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Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik

by Maria Kostyanaya | Mar 31, 2014 | Spotlight

Bluma Wulfovna Zeigarnik

Maria Kostyanaya
doi: 10.12744/tnpt(5)102-105
An outstanding Russian psychologist, Zhenya-Bluma Zeigarnik, was born on October
27, 1901 in the small town of Prenai in southern Lithuania. Her parents, Volf and
Ronya Gerstein, ran a store in the city and were highly respected in the community
of well-educated Jews who were living there at the time.

Despite serious struggles with meningitis, which kept her at home for several years,
Bluma successfully graduated from the girls’ gymnasium in Minsk in 1918, receiving
a gold medal. Shortly after that she took another exam designed for graduates of
the boys’ gymnasium and then, after taking courses in Logic and Psychology for a
second time, she began her intense preparation for university study. It was at this
time that she met her future husband, Albert Zeigarnik, whom she married in 1919.

In 1922, supported by her parents, Bluma enrolled in the Department of Philosophy

at the University of Berlin, while her husband became a student at the Polytechnic
Institute.

Inspired by her former literature teacher from the gymnasium, Bluma continued to
develop her interest in psychology by attending lectures of the now-famous Gestalt
psychologists—Wolfgang Kőhler, Max Wertheimer, and Kurt Lewin—as well as the
lectures of Franz Ernst Spranger on pedagogy.

Bluma started working closely with Kurt Lewin, whose experimental studies were
intended to substantiate the eld theoretical approach (Lewin, 1939). This was the
time of her rst scienti c success when, in 1927, under the supervision of Lewin, her
paper Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen (“Remembering Completed
and Uncompleted Tasks”) was published in the journal Psychologische Forschung
(Psychological Research), founded by Max Wertheimer. In this diploma paper she
described the world-famous phenomenon, the “Zeigarnik e ect”, which states that
adults tend to remember interrupted tasks approximately 90% better than
completed ones, while children generally remember interrupted tasks. It was only in
2001 that this work was nally published in the Russian language by the publishing
company Smysl as a part of the collected works of Kurt Lewin.

In 1925 Bluma graduated from the university and received a doctoral degree
following the publication of her study on interrupted tasks. She continued to work
at the University of Berlin as a part-time research scientist until 1931.

Soon enough the Zeiganiks lived out their dream of returning to Russia, where
Bluma started working at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity in Moscow. At this
time she met such remarkable Russian psychologists as Lev Vygotsky and Alexander
Luria, whom she managed to introduce to Lewin soon afterwards.

Ever since her rst visit to Kurt Goldstein’s clinic at Lazarett Hospital in Berlin,
Zeigarnik had been preoccupied with clinical psychology, and in the 1930s this area
became her primary interest. However, even with the academic degree of Candidate
of Biological Sciences granted to her in 1935, she was not able to publish a single
scienti c paper for the period between 1936 and 1939. This was a hard time of
ideological obstruction towards scientists in Russia when, in 1936, the resolution “On
Pedological Perversions in the System of the People’s Commissariat of Education”
was put out by the Central Committee of the VKP(b).

In 1938 Zeigarnik began to work as a psychologist–neurologist at the Institute of

Psychiatry of the Ministry of Health in the Russian Soviet Federal Socialist Republic.
Then, in 1940, two major events happened in her life. First, she was able for the last
time to visit her mother in Lithuania after the signing of the Treaty of Non-
aggression between Germany and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR);
and, second, in the summer her husband was arrested on a charge of having spied
for Germany. He was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment with no right of
correspondence, and

Bluma was left alone with their two children. During this hard period of her life,
Bluma Zeigarnik received much support from her closest friends Alexander Luria
and Susanna Rubinshtein.

During the Second World War Zeigarnik was sent to the regional branch of the All-
Union Institute of Experimental Medicine in Kisegach, in the Urals, where she began
to work as a senior research scientist on restoring the psychological and somatic
activity of people with brain injuries. The data Zeigarnik gathered when she was
working there was supposed to be summarized in her dissertation, but upon its
completion all the materials were stolen.

In 1943 Zeigarnik went back to Moscow and continued her work as laboratory head
at the Institute of Psychiatry. In 1949 she also started to give courses at Moscow
State University on a new interdisciplinary sphere of knowledge she greatly
contributed to—pathopsychology.

