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The Most Famous

PSYCHOLOGISTS from Ukraine

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This page contains a list of the greatest Ukrainian Psychologists. The pantheon dataset contains 183 Psychologists, 2 of which were born in Ukraine. This makes Ukraine the birth place of the 14th most number of Psychologists behind Czechia and Israel.

Top 2

The following people are considered by Pantheon to be the most legendary Ukrainian Psychologists of all time. This list of famous Ukrainian Psychologists is sorted by HPI (Historical Popularity Index), a metric that aggregates information on a biography’s online popularity.

Photo of Wilhelm Reich

1. Wilhelm Reich (1897 - 1957)

With an HPI of 70.37, Wilhelm Reich is the most famous Ukrainian Psychologist.  His biography has been translated into 54 different languages on wikipedia.

Wilhelm Reich ( RYKHE, German: [ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈʁaɪç]; 24 March 1897 – 3 November 1957) was an Austrian doctor of medicine and a psychoanalyst, a member of the second generation of analysts after Sigmund Freud. The author of several influential books, The Impulsive Character (1925), The Function of the Orgasm (1927), Character Analysis (1933), and The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933), he became one of the most radical figures in the history of psychiatry.Reich's work on character contributed to the development of Anna Freud's The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence (1936), and his idea of muscular armour—the expression of the personality in the way the body moves—shaped innovations such as body psychotherapy, Gestalt therapy, bioenergetic analysis and primal therapy. His writing influenced generations of intellectuals; he coined the phrase "the sexual revolution" and according to one historian acted as its midwife. During the 1968 student uprisings in Paris and Berlin, students scrawled his name on walls and threw copies of The Mass Psychology of Fascism at police.After graduating in medicine from the public University of Vienna in 1922, Reich became deputy director of Freud's outpatient clinic, the Vienna Ambulatorium. During the 1930s, he was part of a general trend among younger analysts and Frankfurt sociologists that tried to reconcile psychoanalysis with Marxism. He established the first sexual advisory clinics in Vienna, along with Marie Frischauf. He said he wanted to "attack the neurosis by its prevention rather than treatment".He moved to New York in 1939, after having accepted a position as Assistant Professor at the New School of Social Research. During his five years in Oslo, he had coined the term "orgone energy"—from "orgasm" and "organism"—for the notion of life energy. In 1940 he started building orgone accumulators, modified Faraday cages that he claimed were beneficial for cancer patients. He claimed that his laboratory cancer mice had had remarkable positive effects from being kept in a Faraday cage, so he built human-size versions, where one could sit inside. This led to newspaper stories about "sex boxes" that cured cancer.Following two critical articles about him in The New Republic and Harper's in 1947, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration obtained an injunction against the interstate shipment of orgone accumulators and associated literature, calling them "fraud of the first magnitude". Charged with contempt in 1956 for having violated the injunction, Reich was sentenced to two years imprisonment, and that summer over six tons of his publications were burned by order of the court. He died in prison of heart failure just over a year later.

Photo of Giacomo Rizzolatti

2. Giacomo Rizzolatti (1937 - )

With an HPI of 51.70, Giacomo Rizzolatti is the 2nd most famous Ukrainian Psychologist.  His biography has been translated into 16 different languages.

Giacomo Rizzolatti (born 28 April 1937) is an Italian neurophysiologist who works at the University of Parma. Born in Kyiv, UkSSR, he is the Senior Scientist of the research team that discovered mirror neurons in the frontal and parietal cortex of the macaque monkey, and has written many scientific articles on the topic. He also proposed the premotor theory of attention. He is a past president of the European Brain and Behaviour Society. Rizzolatti was the 2007 co-recipient, with Leonardo Fogassi and Vittorio Gallese, for the University of Louisville Grawemeyer Award for Psychology. He is an elected member of the Academia Europaea, National Academy of Sciences, and Royal Society In 2020 he adheres to Empathism.

Pantheon has 2 people classified as psychologists born between 1897 and 1937. Of these 2, 1 (50.00%) of them are still alive today. The most famous living psychologists include Giacomo Rizzolatti. The most famous deceased psychologists include Wilhelm Reich.

Living Psychologists

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Deceased Psychologists

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