Else Frenkel-Brunswik

Else Frenkel-Brunswik (August 18, 1908 in Lemberg – March 31, 1958 in Berkeley, California, USA) was a Polish-Austrian Jewishpsychologist. She was forced to leave Poland and later Austria as a result of anti-Jewish persecution. She is best known for her contributions to The Authoritarian Personality , her collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno, Daniel Levinson, and Nevitt Sanford. It is considered a milestone work in personality theory and social psychology.

Else Frenkel was born August 18, 1908 in Lemberg, the second of three daughters of Jewish department store owner Abraham Frenkel and his wife Helene Frenkel. In 1914, her family moved from Poland to Austria to escape the pogrom.

They went to Vienna, where Else completed her Doctorate dissertation under supervision of Karl Bühler at the University of Vienna in 1930. Her thesis topic was Das Associationsprinzip in der Psychologie. She held an associate professorship at the Psychological Institute from 1931 to 1938, working as a research assistant to Charlotte Bühler. She went through psychoanalysis with Ernst Kris.

In 1938, after the Anschluss, she had to leave Austria.

Like many of her peers of Jewish origin, Else made her way to the USA, where she became a citizen in 1938. In the same year she married Egon Brunswik, Bühler's former student who had joined the faculty of Berkeley in 1937.

From 1939 to 1958 Else Frenkel-Brunswik worked as a research associate at the Institute of Child Welfare, Department of Psychology of the University of California at Berkeley. Else Frenkel initially worked in the area of personality studies. Mechanisms of Self-Deception (1939) explained the tenets of psychoanalysis to an American audience.

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