Chapter 14 Eysenck’s Biologically Based Factor Theory 413Is About People (1972); You and Neurosis (1977b); Sex, Violence and the Media
(with D. K. B. Nias, 1978); Smoking, Personality, and Stress (1991d); Genius: The
Natural History of Creativity (1995); and Intelligence: A New Look (1998a).
Eysenck’s range of interests was exceedingly broad, and his willingness to step
into almost any controversy was legendary. He was a gadfly to the conscience of
psychology since he first entered its ranks. He upset many psychoanalysts and other
therapists in the early 1950s with his contention that no evidence existed to suggest
that psychotherapy was more effective than spontaneous remission. In other words,
those people who receive no therapy were just as likely to get better as were those
who underwent expensive, painful, prolonged psychotherapy with expertly trained
psychoanalysts and psychologists (Eysenck, 1952a). Eysenck maintained that belief
for the remainder of his life. In 1996, he told an interviewer that “psychotherapies
are no more effective than... placebo treatments” (Feltham, 1996, p. 424).
Eysenck was not afraid to take an unpopular stand, as witnessed by his
defense of Arthur Jensen, whose contention was that IQ scores cannot be signifi-
cantly increased by well-intentioned social programs because they are largely
genetically determined. Eysenck’s book The IQ Argument (1971) was so contro-
versial that elements in the United States “threatened booksellers with arson if they
dared to stock the book; well-known ‘liberal’ newspapers refused to review it; and
the outcome was that it was largely impossible in the land of free speech to dis-
cover the existence of the book or to buy it” (Eysenck, 1980, p. 175).
In 1983, Eysenck retired as professor of psychology at the Institute of Psy-
chiatry, University of London, and as senior psychiatrist at the Maudsley and
Bethlehem Royal hospitals. He then served as professor emeritus at the University
of London until his death from cancer on September 4, 1997. Eysenck, who fre-
quently argued that cigarette smoking was not a major risk factor for cancer, had
been a heavy smoker until middle age when he gave up cigarettes because he
believed that they affected his tennis game.
During his later years, his research continued to reflect a variety of topics,
including creativity (Eysenck, 1993, 1995; Frois & Eysenck, 1995), behavioral
interventions in cancer and heart disease (Eysenck, 1991d, 1996; Eysenck &
Grossarth-Maticek, 1991), and intelligence (Eysenck, 1998a).
Eysenck won many awards, including the 1991 Distinguished Contributions
Award of the International Society for the Study of Individual Differences. The
American Psychological Association presented him with its Distinguished Scientist
Award (1988), the Presidential Citation for Scientific Contribution (1993), the
William James Fellow Award (1994), and the Centennial Award for Distinguished
Contributions to Clinical Psychology (1996).
Eysenck’s Factor Theory
The personality theory of Hans Eysenck has strong psychometric and biological
components. However, Eysenck (1977a, 1997a) contended that psychometric
sophistication alone is not sufficient to measure the structure of human personality
and that personality dimensions arrived at through factor analytic methods are ster-
ile and meaningless unless they have been shown to possess a biological existence.