Peter R. Hofstätter

Peter R. Hofstätter (born 1913 in Vienna; died 1994 in Buxtehude) was an Austrian social psychologist whose books on group dynamics, social psychology and general psychology were widely read in the German-speaking countries from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The only child of Robert Matthias Hofstätter, M.D., a professor of gynecology at the University of Vienna, he studied physics and psychology in Vienna and received his doctoral degree for a dissertation on the development of Japanese and Korean children. A disciple of Egon Brunswik and Charlotte and Karl Bühler, he became the president of the Academic Association for Medical Schools and displayed a considerable interest in the applications of psychology. In this context, he enjoyed contacts with psychoanalysts including Alfred Adler and psychotherapists such as Viktor Frankl. His first published paper focused on psychoanalysis.