Michael Apter

Michael J. Apter (born 1939) is a British psychologist, born in Stockton-on-Tees, County Durham, and raised in Bristol. He was educated at Clifton College and at Bristol University, where he gained his bachelor degree and his doctorate in psychology in 1965 after a doctoral year at Princeton University. He taught for twenty years at Cardiff University in Wales and has held invited positions at Purdue University, the University of Chicago, Yale University, the University of Toulouse and Georgetown University. He is a chartered psychologist and a fellow of the British Psychological Society. His work has been mainly in motivation and phenomenology, particularly through the lens of reversal theory, set out in books such as The Experience of Motivation (1982) and The Dangerous Edge (1992).