Nicolae Mărgineanu (psychologist)

Nicolae Mărgineanu (1905–1980) was a Romanian psychologist.

Born in Obreja, Alsó-Fehér County (now in Alba County), in the Transylvania region of Austria-Hungary, Mărgineanu attended high school in nearby Blaj and in Orăștie. He graduated from the psychology faculty of Cluj University in 1927, followed by a doctorate in 1929. In 1931 he became a docent of psychology. He attended training in Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg (1929), at the Sorbonne (1935) and in London (1935). He obtained a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship for Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Chicago and Duke Universities (1932-1934). He was instructor (1926-1928), teaching assistant (1928-1936), head of research at the Cluj Psychology Institute (1936-1938) and associate professor (1938-1947). From 1938 to 1942, he was substitute professor of psychology and director of the institute. In 1941-1943 he headed the psycho-technical laboratory in Cluj, under temporary Hungarian administration.

Sentenced to twenty-five years in prison by the new communist regime, he served sixteen (1948-1964). He then returned to work, but was not fully rehabilitated. From 1969 to 1971, he was a researcher at the Institute of Pedagogical Sciences. Until his death, Mărgineanu was a substitute professor of psychology at what was now Babeș-Bolyai University. He was an invited professor at Bonn (1971) and Hamburg (1972) Universities, and again a Rockefeller invitee in the United States (1979-1980). In his publications, he incorporated concepts from philosophy, literature, science and logic. A key work, Psihologia persoanei (1940), focuses on the uniqueness of the individual and his development. In 2012, he was posthumously elected a member of the Romanian Academy.

His son, also called Nicolae Mărgineanu, is a film director.