Charlotte Bühler
Charlotte Bühler was born on 20 December 1893 in Berlin-Charlottenburg and was the daughter of the architect Hermann Malachowski and the palaeontologist/archaeologist Rose Malachowski, née Kristeller.
At the age of 16, she was already concerned with questions of thought processes and how they work. For her theoretical approach, she obtained suitable thematic treatises from the public library. Due to a lack of specialised literature in the libraries available to her, she developed her own method based on an experiment she devised herself and carried out with family members and friends. She developed this method further in later years and used it as the basis for her dissertation.
Her interest led her to study philosophy in 1913, specialising in psychology and education at the universities of Freiburg in Breisgau and Berlin. In addition to her studies, she attended courses in medicine, theology, history and philology in her spare time. In 1914, she moved to Kiel to attend a teacher training seminar and met her first fiancé there. However, he soon broke off the relationship. Following these developments, she completed her studies with the teacher's examination in Kiel and resumed her psychology studies in Berlin at the Humboldt University under Dr Carl Stumpf.
From then on, her goal was to pursue an academic career. As her views on the research field of the theory of thought differed from Stumpf's and she wanted to work independently on her theses, Stumpf recommended that she go to Munich to work with Oswald Külpe.
In autumn 1915, she began her work at the Psychological Institute of the University of Munich. However, she was not able to benefit from the influence and exchange with Külpe for long, as he died in the same year. Associate Professor Karl Bühler initially took over on an interim basis. He also showed a keen interest in Charlotte Bühler's work. It became clear that Karl Bühler's interest was not exclusively of a professional nature when he promptly proposed to her. The professional relationship and the age difference made her hesitate at first. In the end, however, she said yes to his question. The marriage took place in April 1916. Their daughter Ingeborg was born in 1917 and their son Rolf in 1919.
Charlotte Bühler successfully completed her dissertation at the university under Erich Becker in 1918 with "summa cum laude". In the same year, Karl Bühler received a call to Dresden. Charlotte Bühler followed him and habilitated in 1920 under the literary researcher Oskar Walzel on the subject of "Discoveries and Inventions in Literature and Art". This made her the first female habilitant at the Dresden University of Technology. She was also appointed the first private lecturer in Saxony and acquired the right to teach at academic universities there.
Karl Bühler was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1922 and Charlotte Bühler followed in 1923. They worked together at the Institute of Psychology at the University of Vienna from 1929 to 1938. Charlotte Bühler worked as an associate professor during this time. This period also included research visits to the USA in 1924/25 1935. In 1935, she became director of the newly founded Parents Institute in London, according to its model one was also initiated in Vienna in 1936.
With the annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938, the Bühlers' productive and socially integrated working life came to an end due to Charlotte Bühler's Jewish roots. While Charlotte Bühler was on a lecture tour, her husband was arrested in Vienna. It was not until six months later that she managed to get her children and husband to her from Norway.
From 1938, Charlotte Bühler taught at the Trondheim Teachers' Academy and the University of Oslo. In March 1940, she followed her husband, who had already emigrated to the USA. Here they both researched and taught as professors at St Catherine College in St Paul, Minnesota. In 1942, Charlotte Bühler became head of the psychology department at Minneapolis Central Hospital in Minnesota. She became an American citizen in 1945 and worked as chief psychologist at County General Hospitals in Los Angeles until 1953.
In 1950, she began teaching as a professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. At the same time, she ran a private practice as a psychologist in Beverly Hills from 1950 to 1971.
In 1971, Charlotte Bühler returned to Germany, where she ran a private practice as a psychologist in Stuttgart until her death in 1974.