A female applied psychologist: Franziska Baumgarten

In spite of her rich scientific output and active contributions to psychology, Baumgarten’s name is seldom cited in works on the history of psychology, and there are very few biographical works about her. The present essay is designed to remedy that neglect by highlighting the salient points of her intellectual and professional career from the early years education spent among the thousand books of her father’s library until her final interest in traumatic war experiences. This life report is better clarified by personal and social factors. A particular attention is then paid to those meetings which defined the line of her research. The first important meeting took place in 1911 in Berlin, where Baumgarten took Hugo Münsterberg’s course on applied psychology in industry. Her enthusiasm for this branch of psychology derived from personal experience: she had grown up in an industrial city and her house was surrounded by factories. Consequently, she specialized in that field and became a member of the board of directors of the International Psychotechnical Association. The second occasion, her marriage with a Jewish child psychiatrist, led her to deal with diagnostic-methodological themes, such as intelligence, memory, thought, and character. These two lines of research are examined in-depth.