radical behaviourism, and the argument that what controls behaviour is not inside the organism but in the environment.

Russian physiologist who discovered classical conditioning while studying digestion in dogs — the dogs began salivating at the sound of the bell that preceded food. Nobel Prize in Physiology 1904 (for digestive research, not conditioning). He showed that reflexes can be learned, that learned responses can be extinguished, and that the boundary between physiology and psychology is artificial.

Can help you study: Classical conditioning, the conditioned reflex, extinction, stimulus generalisation, experimental neurosis, and the physiological foundations of learning.

Austrian zoologist and ethologist who discovered imprinting — the process by which newborn animals attach to the first moving thing they see. He walked across meadows trailed by goslings who believed he was their mother. Nobel Prize 1973 (with Tinbergen and von Frisch). His work on fixed action patterns and innate releasing mechanisms founded ethology. His Nazi party membership (1938) is the stain on his biography.

Can help you study: Ethology, imprinting, fixed action patterns, innate releasing mechanisms, animal behaviour, and the argument that behaviour must be studied in natural conditions, not laboratories.

American cognitive psychologist who proved that short-term memory holds seven items, plus or minus two. His 1956 paper is one of the most cited in psychology. He co-founded the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard with Jerome Bruner, helped launch the cognitive revolution, and created WordNet — the lexical database. Princeton.

Can help you study: Cognitive psychology, the magical number seven, working memory, chunking, the cognitive revolution, and the architecture of human information processing.

Soviet psychologist who argued that all higher mental functions originate in social interaction, and that the Zone of Proximal Development — the gap between what a learner can do alone and what they can do with help — is where growth happens. Died of tuberculosis at thirty-seven. Suppressed in the USSR until the 1960s. Now foundational everywhere.

Can help you study: The Zone of Proximal Development, scaffolding, the social origins of thought, language and cognition, play as the leading activity of childhood, and developmental psychology.

American psychologist who studied the healthiest people he could find rather than the sickest, and proposed the hierarchy of needs — from physiological survival through safety, belonging, and esteem to self-actualisation. He founded humanistic psychology as a “third force” beyond behaviourism and psychoanalysis. Brandeis University.

Can help you study: The hierarchy of needs, self-actualisation, peak experiences, humanistic psychology, and the argument that psychology should study human potential, not just human pathology.

American psychologist who developed person-centred therapy — the approach built on unconditional positive regard, empathy, and congruence. He believed that the client, not the therapist, knows best, and that the therapist’s job is to create the conditions in which self-understanding can emerge. He transformed counselling, education, and conflict resolution. Chicago, Wisconsin, La Jolla.

Can help you study: Person-centred therapy, unconditional positive regard, empathy, congruence, the actualising tendency, and the argument that people grow best when they are accepted as they are.

Swiss developmental psychologist who proved that children do not think like small adults — they think differently. His four stages of cognitive development (sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operational, formal operational) describe how the mind constructs its understanding of the world through assimilation and accommodation. Geneva, for nearly sixty years.

Can help you study: Cognitive development, the four stages, constructivism, schemas, assimilation and accommodation, conservation, and the argument that intelligence is adaptation.

British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who developed attachment theory — the idea that the infant’s bond to its caregiver is a primary biological need, not a secondary consequence of feeding. Secure attachment provides a “secure base” from which to explore. Insecure attachment shapes internal working models that persist into adulthood. Tavistock Clinic, London.

Can help you study: Attachment theory, the secure base, internal working models, separation anxiety, the protest-despair-detachment sequence, and the argument that the need for closeness is not weakness but biology.

Canadian-American developmental psychologist who created the Strange Situation — the experimental procedure that revealed three patterns of infant attachment: secure, anxious-avoidant, and anxious-resistant (a fourth, disorganised, was added later by Main). She gave Bowlby’s theory its evidence. Her sensitivity hypothesis argues that the caregiver’s responsiveness determines attachment quality. Johns Hopkins, then Virginia.

Can help you study: The Strange Situation, attachment patterns, the sensitivity hypothesis, infant-mother interaction, and the empirical foundations of attachment theory.

Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor who developed logotherapy — the therapy of meaning. He survived Auschwitz and Dachau and wrote Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), arguing that the last human freedom is the ability to choose one’s attitude in any circumstance. The will to meaning, not the will to pleasure or power, is the primary motivational force. Vienna.

Can help you study: Logotherapy, the will to meaning, existential analysis, suffering and meaning, the concentration camp experience, and the argument that meaning can be found in any situation, including the worst.

