Hans Eysenck was born in Berlin on 1926 to Ruth Werner, a starlet at the time of Hans’s birth who later on became a German silent film star, and Anton Eduard Eysenck, an actor, singer and comedian. His parents divorced when he was 4 years of age, and it was then when he went to live with his maternal grandmother, which to him, was a human deserving of all things great, and overall too good for this world. (Feist & Feist, 2009)Eysenck grew up with very little parental discipline, as his parents really didn’t care what he did or didn’t do, and his grandmother was rather permissive. In our book, the author quotes Eysenck telling a story of how he told his grandmother he was going to buy a pack of cigarettes expecting to be apprehended, and was startled when his grandma granted this behavior. Eysenck believed things like these really had nothing to do with a personality development, as he believed genetics had a much stronger impact in the subsequent behavior, than childhood experiences did, in contradiction of Albert Bandura and his theory of children see, children do, or the “Bobo Theory”.
When he was younger, he often would go against teachers, from which most had militaristic background or learning, because he felt skeptical about their teachings. He wasn’t scared to portray a defiant, reluctant attitude towards them as he enjoyed embarrassing them with his intellect and knowledge. As a German he faced a lot of depravation due to the WWI which worsen when Hitler took over. Hans desired to attend the University of Berlin but was told he would have to join the Nazi secret police. Disgusted by this immoral proposal, he decided to leave Germany.
He ended up in England, where he continued his education, and received his Ph.D. in Psychology from the University of London in 1940.During World War II, he couldn’t joined the Air Force for being of German decent, so he served as a psychologist at an emergency hospital, where he did research on the reliability of psychiatric diagnoses. The results led him to a life-long antagonism to main-stream clinical psychology. After the war, he taught at the University of London, as well as serving as the director of the psychology department of the Institute of Psychiatry, associated with Bethlehem Royal Hospital.
He wrote 75 books and some 700 articles, making him one of the most prolific and cited writers in psychology. Eysenck retired in 1983 and continued to write until his death on September 4, 1997.Hans’s theory is based primarily on physiology and genetics. Although he is a behaviorist who considers learned habits of great importance, he believed personality differences to be of generic inheritance, therefore making him in what is usually called temperament.
Eysenck hypothesized that some people have a more responsive sympathetic nervous system than others. Some people remain very calm during emergencies; others feel considerable fear or other emotions, while the rest are terrified by even very minor incidents.
