Hans Eysenck

Professor Hans Eysenck, who died on 4 September 1997, was a life-long Fellow of the Galton Institute, an active participant in its affairs and, as Harry Armytage recalls in the following memoir, a staunch public defender of its reputation.

Hans Eysenck was born in 1916 and grew up in Berlin where he observed with revulsion the rise of Nazism. In 1934, following Hitler’s "Blood Purge" and his hijacking of the Presidency on the death of Hindenburg, Eysenck fled Germany and came to England. Here he enrolled as a psychology student at University College, London, in the Department headed by Sir Cyril Burt. His postgraduate research, supervised by Burt, led to the award of a PhD in 1940 after which he went on to become the best known, possibly the most influential, certainly the most controversial Professor of Psychology in Britain.

His heterodox views, which he promulgated not only in the learned journals but also in a number of best-selling popular books, are well-known. Inheritance, he maintained, accounts for fifty percent of all personality and behavioural traits including IQ. Communism and fascism are not, as in the simplistic constructs of political sociology, polarities on a linear scale of political locations; they are overlapping, in many ways identical, ideologies characterised by totalitarian programmes and appealing to similar (authoritarian) personality types. And thought he spent almost the whole of his professional life at the Maudsley he did not hesitate to criticise Freud as unscientific and to scorn the claims of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

Today, and to the readership of this Newsletter, these views may not appear especially outrageous but they were first voiced by Eysenck more than 40 years ago and in the 1960s provoked the hostility of the student left who attempted to wreck his lectures as, in America, they did those of Professor Arthur Jensen, a former post-doctoral student of Eysenck.

These experiences did not deter him from entering the Cyril Burt controversy twenty years later. In a letter to the Listener he castigated Burt’s detractors as "McCarthyist" for "dragging Hitler" into every discussion of eugenics. "The eugenics movement as I have known it", he wrote, "has been concerned with research into genetic problems and, on the practical side, with disseminating knowledge about … genetically transmitted diseases; it had nothing to do with rationalising class divisions and justifying an educational system of any kind. This certainly was the position when I was on the council of the movement, and I have no reason to imagine that it has changed since then."

Hans Eysenck gave the Institute’s 1983 Galton Lecture, entitled "Intelligence: Old Wine in New Bottles"; he also gave papers at the 1991 and 1994 symposia. With his passing the Institute loses a loyal friend and the academic world a courageous scholar.

W H G Armytage