South African-American psychiatrist who developed systematic desensitisation — the technique of treating phobias by pairing relaxation with graduated exposure to the feared stimulus. His principle of reciprocal inhibition (you cannot be anxious and relaxed simultaneously) is the foundation of exposure therapy. He proved that fear can be unlearned. Johannesburg, then Temple University.

Can help you study: Systematic desensitisation, reciprocal inhibition, exposure therapy, the treatment of phobias, behaviour therapy, and the principle that what was learned can be unlearned.

American psychologist who published the behaviourist manifesto (1913), arguing that psychology must study observable behaviour, not consciousness. He conducted the Little Albert experiment (1920), demonstrating that fear can be conditioned in an infant. He left academia after a scandal and became an advertising executive at J. Walter Thompson, where he applied conditioning principles to selling. Johns Hopkins, then Madison Avenue.

Can help you study: Behaviourism, the behaviourist manifesto, classical conditioning of emotion, environmental determinism, and the founding argument that psychology is the science of behaviour, not of mind.

Co-founder (with Heymann Steinthal) of Völkerpsychologie (folk or social psychology), which argued that psychology must study the collective mind of peoples and not just individual mental processes. His Das Leben der Seele applied psychological analysis to ethics, art, and culture. Cross-posted from the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums.

Can help you study: Völkerpsychologie and the psychology of peoples, the relationship between individual and collective mind, the application of psychology to ethics and culture, and the Jewish contribution to nineteenth-century German psychology.

Reconstructive Memory · Schema Theory · Cambridge Psychology

The first professor of experimental psychology at Cambridge, who showed that remembering is not playback but reconstruction. His “War of the Ghosts” experiments revealed how each retelling reshapes a memory to fit the rememberer’s schemas — so the errors people make are the evidence of how memory actually works.

Can help you study: Reconstructive memory, schema theory, the multi-store model in contrast, and why eyewitness testimony is fragile — for the Memory topic of GCSE Psychology.

Personality · Extraversion–Neuroticism–Psychoticism · Criminal Personality

One of the most-cited and most-debated psychologists of the twentieth century, who argued that personality has a biological basis measurable along the dimensions of extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism — and that the criminal personality could be understood through them and the nervous system beneath them.

Can help you study: The criminal personality theory, the biology of personality, and how arousal and conditioning relate to offending — for the Criminal Psychology topic of GCSE Psychology.

Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy · ABC Model · Cognitive Therapy

The originator of Rational Emotive Behaviour Therapy and a founder of the cognitive tradition in psychotherapy. His insight was deceptively simple: we are disturbed not by events but by our beliefs about them — and a belief, unlike an event, can be disputed and changed.

Can help you study: The ABC model of depression, rational versus irrational beliefs, and the cognitive explanation and treatment of mental health problems — for the Psychological Problems topic of GCSE Psychology.

Activation–Synthesis · REM Neurophysiology · Dream Theory

A scholarly tradition rather than a person — the body of neurophysiological dream theory that overturned the Freudian account. On this view the dream is not a coded message from a hidden self but the cortex making sense of its own brainstem activation during REM sleep: activation first, then synthesis.

Can help you study: The activation–synthesis theory of dreaming, REM sleep and the brain, and the contrast with Freud — for the Sleep and Dreaming topic of GCSE Psychology.

Social Learning Theory · Observational Learning · Self-Efficacy

A scholarly tradition rather than a person — the social-cognitive account of how behaviour is learned by watching others rather than by trial and error alone. Through modelling, observation, imitation, and the expectation of reward, even aggression can be acquired vicariously, as the famous Bobo doll studies suggested.

Can help you study: Social learning theory, observational learning and vicarious reinforcement, and the learning explanation of criminality — for the Criminal Psychology topic of GCSE Psychology.

Obedience to Authority · Situational Social Psychology · Conformity

The social psychologist whose obedience experiments showed that ordinary people would administer what they believed were dangerous shocks when instructed by an authority figure. His lesson was that it is often not the kind of person someone is, but the kind of situation they are in, that decides how they behave.

Can help you study: Obedience and the power of the situation, conformity, and situational versus dispositional explanations of behaviour — for the Social Influence topic of GCSE Psychology.

Experimental Design · Statistical Method · Hypothesis Testing

The statistician and biologist who built the modern theory of experimental design — randomisation, control, and the discipline of stating a hypothesis before collecting data. To call in the statistician after the experiment is done, he warned, is to ask for a post-mortem.

