John Flügel Explained

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

Early life

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

Career

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]

Personal life

In 1913 Flügel married Ingeborg Klingberg, who also became a psychoanalyst. They had one daughter. Flügel died in London in 1955.

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

Notes and References

1. Graham Richards, 'Flügel, John Carl (1884–1955)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 2004 https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-60995
2. [Eric Berne]
3. O. L. Zangwill, 'Flugel, John Charles', in R. Gregory ed., The Oxford Companion to the Mind (1987) p. 264
4. R. Koppen, Virginia Woolf, Fashion and Literary Modernism (2009) p. 59
5. J. C. Flugel, Man, Morals and Society (1973) p. 242-3 and p. 317
6. J. C. Flugel, Man, Morals and Society (1973) p. 67