John Flugel (13 June 1884 – 6 August 1955), was a British experimental psychologist and a practising psychoanalyst.
Early life
Flügel was born in Liverpool on 13 June 1884, to a German father and English mother.
Career
Flügel's book Psychoanalytic Study of the Family (1921) was acclaimed by Eric Berne for its insights into the Oedipus complex. He also published Men and their Motives (1934) and The Psychology of Clothes (1930), the latter continuing to influence thinking on the subject into the 21st century.
In Man, Morals and Society (1945), Flugel charted a movement from egocentrism to social awareness by way of what he saw as a hierarchy of expanding loyalties. Reaching back to his old mentor, he also highlighted “the distinction that McDougall has sometimes made between an 'ideal', which is little more than an intellectual assent to a moral proposition, and a 'sentiment', which involves a real mobilisation”.
Personal life
In 1913 Flügel married Ingeborg Klingberg, who also became a psychoanalyst. They had one daughter. Flügel died in London in 1955.
References
- Graham Richards, 'Flügel, John Carl (1884–1955)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004
- Eric Berne, A Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis (1976) p. 134
- O. L. Zangwill, 'Flugel, John Charles', in R. Gregory ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987) p. 264
- R. Koppen, Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernism (2009) p. 59
- J. C. Flugel, Man, Morals and Society (1973) p. 242-3 and p. 317
- J. C. Flugel, Man, Morals and Society (1973) p. 67
Further reading
- Graham Richards, Flügel, John Carl (1884–1955), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
- FLUGEL, John Carl, Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007, accessed 30 Jan 2012
- 1884 births
- 1955 deaths
- British psychoanalysts
- British Esperantists
- Presidents of the British Psychological Society
- Analysands of Ernest Jones
- Translators of Sigmund Freud
- British people of German descent
- Alumni of Balliol College, Oxford
- Alumni of the University of London
- Academics of the University of London
- 20th-century British psychologists