Can help you study: Designing investigations, hypotheses and variables, sampling, and reading data critically — for the Research Methods strand of GCSE Psychology.

The founder of Gestalt therapy, who insisted that awareness itself is curative — that the unfinished situation, the avoided feeling, the interrupted gesture, holds all the energy the patient needs, and that the work is to bring it into contact with the present moment.

Can help you study: Gestalt therapy, the here-and-now in therapeutic practice, the concept of contact and withdrawal, and the phenomenological tradition in psychology.

The pioneer of family therapy who developed the communication stances (placating, blaming, super-reasonable, irrelevant, congruent) as a map of how people protect themselves under stress — and who insisted that self-worth, not technique, is the foundation of change.

Can help you study: Family systems therapy, communication patterns, the concept of congruence, and the humanistic tradition in counselling and psychotherapy.

The most influential hypnotherapist of the twentieth century, whose utilisation approach turned the patient's own symptoms, resistances, and idiom into the instrument of change. He demonstrated that therapeutic trance is a natural state of focused attention, not a surrender of will.

Can help you study: Clinical hypnosis, the therapeutic use of metaphor and indirect suggestion, Ericksonian approaches in psychotherapy, and the psychology of trance and altered states.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is not a therapy but a modelling technology. Grinder and Bandler asked what Perls, Satir, and Erickson did that worked — then built a map of the structure beneath the surface. The Meta Model recovers what language has deleted; the Milton Model uses deliberate ambiguity to facilitate change. The system is the synthesis of what the three great therapists had in common.

Can help you study: The principles and techniques of NLP, the Meta Model and Milton Model, the process of modelling excellence, and the relationship between language, neurology, and behaviour.

The founding model of cognitive therapy, developed by Aaron Beck at the University of Pennsylvania. The core insight: depression, anxiety, and other disorders are maintained by characteristic patterns of distorted thinking — automatic thoughts, cognitive biases, and underlying core schemas — and that identifying and restructuring these thoughts produces lasting change.

Can help you study: Cognitive therapy for depression and anxiety, the cognitive model, automatic thoughts and cognitive distortions, schema therapy, and the foundations of CBT.

The cognitive models of panic, OCD, and health anxiety developed by David Clark and Paul Salkovskis, which extended Beck's framework to the anxiety disorders. The panic model identifies catastrophic misinterpretation of bodily sensations as the maintaining mechanism; the OCD model focuses on the significance attributed to intrusive thoughts.

Can help you study: Cognitive models of panic disorder, OCD, and health anxiety; CBT for anxiety disorders; the role of appraisal and safety behaviours in maintaining anxiety.

Donald Meichenbaum's cognitive behaviour modification approach, which places the internal dialogue at the centre of change. His Stress Inoculation Training — a three-phase programme of conceptualisation, skills acquisition, and application — has become one of the most widely used CBT protocols for stress, anxiety, and PTSD.

Can help you study: Self-instructional training, stress inoculation, the role of self-talk in performance and coping, and CBT approaches to stress and trauma.

Steven Hayes's Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, a third-wave CBT that shifts the goal from reducing unwanted thoughts and feelings to increasing psychological flexibility — the ability to act in line with one's values even in the presence of difficult private experiences. Defusion and acceptance replace disputation as the core cognitive techniques.

Can help you study: ACT and third-wave CBT, psychological flexibility, acceptance and defusion techniques, values clarification, and the comparison between ACT and traditional CBT.

Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behaviour Therapy, developed originally for borderline personality disorder and now widely applied across high-distress presentations. The dialectic is validation and change held simultaneously. DBT's four skill modules — mindfulness, distress tolerance, emotional regulation, and interpersonal effectiveness — are now among the most widely taught in clinical psychology.

Can help you study: DBT and the treatment of BPD and emotional dysregulation, the dialectical philosophy, the four skill modules, radical acceptance, and the validation-change balance in therapy.

Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, developed by Segal, Williams, and Teasdale as a relapse prevention programme for recurrent depression. The core insight is that it is not low mood itself but the ruminative cognitive patterns it triggers that drive relapse — and that mindfulness practice teaches decentring, the capacity to observe thoughts as mental events rather than facts, interrupting the rumination cycle.

Can help you study: MBCT and mindfulness-based approaches, relapse prevention in depression, decentring and metacognitive awareness, the being versus doing mode distinction, and the integration of mindfulness into CBT.