25 Facts About Bluma Zeigarnik

Bluma Zeigarnik contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period.

Bluma Zeigarnik had found that interrupted tasks are remembered better than completed ones; this is known as the Zeigarnik effect.

Bluma Zeigarnik is considered one of the co-founders of the Department of Psychology at the Moscow State University.

Bluma Zeigarnik graduated in 1925 and received a Doctoral degree from the same university in 1927.

Bluma Zeigarnik 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, and from the 1940s, at the Institute of Psychiatry in Moscow.

Bluma Zeigarnik liked his progressive views and started her scientific career within his research group.

Not only was Lewin the main influence in Bluma Zeigarnik life, but he was a good friend.

Bluma Zeigarnik met and started working with him, as well as with Alexander Luria and Alexei Leontyev in 1931.

In 1940, Bluma Zeigarnik started to publish works on the effects of brain injuries.

In 1950, upon the beginning of an antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union, Bluma Zeigarnik stopped heading the laboratory, and in 1953, she was fired from the Institute of Psychiatry.

Bluma Zeigarnik explored which subcategories of these three main categories are characteristic of certain diseases and how best to identify them.

Experimental data led Bluma Zeigarnik to conclude that the usual division of mental activity into separate processes is artificial and does not allow a consistent description of the disintegration of thinking.

Bluma 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.

Bluma Zeigarnik 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, and comparison of experimental data with the patient's history of life.

Bluma Zeigarnik pointed out that the most fruitful studies are those related to the analysis of the intellectual sphere, and not with the more volatile emotional sphere.

Bluma 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.

Bluma Zeigarnik's work provided great service to her country and as a pathophysiology, she established the use of her work in medical care, specifically in clinical work.

Bluma Zeigarnik's work had a clinical focus which helped psychiatric health professionals focus their attention on mental health issues.

Later, Bluma Zeigarnik concluded that the importance of taking personality assessment of the patient's psychological state and general understanding of their defect structure was key.

Bluma Zeigarnik stated that, "Any problem suggested by psychiatric practice, whether it concerns the examination of disability, or the study of the structure of remission, or the effectiveness of treatment - the data of psychological study comes useful only at once, when and where they suggest a qualification of the whole personality rather than a certain mental process".

In Gestalt psychology, the Bluma Zeigarnik effect has been used to demonstrate the general presence of Gestalt phenomena: not just appearing as perceptual effects, but present in cognition.

In 1978, Bluma Zeigarnik received the Lomonosov award from the Moscow State University.

In 1980, Bluma 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.

Each awardee usually presented a paper, and Bluma Zeigarnik submitted her article, largely based on her book "The Theory of Personality of Kurt Lewin".