John Flügel

John Carl Flügel (13 June 1884 – 6 August 1955), was a British experimental psychologist and a practising psychoanalyst.

Training and career

Flügel was born in Liverpool on 13 June 1884, to a German father and English mother.^[1]

Psychoanalytic career and writings

Flügel's book Psychoanalytic Study of the Family (1921) was acclaimed by Eric Berne for its insights into the Oedipus complex.^[2] He also published Men and their Motives (1934) and The Psychology of Clothes (1930),^[3] the latter continuing to influence thinking on the subject into the 21st century.^[4]

In Man, Morals and Society (1945), Flugel charted a movement from egocentrism to social awareness by way of what he saw as a hierarchy of expanding loyalties.^[5] Reaching back to his old mentor, he also highlighted “the distinction that McDougall has sometimes made between an 'ideal', which is little more than an intellectual assent to a moral proposition, and a 'sentiment', which involves a real mobilisation”.^[6]

Marriage and death

In 1913 Flügel married Ingeborg Klingberg, who also became a psychoanalyst. They had one daughter. Flügel died in London on 17 August 1955.^{[citation needed]}

References

Further reading

• Graham Richards, Flügel, John Carl (1884–1955), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
• FLUGEL, John Carl, Who Was Who, A & C Black, 1920–2008; online edn, Oxford University Press, Dec 2007, accessed 30 Jan 2012

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