Charlotte Bühler

Academic appointments

In 1923, Charlotte Bühler went to teach at the University of Vienna, where in 1929 she was promoted to the position of associate professor. Both Bühlers worked closely together at this new institution, which provided them with a laboratory to conduct their research.

In the next few years at Vienna she gained international prestige through her research and publications which led to the development of the "Viennese child psychology school" of Charlotte Bühler - the spirit of which is still maintained today in the Charlotte Bühler Institute.

In March 1938, during a stay in London, she learned of the occupation of Austria by Nazi Germany. Karl Bühler was taken into "protective custody" on March 23, 1938, due to his vocal anti-Nazi sentiments. Via connections in Norway, Charlotte Bühler arranged the release of her husband after six and a half weeks, and in October 1938 the family was reunited in Oslo. Because Charlotte Bühler was of Jewish descent they immigrated to the United States.

Both Bühlers were offered professorships in 1938 by Fordham University in New York City, which, however, did not materialize. Karl Bühler then accepted a professorship in Saint Paul, Minnesota; however, Charlotte Bühler remained in Norway because she had already accepted a professorship at the University of Oslo and a position at the Teachers' Academy in Trondheim. Only after an urgent request by her husband did she emigrate in 1940 to Saint Paul in the United States, where she arrived shortly before the invasion of Norway.

In 1942, she accepted a position as senior psychologist at the Minneapolis General Hospital. In 1945, she became an American citizen and moved to Los Angeles, California, as chief psychologist at the Los Angeles County Hospital. She held this position until her retirement in 1958; during that time she also served as a professor of Psychiatry at the University of Southern California. After her retirement she went into private practice in Beverly Hills, California.

Work

• In 1922 in Dresden, she published Das Seelenleben des Jugendlichen ("The mental life of young people"), in which, for the first time, a developmental perspective was used in adolescent psychology. "Bühler's world test" is a projective test method developed by Charlotte Bühler.
• In Vienna, specializing in infant and adolescent psychology, Bühler established a focus on experimental research based on diaries and behavioral observations (the "Vienna School"). With her assistant Hildegard Hetzer, who was succeeded in 1927 by Lotte Schenk-Danzinger, she developed intelligence assessment tests for children which are used to this day.
• In 1933, her work on Der menschliche Lebenslauf als psychologisches Problem ("The course of human life as a psychological problem") was the first German-language study to include old age among the psychological age spans and to consider gerontopsychology a part of psychology. She is therefore considered an early pioneer in the field of gerontopsychology.
• In the United States, she came up with four "basic tendencies" of humans: gratification, self-restricting accommodation, creative expansion, and maintaining internal order. Other ways of expressing these tendencies are: drive for personal satisfaction, adjustment for the purpose of obtaining security, creativity or self-expression, and need for order. She laid the foundations of humanistic psychology together with Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow.

Honors

• The Charlotte-Bühler-Institut für praxisorientierte Kleinkindforschung ("Charlotte Bühler Institute for practical research on infants"), established in 1992 in Vienna, is named after her.

• A plaque in honor of Charlotte and Karl Bühler was unveiled in 1995 at the Palais Epstein in Vienna.
• Dresden and Emsdetten have Charlotte Bühler roads and Vienna has a Charlotte Bühler way.