An Austrian educator with an interest in psychoanalysis, the pioneer of a new approach to reeducating problem children, August Aichhorn was born July 27, 1878, in Vienna, Austria, where he spent his entire life, and died October 13, 1949. He was raised, along with a twin brother who died when Aichhorn was 19, in a Catholic family of modest means. He became a teacher and continued his studies at the Technische Hochschule of Vienna.

From 1908 to 1918 he was in charge of managing homes for boys in the Austrian capital. In 1918 he was made responsible for setting up an educational center for delinquent children in an unused refugee camp. Convinced that the suppression then commonly practiced was not the right approach, and disappointed by the kinds of psychological training taught at the university, he introduced unorthodox methods, based on "warm sympathy with the fate of those unfortunates and was correctly guided by an intuitive...