Institute of Psychology (Szeged)

The former campus site was the Neo-Renaissance building in Szeged's Dugonics Square, originally built as a secondary school for modern languages and sciences in 1873.

Accordingly, on 20 October 1926, he filed his petition to the directors of the university for the establishment of a fundamentally different, modern Department of Pedagogy and Psychology.

In 1929, the establishment of the Second Department of Pedagogy and Psychology was brought about by lucky circumstances, given that the petition of Imre Sándor and György Málnási Bartók would not have been sufficient by itself.

In the fall of 1928, to aid the foundering university, the Minister of Culture, Kuno Klebelsberg, ordered the relocation of the Paedagogum and the academic section of Erzsébet Girls’ School to Szeged.

Both Dezső Várkonyi Hildebrand and Sándor Sík were excellent educators at the university and besides Philosophy, János Mester also engaged himself in studies of Psychology and Pedagogy.

On 18 December 1929, Dezső Hildebrand Várkonyi, a Benedictine monk was appointed as the Head of the Independent Institute of Pedagogy and Psychology.

Várkonyi introduced more modern fields of Psychology, including the work of Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, Carl Gustav Jung and Jean Piaget.

In the 1930s, István Boda, a Privatdocent at the University, held a series of lectures on the survey of the intellectuals, and the practical psychology of self-development.

Following the re-annexation of Northern Transylvania, the Franz Joseph University of Sciences was relocated back to Cluj-Napoca, together with the majority of its teachers, Dezső Várkonyi Hildenbrand among them.

Thus, under the leadership of Béla Tettamanti, the only possible approach for the Institute was to mimic the Soviet example, and teach in accordance with the ideology prescribed by Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.

In the early 1990s, the Faculty of Arts of the József Attila University of Sciences called for the reorganization of its departments as institutes.

The university's Medical Faculty and the Cognitive Science Group,[4] led by Csaba Pléh, organized the VIII.

The institute has strong ties to the international Psychology mainstream, as is proven by the lectures given by visiting professors and the large number of students spending months at foreign universities on Erasmus grants.