Else Frenkel was born in Lemberg (Lwiw) in 1908. Before World War I, her family moved to Bad Vöslau in Lower Austria and finally to Vienna, where Frenkel first studied mathematics and physics, then philosophy and psychology. At the age of 22, she completed her studies with the dissertation The Association Principle in Psychology. Both reviewers, Karl Bühler and Moritz Schlick, viewed her work very positively. Else Frenkel soon belonged to the inner circle around Karl and Charlotte Bühler, where she played an important intellectual and social role, especially in coordinating Charlotte Bühler’s psychological research on the life course, which involved several social scientists of these days, including Marie Jahoda. According to Jahoda, Frenkel seemed to have practically lived at the Psychological Institute.

Frenkel made closer acquaintance with Egon Brunswik, whose family came from the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy and whose position she twice represented at the institute in 1931/1932 and 1936. Brunswik, who decided to stay in the US after a visiting professorship at the University of California at Berkeley in 1937, finally enabled Frenkel to flee from Austria to the US just in time – as a Jew, she had been attacked long before 1938 by students who believed it to be a »shame not being able to finish one’s studies without attending a seminar of the Jew Else Frenkel« (quoted in Paier 1996: 32), and was interrogated by the Gestapo before she left. Else Frenkel arrived in New York in June 1938; the wedding with Egon Brunswik took place on the day of her arrival, still on the ship. As a research associate, she worked on several projects in Berkeley, from 1943 onwards also with Theodor W. Adorno, Daniel J. Levinson and R. Nevitt Sanford, a group which eventually published one of the best-known sociological and social psychological studies on National Socialism: The Authoritarian Personality.

_{Further reading:
Frenkel-Brunswik, Else (1996): Studien zur autoritären Persönlichkeit, hrsg. und eingeleitet von Dietmar Paier, Graz/Wien: Nausner & Nausner (Bibliothek sozialwissenschaftlicher Emigranten, Band 3).
Paier, Dietmar (1996): »Einleitung«, in: Frenkel-Brunswik, Else, Studien zur autoritären Persönlichkeit. Ausgewählte Schriften, hrsg. und eingeleitet von Dietmar Paier, Graz/Wien: Nausner & Nausner, S. 7–70.
Sprung, Helga (2011): »Else Frenkel-Brunswik: Wanderin zwischen der Psychologie, Psychoanalyse und dem Logischen Empirismus«, in: Volkmann-Raue, Sibylle/Lück, Helmut E. (Hg.): Bedeutende Psychologinnen des 20. Jahrhunderts. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, S. 235–246. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-531-93064-0_18.}