ABSTRACT
Hans Jurgen Eysenck (1916-1997) was probably the world’s most famous psychologist of his period, rivaled in renown only by Jean Piaget (chap. 9, Pioneers III) and B.F.Skinner (chap. 16, Pioneers III). In Britain he became a well-known public figure because of his many popular books, interviews in the mass media, and appearances on radio and television. Almost from the beginning of his brilliant career, spanning 55 years, he was a popular and controversial subject of conversation in British psychological circles. He was one of those rare individuals who become the subject of anecdotes-some apocryphal, many true-that express a gamut of emotions ranging from extravagant vituperation, to wonderment, to veneration. In this respect, with the possible exception of Sigmund Freud (chap. 4, Pioneers I) there probably has been no other psychologist like him. Eysenck himself would have hated any other kind of comparison with Freud, because he was a leading critic of Freudian psychoanalytic theory and practice in the second half of the 20th century.
