Karl and Charlotte Bühler

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Excerpt: Karl Ludwig Bühler (27 May 1879 – 24 October 1963) was a German psychologist and linguist. In psychology he is known for his work in gestalt psychology, and he was one of the founders of the Würzburg School of psychology. In linguistics he is known for his organon model of communication and his treatment of deixis as a linguistic phenomenon. He was the dissertation advisor of Karl Popper.

On Charlotte Buhler’s main contribution to psychology:

Photographed By Andrew Ruppenstein, November 11, 2022

2. Karl and Charlotte Bühler Marker - wide view

The marker is visible here on the northeast corner of the Palais Epstein.

Through her research at The Vienna Psychological Institute, Buhler pioneered the autobiographical method in order to study adolescent thought processes using their personal diaries. Moreover, Buhler determined that infants are intentional, rather than simply reactive, individuals that interact with the world while setting personally selected goals as they mature. She found evidence of infant curiosity, delight in achievement, social engagement and distinctive individual style, even in the very first months of life. During her Vienna period, Buhler also wrote for publication and came up with her major thesis: that people develop throughout the lifespan. Lastly, before leaving Vienna due to the Nazi invasion of Austria and the closing of The Vienna Psychological Institute in 1938, Buhler established that developmental age is more psychologically important than "mental age" or "intelligence quotient."

Excerpt on the Institute:…then in 1921 they moved to a chair of philosophy at Vienna, on the understanding that this would bring strengths in psychology and experimental studies in education to the position. The university did not have a psychological laboratory and to overcome this the Buhlers occupied some

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rooms in the office of Otto Glockel, the Viennese school supervisor and education reformer. This became the Vienna Institute of Psychology. In return, Buhler conducted extremely popular courses for elementary schoolteachers. The Institute gained worldwide renown due to sixteen years of immensely fruitful work guided by the Buhlers, aided by a ten-year Rockefeller grant. Both Karl and Charlotte Buhler pursued important and fundamental studies with many colleagues and students, including some visitors from overseas such as the American Tolman. Their work included major scholarly landmarks such as Charlotte Buhler's book "From Birth to Maturity: An Outline of the Psychological Development of the Child" which was published in English in 1935. As an indicator of the amount of research in progress, during that time Buhler supervised some 130 dissertations with each of two colleagues in psychology and 40 with the philosopher Moritz Schlick (one of these students was Karl Popper).