27 October] 1900[1] – 24 February 1988) was a Soviet psychologist of Lithuanian origin, a member of the Berlin School of experimental psychology and the so-called Vygotsky Circle.

She contributed to the establishment of experimental psychopathology as a separate discipline in the Soviet Union in the post-World War II period.

Bluma's parents informally adopted her future husband, Albert Zeigarnik, and paid for education of both children abroad.

In 1920–1922 she attended at lectures at the Department of Humanities of Lithuanian Higher Courses of Study in Kovno [now Vytautas Magnus University].

[2][5] In 1940, a major event happened in Zeigarnik's life; her husband Albert was arrested and sentenced (on February 26, 1942) by the Special Council of the NKVD to 10 years in prison in a labor camp, which is often referred to as Gulag, "as an agent of foreign intelligence and for espionage activities" (rehabilitated on June 27, 1956).

3120 in Evacuation in the village of Kisegach, Chelyabinsk oblast, where she was engaged in the restoration of cognitive and mental functions after brain injuries and rehabilitation treatment of the wounded.

Being influenced by Vygotsky, she started to work on various problems related to pathologies of reasoning, psychotic and personality disorders, post-traumatic silliness, etc.

[6] By the end of the 1940s, she accumulated considerable knowledge that allowed her to compare pathologies in patients with and without military traumas.

In 1950, upon the beginning of an antisemitic campaign in the Soviet Union, Zeigarnik stopped heading the laboratory, and in 1953, she was fired from the Institute of Psychiatry.

By 1959, she prepared yet another doctor-of-sciences dissertation titled "Thinking disorders in the mentally ill." In her dissertation work, Zeigarnik described the results of a study of 710 patients who were diagnosed with schizophrenia, epilepsy, cerebrovascular disease, brain injury, intellectual disability, encephalitis, progressive paralysis, manic depressive psychosis, and personality disorders.

Comparison of experimental psychological and clinical data made it possible to diagnose diseases more effectively.

Experimental data led Zeigarnik to conclude that the usual division of mental activity into separate processes is artificial and does not allow a consistent description of the disintegration of thinking.

[16] Zeigarnik criticized psychological research, in which the main emphasis was not on the experiment but rather on the measurement and correlation of individual characteristics or personality traits.

At the same time, she criticized speculative psychological research: theories and ideas that were not in connection with systematic experimental studies.

Later, Zeigarnik concluded that the importance of taking personality assessment of the patient's psychological state and general understanding of their defect structure was key.

[21] In 1980, Zeigarnik attended at the Leipzig International Congress of Psychology, the first and one of the few opportunities to travel outside of the Soviet Union and meet foreign colleagues.

Each awardee usually presented a paper, and Zeigarnik submitted her article,[23] largely based on her book "The Theory of Personality of Kurt Lewin" (in Russian).