Heinz Ansbacher

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Heinz Ansbacher, an American psychologist, was born in Frankfort, Germany on October 21, 1904 - June 22, 2006

After completing high school heworked in a brokerage firm. He immigrated to the U.S. via steamer to Spain, Cuba and Mexico, working as a dishwasher. Upon arrival in New York he resumed his career in the financial business.

  In the evening, he attended lectures of Alfred Adler. At one point he went to see Adler for a personal consultation, concerning his unhappiness in work and with a relationship having ended. After some discussion Adler suggested he must go to graduate school, saying this was the only way to get ahead and be satisfied.
  He attended seminars in Adler’s home, sparking his interest in psychology. At lunch with Adler, he met Rowena Ripin, who had her doctoral degree from the University of Vienna. They were married a year later. Without a bachelors degree, he was admitted to the doctoral program at Columbia University. He did his doctoral dissertation on the perception of number as affected by the monetary value of objects, under R.S. Woodward, graduating in 1937. This work concerning the importance of context was cited in the 1939 American Psychological Association Presidential Address.
  After receiving his degree, he was on the faculty of Brown University from 1940 through 1943 where he worked for Walter S. Hunter as an editor for Psychological Abstracts. Following this, he worked for the Office of War Information writing air-drop leaflets to convince German Soldiers to give up the war effort. In addition, he wrote some papers on German military Psychology. He came to the University of Vermont in Burlington (UVM) in 1947. 
  In 1958, Heinz Ansbacher took over the editorship of The Individual Psychology News and renamend the periodical the Journal of Individual Psychology - much to the satisfaction of Adlerians outside the USA. As editor until 1974, it maintained high academic standards and 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".
  Heinz and Rowena Ansbacher both worked directly with Alfred Adler as scholars and editors and are considered among the leading early followers of the Adlerian school of thought. Their major contribution, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler (1956), is still the definitive text on Individual Psychology and is still in print today, 50 years after it's publication. He and his wife published Superiority and Social Interest in 1964 and Cooperation Between the Sexes in 1978. He has said his collaboration with his wife Rowena was the thing that really made the work so successful. 
  They were jointly awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters, Honoris Causa by UVM in 1980.