Johan Teunis Barendregt

Johan Teunis Barendregt (Nieuwerkerk, February 16, 1924 – Amsterdam, January 2, 1982) was a Dutch psychologist. He was also known as a chess player and chess composer of some endgame studies

Psychologist
Barendregt studied psychology at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) under Adriaan de Groot and, among other things, researched the effectiveness of psychoanalysis. He had the ambition to advance psychology towards natural science and, according to his contemporaries, delivered a methodologically exemplary dissertation that was only 53 pages long.

From 1962 he was professor of personality theory at the UvA. His model for the development of a phobia was published posthumously. Barendregt argued that a phobia arises as a result of what he called "it", an acute attack of depersonalization in which the phobia has a survival function; “the support lies in fear, which is preferable to emptiness.”

In a retrospective by Jaap van Heerde, Barendregt is referred to as a "walking paradox" because he became the personification of the methodological battle that was raging at the time between the hermeneutics of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists and the methodological approach of experimental psychologists and psychometricians. He accused the first group of not being sufficiently verifiable in their results. But according to Barendregt, the methodologists paid too little attention to the individual.

Chess player
Barendregt became obsessed with chess at the age of 13 and in 1937 proved a chess problem in De Schaakwereld wrong.  He played for the Dutch title four times and took part in the 1952 Chess Olympiad. In 1961 he came third in the blast furnace chess tournament behind Bruno Parma and Francesco Scafarelli. In 1962 he was awarded the title of International Master. In 1966 he defeated Mikhail Botvinnik at the IBM tournament.  He is mentioned in My Sixty Unforgettable Games (1969) by Bobby Fischer in connection with a variation of an opening.

Private life
Barendregt died of lung cancer at the age of 57.

His son Henk Barendregt (1947) is a professor of mathematics and computer science.

Bibliography (selection)
Research in psychodiagnostics: examination protocol (1961), with Willem Meuwese
Characters of and after Theophrastus (1977), free translation from the Greek of Characters of Theophrastus
The Market for Souls: About Psychotherapy Seriously (1982)
external link
(de) The chess games of Johan Teunis Barendregt, overview of 85 chess games by Johan Barendregt, period 1948 – 1974
Sources, notes and/or references
A Walking Paradox, by Jaap van Heerde
Advertising motivation, by Tim Krabbé. Archived on December 11, 2022.
Barendregt, by Cor Jansen
Barendregt beats the great Botvinnik, Het Vrije Volk, July 13, 1966

Source: Wikipedia (Dutch)

Website arves org (editor Peter Boll):

He what about o.t.b. International Master and working at the University of Amsterdam.

Others: 3 endgame studies by him are selected on Website arves.org