His father was at various times a store keeper, an insurance agent, postmaster and the co-op grain elevator manager, as well as school board president and church elder.

Following the military, he earned his Ph.D in Psychology from the University of Kansas in 1952, summa cum laude, a member of Phi Beta Kappa.

[3] He had two major grants from the National Institutes of Health and invitations to teach in seminars and at universities around the U.S. and abroad, and he published numerous papers on individual differences and cognition.

In the late 1950s an attempt was being made in academic psychology and psychoanalysis to correlate and study the interaction of cognition, needs, and personality.

Gardner was part of this well known group that also included George Klein, Philip Holzman, and Robert Holt.

This idea is an implicit foundation for modern day psychoanalytic concepts such as self and object representations, mentalization, and a structural perspective on the workings of the mind.