Anton Trstenjak

Anton Trstenjak
Born	(1906-01-08)8 January 1906 Rodmošci, Austria-Hungary
Died	29 September 1996(1996-09-29) (aged 90) Ljubljana, Slovenia
Nationality	Slovene
Occupation(s)	Psychologist, theologian, author

Anton Trstenjak (8 January 1906 – 29 September 1996) was Slovene psychologist, theologian, and author. He is notable as a pioneer of Slovenian clinical psychology and was practicing his own logotherapy-inspired psychotherapy. As author he wrote books in specific areas of applied psychology such as ecological psychology, pastoral psychology, psychology of work and organization, and his overview of the field of psychology in general.

Life

Anton Trstenjak was born into a family of small farmers in Rodmošci near Gornja Radgona, at the time part of Austrian Empire, now Slovenia. After elementary school in Negova and high school in Maribor, he went to the University of Innsbruck to become a Roman Catholic priest. However, he first received a doctoral degree in philosophy in 1929, and four years later in theology. He went to study further in Paris between 1935 and 1937, and then to Milan, where he specialized in experimental psychology at Agostino Gemelli between 1941 and 1942.

Work

Teaching

From 1940 until his retirement in 1973, he taught psychology and philosophy at the Roman Catholic Faculty of Theology in Ljubljana.

Experimental psychology of color perception

Upon conducting his experiments, he proposed there exists an inverse quantitative relationship between the reaction times, on one hand, and wavelengths, on the other hand, in perception of colors by humans.

Membership

In 1953, he became a member of the Paris-based International Association for Applied Psychology. In 1979, he became a member of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts and in 1993 a member of the European Academy of Sciences and Arts.

Further reading

• 2007 Anton Trstenjak's 100 Years Anniversary Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts Symposium, with 17 participating authors.