Background
Ansbacher was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
psychologist university professor
Ansbacher was born in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.
Upon arrival in New York he resumed his career in the financial business and attended evening lectures by Alfred Adler. He attended seminars in Adler’s home, sparking his interest in psychology.
After completing high school he worked in a brokerage firm. He immigrated to the United States. via steamer, working as a dishwasher. At one point he went to see Adler for a personal consultation concerning his unhappiness over his work and over the termination of a recent relationship.
Adler encouraged him to enroll in graduate school.
Through Adler, he met Rowena Ripin, who had her doctoral degree from the University of Vienna. Although he had no bachelor"s degree, Ansbacher was admitted to the doctoral program at Columbia University.
He wrote 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.
Ansbacher served on the faculty of Brown University from 1940 through 1943, and worked for Walter South. 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 at Burlington (UVM) in 1947.
In 1958, Heinz Ansbacher took over the editorship of The Individual Psychology News and renamed the periodical the Journal of Individual Psychology - much to the satisfaction of Adlerians outside the United States of America. Under his editorship, which continued until 1974, the journal 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".