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PAUL HARKAI SCHILLER: AN INTRODUCTION
DONALD A. DEWSBURY
Paul Harkai Schiller was among the most creative and vigorous psychologists of his time. Although he was killed in a skiing accident in 1949 at a relatively young age, his work continues to be relevant in several research areas. The published record, especially in English, consists of an array of disjointed fragments. In fact, however, Schiller's work fits into a coherent and consistent package. The present four-article treatment is intended to remedy the lack of information about Schiller and to provide a broader perspective on his life and work.
Aside from a short paragraph in Science(Staff, 1949), when Schiller died there were none of the published tributes and obituaries of the sort written upon the deaths of other prominent psychologists. Perhaps this was because he was Hungarian born and had lived in the United States only a short time before his death.
Given the respect displayed for Schiller by his peers, this lacuna is surprising. Frank Beach (1958, p. 177) wrote that Schiller's death "robbed comparative psychology of one of its most imaginative thinkers and ingenious experimenters." Karl Lashley (1957, p. x) called Schiller "distinguished" and ranked him "among the three or four most competent students of comparative psychology in America" (Lashley, 1949). Leonard Carmichael (1968, p. 60) wrote that Schiller "made especially important contributions to what might be called quantitative psychobiology because he combined the modern ethological point of view with a clear understanding of the quantitative American approach to animal psychology."
Although I have been aware of Schiller's work for some time (e.g., Dewsbury, 1984), I first learned a substantial amount about his life from an obituary written by the late Karl Lashley soon after Schiller's death. I found this in the archives of the Yerkes Primate Regional Research Center in Atlanta, GA. Another original copy is now in the archives at the University of Florida. Lashley prepared the sketch after Claire Schiller wrote a 7-page version in 1950. It has never been published in English; several editors, including Edwin G. Boring, Karl M. Dallenbach, and Carroll C. Pratt, rejected Lashley's article. The piece has recently been published in Hungarian (Lashley, 1992). Lashley's biography of Schiller is included as the second part of this treatment.