Frank Sulloway

Psychologist and Historian of Science Class of November 1984
location icon Location
Cambridge, Massachusetts
age iconAge
37 at time of award

About Frank's Work

Frank Sulloway is a psychologist and a science historian whose interests also include evolutionary biology.

Sulloway’s research focuses on how family dynamics, considered from a Darwinian perspective, influence personality and behavior, including major events in world history.  He is the author of Freud, Biologist of the Mind: Beyond the Psychoanalytic Legend (1979), a revisionist biography on the intellectual sources of Freud’s psychoanalytic theories.  He is also the author of Born to Rebel: Birth Order, Family Dynamics, and Creative Lives (1996), in which he demonstrates that birth order is the single best predictor of intellectual flexibility, attitudes toward innovation and new ideas, and other personality traits.  In the early 1970s, Sulloway organized a film expedition retracing Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle.  He has returned to this subject and is working on a collaborative project about Charles Darwin and the Galapagos Islands.

 

Biography

Sulloway is a visiting scholar at the Institute of Personality and Social Research of the University of California, Berkeley.  He served previously as a visiting scholar in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and as a visiting professor at Dartmouth College.

Sulloway received an A.B. (1969), an A.M. (1971), and a Ph.D. (1978) from Harvard University.

Last updated January 1, 2005.

Published on November 1, 1984

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