As part of a broad area of clinical psychology in Russia, pathopsychology was

established in response to the demands of the medical care model and the needs of
clinical practice. Thus, Zeigarnik put much e ort into the organization of
psychological services in psychiatry, claiming pathopsychology as a boundary
discipline between psychology and psychiatry.

The main methodological approach of the emerging eld of pathopsychology that

Zeigarnik saw in general psychology was the focus on nding the “single
psychological link … in the norm and break-up or decay [which] helps understand in
what way certain speci c terms of disease may distort general regularities of mental
life and change its structure” (Nikolaeva, 2011, p. 179). She insisted on the
importance of theoretical knowledge for the development of any discipline and,
therefore, strongly supported the core ideas of the Vygotsky-Luria-Leontiev school of
psychology.
Thus, following the concept of intra-vitam development and the formation of higher
mental functions, Zeigarnik formulated major conditions for pathological
phenomena of the mind (Bratus, 1988). These phenomena might occur either due
to a change in biological conditions caused by the pathology of the brain or
otherwise because of a speci c “narrow” framework of the patient’s life, limited by
the disorder. Zeigarnik believed that for an analysis of mental functions to be
successful it is essential to qualify and classify clinical phenomena within a system of
psychological concepts. Hence, in her work, the whole clinical phenomenology of
aphronia was psychologically quali ed in the form of original and consistent
classi cation and according to the place of the phenomenon in the structure of
intellectual activity.

Another outstanding idea of Zeigarnik’s that she developed at this time was the
quali cation of the whole personality in the clinical picture of disorders. She stated
that, together with cerebral mechanisms of mental disorders, it was important to
address a special—psychological—type of such mechanisms. In other words, the
distortion of personal activity by a patient can contribute signi cantly to pathological
mental phenomena.

Following this idea, her disciples (e.g., Bratus, 1974; Leontiev, 1975; Kareva, 1975;
Kornilova, 1980; Safuanov, 1998) showed that mental pathology might be
psychologically manifested in: (a) the formation of pathological needs and motives;
(b) the change of structure and hierarchy of motives; (c) in the break-up of meaning
making, goal-setting, and goal achievement; (d) personal criticism; and (e) self-
regulation.

Other core areas of research initiated by Zeigarnik included: inquiry into the role of
the patient’s activity in symptom formation; the analysis of symbolic mediation as
the most important mechanism of symptom formation; syndrome analysis, and
pathopsychological experimentation as an original diagnostic procedure.

However, following many years of severe political ostracism in the USSR, Zeigarnik
and her family were left almost destitute. They were supported by Luria,
Rubinshtein and Melekhov for nearly a decade, after which time Zeigarnik resumed
her independent work both at the Institute of Psychiatry and Lomonosov Moscow
State University.

In 1958, upon completion of her third doctoral dissertation, Zeigarnik was granted
the degree of Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences; in 1965, she was conferred the title of
Professor of Psychology; and in 1967 she was elected chair of the Faculty of
Psychophysiology and Neuropsychology of Moscow State University. It was the time
of her worldwide recognition as a remarkable Soviet psychologist whose research
went beyond her work on interrupted actions, and when most of her major works
were nally published, namely, Thought Disorder in the Mentally Ill (Zeigarnik, 1959),
Pathology of Thinking (Zeigarnik, 1962), Introduction to Pathopsychology (Zeigarnik,
1969), Personality and Pathology of Activity (Zeigarnik, 1971), and Foundations of
Psychopathology (Zeigarnik, 1973).

In 1969 Zeigarnik managed to attend the International Congress of Psychology in

London, and in 1978 she was awarded the First Degree Lomonosov Prize for a
collection of works on the psychological manifestations of various mental disorders
and the correction and rehabilitation of mentally disturbed patients. Later, on her
trip to Leipzig to attend the International Congress of Psychology, Zeigarnik was
awarded the Lewin Memorial Award, although she was not able to accept it herself
because of political bans between East and West still in place at that time.

During the 1980s, Zeigarnik continued her work as Chair of the Faculty of
Pathopsychology and Neuropsychology of Moscow State University, giving lectures
on pathopsychology, pathology of thought, and foreign theories of the personality.
Her monographs The Theory of Personality of K. Lewin (Zeigarnik, 1981), Theories of
Personality in Foreign Psychology (Zeigarnik, 1982), and Pathopsychology (Zeigarnik,
1986) appeared during this period of her life. Memorising nished and un nished
actions (Zeigarnik, 2001) was published after her death.

