Hans Eysenck

He married Margaret Davies in 1938. The marriage, however, broke up later on. They had one son Michael who later became a renowned psychologist himself.

He later married personality psychologist Sybil Bianca Giuliett. They had a happy marriage that produced four children and lasted till his death.

He died of a brain tumour at the age of 81 in London.

He was born in Germany as the only child of film star Ruth Werner (stage name Helga Molander) and nightclub entertainer Eduard Anton Eysenck. His parents separated when he was very young and he was primarily raised by his maternal grandmother who was later killed in a concentration camp.

He completed his schooling from Prinz-Heinrichs-Gymnasium in Berlin.

He vehemently opposed Hitler and the Nazi regime and moved to London in 1934. His father stayed back and joined the Nazi party much to Hans’s disgust. Initially he faced many problems in London due to his German origins.

He enrolled at Pitman’s College in London for the winter session of 1934-35. He then shifted to University College to study psychology and graduated in 1938.

He worked on his PhD from the Department of Psychology in University College under the noted Professor Sir Cyril Burt. He completed his PhD in 1940.

The World War II was escalating at the time when Eysenck completed his doctorate. He was still a German citizen at that time and was therefore unable to get a good job. He spent a little while working as a firewatcher.

By 1942 the tensions had eased a bit and he was able to get a job as a researcher psychologist at the Mill Hill Emergency Hospital in Northern London.

After the war, a new Institute of Psychiatry (IoP) was established as a postgraduate training and research facility at the University of London. He was chosen to head the department and held this post till his retirement in 1983.

He was provided the freedom to organize the department according to his research priorities. He was intrigued by the psychometric descriptions of personality and published the results of his experiments in ‘Dimensions of Personality’ in 1947.

In his 1952 work, ‘The Scientific Study of Personality’, he gave a factor psychoticism which was constructed around the idea that psychotic disorders differed in terms of introversion-extraversion (I-E).

He was the most influential psychologist in postwar Britain and is best known for his research on the heritability of intelligence though his works covered diverse fields like tobacco use, genetics, politics, and astrology.