ABSTRACT
Hans Jurgen Eysenck was a prolific writer, a researcher with a prominent public profile and one of the most distinguished figures in the field of individual differences. There is very little known about the early part of Hans Eysenck’s life. Eysenck was able to demonstrate that fidelity within a population was as much related to the number of persons required for an experimental study. This finding triggered Eysenck’s first public spat with Bernard Babington Smith who contended that Eysenck had overreached himself. By the close of 1941, Eysenck had published some 11 prestigious articles, including in the journal Nature. Eysenck’s appraisal of the psychiatric literature, particularly psychoanalysis, was typically critical, he began to make many enemies in the psychiatric community. The objective of Eysenck’s work was to differentiate between what was normal and abnormal personality and to move psychiatrists away from using subjectivity in their decision making.