Su ering for many years from anemia that required frequent blood transfusions,
Bluma nevertheless remained completely dedicated to her work right up until her
death on February 24, 1988. Despite all the vicissitudes of life, Bluma Zeigarnik was
known to always express true joy from what she was doing as well as gratitude
towards all the kind people who had helped her survive and become an outstanding
scientist.

References

Bratus, B. (1974). Psikhologicheskij analiz izmeneniya lichnosti pri alkogolisme

[Psychological analysis of personality change in alcoholism]. Moscow: Izd-vo Mosk.
un-ta.

Bratus, B. (1988). Anomalii lichnosti [Abnormalities of personality]. Moscow: Smysl.

Kareva, M. (1975). Ob odnom vide formirovaniya patosogicheskogo motiva v

podrosrkovom vozraste [A form of the formation of pathological motive in
adolescence]. : Avtoref. dis. … kand. psikhil. nauk.

Kornilova, A. (1980). Narusheniya celepologaniya u psikhicheski bol’nyh [Violations of

goal-setting of the mentally ill]. : Avtoref. dis. … kand. psikhol. nauk.

Leontiev, A. . (1975). Deyatel’nost’, soznanie, lichnost’ [Activity, mind, personality].

Moscow: Politizdat

Lewin, K. (1939). Field Theory and Experiment in Social Psychology: Concepts and
Methods. American Journal of Sociology, 44, 868–896.
Nikolaeva, V. V. (2011). B. W. Zeigarnik and pathopsychology, Psychology in Russia:
State of the Art, 4, 176–192.

Safuanov. F. S. (1998). Sudebno-psikhologicheskaya ekspertiza v ugolovnom

processe [Forensic psychiatric examination in criminal proceedings]. Moscow:
Gardarika, Smysl.

Zeigarnik, B. (1959). Narushenie myshleniya u psikhicheski bol’nyh [Thought disorder

in the mentally ill]. Moscow.

Zeigarnik, B. (1962). Patologiya myshleniya [Pathology of Thinking] Moscow: Izd-vo

Mosk. un-ta.

Zeigarnik, B. (1969). Vvedenie v patopsikhologiyu [Introduction to Pathopsychology]

Moscow: Izd-vo Mosk. un-ta.

Zeigarnik, B. (1971). Lichnost’ i patologiya deyatel’nosti [Personality and pathology of

activity]. Moscow: Izd-vo Mosk. un-ta.

Zeigarnik, B. (1973). Osnovy patopsikhologii [Foundations of Psychopathology].

Moscow: Izd-vo Mosk. un-ta.

Zeigarnik, B. (1981). Teoriya lichnosti Kurta Levina [The Theory of Personality of K.

Lewin]. Moscow: Izd-vo Mosk. un-ta.

Zeigarnik, B. (1982). Teorii lichnosti v zarubezhnoj psikhologii [Theories of

personality in foreign psychology]. Moscow: Iz-vo Mosk. un-ta.

Zeigarnik, B. (1986). Patopsikhologiya [Pathopsychology]. Moscow: Izd-vo Mosk. un-

ta.

Zeigarnik, B. (2001). Zapominanie zakonchennyh I nezakonchennyh dejstvij

[Memorising nished and un nished actions]. Moscow: Smysl.

Литература

Зейгарник, Б. В. Нарушение мышления у психически больных: дис. д-ра психол.

наук / Зейгарник Блюма Вульфовна. – М., 1959.

Зейгарник, Б. В. Патология мышления. М.: Изд-во МГУ, 1962.

Зейгарник, Б. В. Введение в патопсихологию. М.: Изд-во МГУ, 1969.

Зейгарник, Б. В. Личность и патология деятельности. М.: Изд-во МГУ, 1971.

Зейгарник, Б. В. Основы патопсихологии. М.: Изд-во МГУ, 1973.

Зейгарник, Б. В. Теория личности Курта Левина. М.: Изд-во МГУ, 1981.

Зейгарник, Б. В. Теории личности в зарубежной психологии. М.: Изд-во МГУ,
1982.

Зейгарник, Б. В. Патопсихология. М.: Изд-во МГУ, 1986.

Зейгарник Б. В. Запоминание законченных и незаконченных действий // Левин

К. Динамическая психология: избранные труды. М.: Смысл, 2001.

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