Walter Mischel

Walter Mischel was an Austrian-born American psychologist specializing in personality theory and social psychology. He was the Robert Johnston Niven Professor of Humane Letters in the Department of Psychology at Columbia University.

“I was born in Vienna in 1930 not all that far from Freud’s house. So even as a young child I was aware of his presence, and I suspect at some level I became quite interested in what makes people tick. In 1938 the Nazis took over Austria and we had to get out of Austria alive – which was not easy to do.  But we managed it and we left pretty much without anything. We had to begin all over again.

As a child in the United States, my family lived under conditions of poverty. It’s not that we were starving – we had enough to eat – but not much else. A few years later, as an adolescent, I became increasingly interested in reading about psychoanalysis, which was all the rage at the time. Remember, we are now talking about the 1940s when psychology was very different. As I was going to college I worked as an uncredentialised social worker with kids at the Lower East Side of New York, which was at the time an extremely impoverished area. They were living under very difficult conditions. So my interests in psychology really began as I tried to apply the work I was reading about to these troubled adolescents. This was still within a psychodynamic perspective.” The Psychologist