Bluma Zeigarnik

Soviet psychologist (1901–1988)

Bluma Zeigarnik (Блю́ма Ву́льфовна Зейга́рник; 9 November [O. S. 27 October] 1900 – 24 February 1988) was a Soviet psychologist of Lithuanian origin, a member of the Berlin School of experimental psychology and the so called Vygotsky Circle. She contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the post World War II period. In the 1920s she conducted a study on memory, in which she compared memory in relation to interrupted and completed tasks. She had found that interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones; this is now known as the Zeigarnik effect. From 1931 she worked in the Soviet Union. She is considered one of the co founders of the Department of Psychology at the Moscow State University. In 1983 she received the Lewin Memorial Award for her psychological research.

Zeigarnik was born as Zhenya Bluma Gerštein (or Geršteinaite) into a Jewish family in Prienai, Suwałki Governorate (now in Lithuania) to Wulf and Ronya Feiga Gerštein, as their only child. Her primary language was Russian, although she was also able to speak Yiddish, Lithuanian, and Polish. Bluma's parents informally adopted her future husband, Albert Zeigarnik, and paid for education of both children abroad. In her autobiographic note, which she wrote in 1927 as it was required for her doctorate thesis and which is available from the archive of the Humboldt University, she wrote that until she was 15, she took private lessons and in 1916 she entered the [fifth grade of] Reimann–Dalmatov Gymnasium in Minsk, which she left in 1918 after passing the final exam. In 1920–1922 she attended at lectures at the Department of Humanities of Lithuanian Higher Courses of Study in Kovno [now Vytautas Magnus University]. In May 1922, the future couple left for Berlin, where he studied at the Polytechnic Institute and she at the University of Berlin. They married in Kaunas on January 9, 1924. At at the University of Berlin, she met Kurt Lewin and upon graduation assisted him in his experimental work. She graduated in 1925 and received a Doctoral degree from the same university in 1927. She described the Zeigarnik effect in a thesis prepared under the supervision of Kurt Lewin.

In May 1931, Zeigarnik relocated from Berlin to Moscow, where she started to work closely with Lev Vygotsky at the Institute of Higher Nervous Activity belonging to the Section of Natural Science of the Communist Academy, at the Psychoneurological Hospital of the All Union Institute of Experimental Medicine (existed in Moscow in 1932–1944), and from the 1940s, at the Institute of Psychiatry in Moscow. During this time, Lewin was a teacher and a researcher. Zeigarnik liked his progressive views and started her scientific career within his research group. It was with Lewin that she developed her well known theory: the Zeigarnik effect. Not only was Lewin the main influence in Zeigarnik life, but he was also a good friend. Another Influence of Zeigarnik was Lev Vygotsky. Zeigarnik met and started working with him, as well as with Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontyev in 1931. Together they studied topics involving mental structures and general psychology. Their research also allowed Zeigarnik to create and name her own field of psychology. By the end of the 1940s, she accumulated considerable knowledge that allowed her to compare pathologies in patients with and without military traumas. As a result of these studies, she prepared a doctor of sciences dissertation, but the text was stolen shortly before its completion. In 1950, upon the beginning of an antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union, Zeigarnik stopped heading the laboratory, and in 1953, she was fired from the Institute of Psychiatry. The Pathology of Thinking (1962), Introduction to Abnormal Psychology (1969), Personality and the Pathology of Activity (1971), Foundations to Abnormal Psychology (1973), Essays on the Psychology of Abnormal Personality Development (1980), Abnormal Psychology (1968). Zeigarnik criticized psychological research, in which the main emphasis was not on the experiment but rather on the measurement and correlation of individual characteristics or personality traits. She considered it mandatory to use a set of techniques and believed that a pathopsychological study should include several components: an experiment, an interview of a patient, an observation of the patient's behavior during the study, an analysis of the life story of a sick person (which is a professionally written medical history by a doctor and a clinical record), and comparison of experimental data with the patient's history of life. From her point of view, it is very important (although not always possible) to conduct research in dynamics, that is, to see the same person in a year or two. The experiment must take into account the fundamental indivisibility of the psyche into separate components and, therefore, cannot be reduced to measuring the characteristics of its individual components. At the same time, she criticized speculative psychological research: theories and ideas that were not in connection with systematic experimental studies. Zeigarnik pointed out that the most fruitful studies are those related to the analysis of the intellectual sphere (associated with sensations, perceptions, ideas, concepts and their combination, and speech), and not with the more volatile emotional sphere (moods, feelings, and drives). In her opinion, the main principle of constructing a pathopsychological experiment is the principle of a qualitative analysis of the course of the patient's mental processes, as opposed to the task of merely measuring their scores. In addition to the complexity of tasks that the patient was able to comprehend or complete, she considered important to know what caused the patient's mistakes and what was difficult. In contrast to healthy subjects, whose usual attitude toward the experiment is to accept tasks and follow instructions, mental patients sometimes ignore or misinterpret tasks or sometimes actively resist instructions. Zeigarnik pointed out that the pathopsychological experiment is a joint two way activity of the experimentalist and the subject, and the situation of the pathopsychological experiment is a segment of real life. Therefore, the experiment should not fix some static psychological states, but rather should be formative. Diagnostic tests, according to her idea, should be carried out as psychological experiments in the Vygotskian sense. Her work had a clinical focus which helped psychiatric health professionals focus their attention on mental health issues. In addition, she continued to teach and concentrated on the importance of mental health and clinical practice. Later, Zeigarnik concluded that the importance of taking personality assessment of the patient's psychological state and general understanding of their defect structure was key.

In psychology, the Zeigarnik effect states that people remember uncompleted or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks (this effect should not be confused with the Ovsiankina effect). In Gestalt psychology, the Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but also present in cognition.

In 1978, Zeigarnik received the Lomonosov award from the Moscow State University. In 1980, Zeigarnik attended at the Leipzig International Congress of Psychology, the first and one of the few opportunities to travel outside of the Soviet Union and meet foreign colleagues. There she met June Louin Tapp, a professor at the University of Minnesota and the Chair of the Kurt Lewin Memorial Award Committee, who was surprised to discover that she was a woman and one of Kurt Lewin's last living Berlin students. In 1983,  June Louin Tapp announced her as the Kurt Lewin Memorial Awardee. Although she was not allowed to travel outside of the Soviet Union, she received the diploma and financial support. Each awardee usually presented a paper, and Zeigarnik submitted her article, largely based on her book "The Theory of Personality of Kurt Lewin" (in Russian).

1927: Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen. Psychologische Forschung 9, 1–85. 1965: The Pathology of Thinking. New York: Consultants Bureau Enterprises. 1972: Experimental Abnormal Psychology. New York: Plenum Press. 1984: Kurt Lewin and Soviet psychology. Journal of Social Issues 40 (2), 181–192.