Dreikurs, Rudolph

Basic Biography

Rudolph Dreikurs, an American psychiatrist and educator, was born in Vienna, Austria, on February 8, 1897. He completed his medical training at the University of Vienna in 1923 and began his medical career in Austria, before immigrating to the United States in 1937. Five years later, during World War II, Dreikurs began a 30-year career at the Chicago Medical School as a professor of psychiatry. He also lectured in psychiatry at Loyola College from 1957 onward, and was a visiting professor at several other American universities as well as at colleges in Brazil and Israel.

Dreikurs was a student of the Austrian-born social psychologist Alfred Adler, who also immigrated to the United States in the 1930s; the two became close professional colleagues. Adler based his theories of individual psychology on the premise that people as social beings are primarily motivated by the need to be part of a social context and accepted by others. For both Adler and Dreikurs, the key to...