Sophie Lazarsfeld Portrait

Sophie or Sofie Lazarsfeld (née Munk; May 26, 1881 – September 24, 1976) was an Austrian-American therapist and writer, a student of Alfred Adler.

Life

Sophie Munk was born in Troppau on May 26, 1881.[1]

She married Robert Lazarsfeld, a lawyer: the sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld was their son. Friedrich Adler lived with the family for some time: on the morning that Adler assassinated Austria's prime minister, he sent them a postcard saying he was in good spirits after leaving the house. In the later judgement of Paul Lazarsfeld, "My mother was responsible for destroying three men, my father, Friedrich Adler, and myself. I always say this."[2]

Apparently introduced to the ideas of Alfred Adler (no relation to Friedrich) by her son,[2] Lazarsfeld joined the Vienna Individual Psychology Society after the First World War, and underwent training with Alfred Adler in the 1920s. She coined the phrase "the courage to be imperfect", first using it at the 1925 Second International Congress of Individual Psychology, and expanding on the idea in later writing.[3]

How Women Experience Men (1931) drew on the work of marriage clinics set up by Alfred Adler.[4]

She escaped Austria for Paris in 1938, and then the United States in 1941,[5] where she settled and built a psychological practice in New York City. She became Honorary President of the American Society of Adlerian Psychology, and contributed several articles to its journal, The American journal of individual psychology.

She died in 1976 in New York City.

Work

References

  1. ^ Brigitta Keintzel; Ilse Erika Korotin (2002). Wissenschafterinnen in und aus Österreich: Leben- Werk- Wirken. Böhlau Verlag Wien. pp. 450–452. ISBN 978-3-205-99467-1. Retrieved October 20, 2012.
  2. ^ a b Lewis Samuel Feuer (1982). Einstein and the Generations of Science. Transaction Publishers. pp. x–xi. ISBN 978-0-87855-899-5. Retrieved October 21, 2012.
  3. ^ Jane Griffith & Robert L. Powers, The Lexicon of Adlerian Psychology: The courage to be imperfect Archived September 26, 2013, at the Wayback Machine, The ISIP NewsLetter, Vol. 30. No. 2 (November/December 2007), p.4.
  4. ^ Deborah Holmes; Lisa Silverman (2009). Interwar Vienna: Culture Between Tradition and Modernity. Camden House. p. 27. ISBN 978-1-57113-420-2. Retrieved October 20, 2012.
  5. ^ The Use of Fiction in Psychotherapy

External links

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