Women in Psychology

 

Women in psychology traditionally were highly underrepresented in history, often dismissed and restricted. Nietzsche wrote in ‘Thus spoke Zarathustra’: “Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman hath one solution —it is called pregnancy. Man is for woman a means: the purpose is always the child.” 👀😶

Being a single mother with ambitions can feel like netted in a Kafkaesque tragedy - captured somewhere between ‘the verdict’ and ‘the castle’, alienated and guilt-ridden, tortured by fatigue and goals that seem to move away with every step forward. I long for undisrupted time to tackle a project and sit through it until it is finished. It feels like an impossible mountain climb. I often suspend an excellent workflow - in the morning when the kids get out of bed, during the day multiple times to be present with them, in the afternoon to pick them up from either daycare or school. However, as I just found out, there may be certain memory benefits of being interrupted and having to leave an unfinished task.

Bljuma Wulfowna Zeigarnik was a Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist who lived between 1901 and 1988. Her paper published in 1929 states that participants remembered unfinished tasks better than finished tasks. Her tasks consisted of writing a poem, kneading an animal from clay, drawing a little map from a part of Berlin, stringing pearls on a thread, or doing multiplications, solving riddles and many more. Depending on the condition, participants had to attend to on average 20 tasks. During some of those, they were interrupted; others they could finish. When asked to remember all the items given, participants reproduced those tasks left unfinished at nearly double the rate than the finished ones. This phenomenon has been termed the Zeigarnik effect. But why would this occur?

Zeigarnik reported that many participants were quite disturbed by the intermittent interruptions and asked to finish one before going to the next. Leaving something unfinished was unsatisfying and met with great hesitancy. This emotional emphasis towards unfinished tasks and the tension created was thought to be a reason for the better recall of those items. Alternatively, the participant might have felt that the instructor would want the task to be finished at a later point, therefore paying more attention to those items. However, some tasks were completed, yet the participant felt inadequate about them; and these were also remembered better.

Interestingly, children recalled the unfinished tasks even better than adults, so I will experiment tomorrow by asking my daughter while she is doing her homework to help me in the garden instead, or interrupt her otherwise. Maybe she will recall her timetables better afterwards...? 😂

Bljuma Zeigarnik was a fascinating woman. Born to Jewish parents, she was a steadfast learner and reader, and after getting married, she moved to Berlin and attended the University. Under the supervision of Kurt Lewin, the developer of the Gestalt theory, she received a doctoral degree. She was also a friend of Lev Vygotsky, a vital inspiration to her, and was greatly troubled by his premature death. Back in Russia, she had to censor mostly everything that had to do with her Western education in Berlin, and her life in Germany, while at the same time, she also believed strongly in the Marxist views of the time. She raised her small children as a single mother when her husband was sent to a prison camp for ten years in 1940 due to suspicions of spying for the Germans.

During world war 2, Zeigarnik helped treat head injuries, trying to restore patients’ psychological and somatic symptoms. Later, she co-founded the Moscow State University Department of Psychology, where she held seminars in psychopathology until her death at 87. She promoted the classification of psychological illnesses independently to the West and akin to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). She endorsed integrating the whole personality of a patient for a diagnosis and not posing a diagnosis just based on symptoms. Furthermore, she further proposed that a psychiatric disorder could manifest in the collapse of sense-making, an early move away from reductionism, a concept taken up recently by Sanneke de Haan, another intriguingly brilliant female psychiatrist and philosopher in her theory of enactivism, or enactive psychiatry. 

It strikes me that not only have women in psychology been denied academic positions in the West, but academic achievements from the East have also not been recognized as much, firstly due to the iron curtain, but lastly because of an academic halt due to the social and political influence in Russia under Marxist idealism. Even more astounding that Bljuma Zeigarnik was able to work and teach under these circumstances, and I felt that we need to acknowledge her findings as well as her life.

Bibliography

Awais Aftab, M. (2021). Sense-Making and the Enactive Turn in Psychiatry: Sanneke de Haan, PhD. Psychiatric Times. Retrieved 5 May 2021, from https://www.psychiatrictimes.com/view/sense-making-enactive-turn-psychiatry- sanneke-de-haan-phd.

Chebotareva, E., & Novikova, I. (2013). Russian Psychology. The Encyclopedia Of Cross- Cultural Psychology, 1111-1115.

https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118339893.wbeccp464

Kholmogorova, A., Pugovkina, O., & Vedmitskaya, D. (2020). Readings in the Memory of Bluma Zeigarnik: Preliminary Outcomes. Консультативная Психология И Психотерапия, 28(4), 191-199. https://doi.org/10.17759/cpp.2020280411

Quotes - Nietzsche. Retrieved 5 May 2021, from https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/6218495-everything-in-woman-is-a-riddle-and- everything-in-woman.

Zeigarnik, A.V. (2007). Bluma Zeigarnik: A Memoir. Retrieved 5 May 2021, from http://www.gestalttheory.net/cms/uploads/pdf/GTH- Archive/2007Zeigarnik_Memoir.pdf.

Zeigarnik, B. (1928). Das Behalten erledigter und unerledigter Handlungen. Retrieved 5 May 2021, from https://www.interruptions.net/literature/Zeigarnik- PsychologischeForschung27.pdf.