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25 May 2022 | Story Alicia Pienaar
Prof Paul Fouche

The Dean of the Faculty of the Humanities, Prof Heidi Hudson, has the pleasure of inviting you to the inaugural lecture of Prof Paul Fouché in the Department of Psychology. 

 
Event details:
Date: Wednesday 1 June 2022
Time: 17:30 SAST
Venue: Equitas Auditorium, UFS Bloemfontein Campus 

RSVP before or on 27 May 2022 to Anneke Diesel, +27 51 401 9314 or email denobilia@ufs.ac.za 

 

Subject: 
Understanding Greatness: Dissecting the eminent personality from a psychobiographical approach

 

About the Speaker: 

Paul Fouché has been employed at the UFS since 2007. Currently, he is a professor and a registered counselling psychologist with the HPCSA and an active member of the Psychological Society of South Africa. He is also an NRF C-rated researcher. As research supervisor/co-supervisor, he has graduated 115 postgraduate students. 

He served on the editorial committee of Acta Academica, was guest editor of the Journal of Psychology in Africa, and co-editor of special issues on psychobiography for Europe’s Journal of Psychology and two books by Springer. Paul is the coordinator of the BPsych Honours programme and lectures in the Applied Master’s programme.

Academic credentials: 
PhD: 1999, Psychobiography, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa 
MSocSc cum laude: 1993, Counselling Psychology, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa 
BSocSc Honours cum laude: 1990, Psychology, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa 
BSocSc: 1989, Psychology, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa


News Archive

Understanding the nature of prominence
2014-03-14

 

What did Hendrik Verwoerd and Steve Biko have in common? Or perhaps Johannes Kerkorrel and Brenda Fassie?

“They all possessed a certain natural predisposition to prominence,” says Prof Paul Fouche, reseacher in psychobiography at the University of the Free State’s Department of Psychology.

Prof Fouche and a team of researchers from other South African universities released findings on psychobiographical studies done on personalities that played a great role in our history.

The studies show that notable historical figures were very often prolific readers with a passion for literature since childhood. Generally, they also had a great love for nature and a sense of the sacredness of it, as well as a love for the cosmos.

The study further reveals that many of them were forced to take up leadership roles in the family from a very young age and were driven to succeed in order to take care of their own.

In many of these cases, there was a strong partner who supported the leader while they went about the business of governing their world.

Psychobiography is the systematic and descriptively-rich case study of renowned, enigmatic or even contentious individuals in socio-historical contexts within a psychological frame of reference. Over the past decade, psychobiography has become an established research genre and a methodology used by various academics and scholars in the field of life history research.

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