Ştefan Odobleja (1902-1978) was a Romanian scientist considered to be one of the precursors of Cybernetics. He has published a set of ideas regarding systemic thinking as early as 1938 in Paris.
Ştefan Odobleja who originated from a family of peasants in Romania, was obliged to be a self-educated man in his early years of study. Later he attended a pretigious High School and the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest which he was able to finish only with the financial support of the Medical-Military Institute of Bucharest, whose scholar he was. Endowed with an uncommon capacity of work and with an astonishing spirit of inventivity, Ştefan Odobleja has dedicated the greatest part of his life to the problems of knowledge in general, to the knowing of human nature, especially. In spite of the vicissitudes which the unfair fate gave to him, he left an impressive work to the posterity. This work was comprised in about 50,000 pages.
The most important of these writings is "Psychologie consonantiste". This book ,published in Paris (vol. I in 1938 and vol. II in 1939), totalized almost 900 pages and included 300 figures in the text. The author considers that "this book is rather a table of contents, an index or a dictionary of psychology, a general plane for a great Treatise of Psychology that should contain 20-30 volumes". This fact confirms us the proportions of the work at whose achievement the bold personality of Ştefan Odobleja engaged himself.
In this work Ştefan Odobleja was laying the theoretical foundations of the generalized cybernetics. It was forgotten for over 35 years, maybe also because of same difficulties caused by the World War II. The book was printed in French and diffused by the famous "Librairie Maloine" from Paris
The existence of this pioneer work in the domain of cybernetics drew the attention of the scientists through only two published review. The first was published in a Romanian magazine (in 1939) and the second in the well-known American magazine "Psychological Abstracts" (p.59-60), in January 1941. S.M. Strong was signing the latter. It is also to be noticed that the author himself - Ştefan Odobleja - has diffused the prospect by which he announced the participants at the International of Military Medicine about the appearance of this paper "Psychologie consonantiste". That Congress took place at Bucharest between 8-12 June 1939. At this Congress also participated a delegation of the Military Navy of USA, lead by Dr. W.S. Bainbridge.
The first edition in Romanian of this work of an inestimable value appeared only in 1982.
The personality of Ştefan Odobleja can be connected to the existence of a strong interest in Cybernetics in the Romanian scientific community and even outside of it. The largest Romanian University ASE has a Cybernetics department. In 1982 a group of scientists have established the Cybernetics Academy, a scientific forum registered in Lugano, Switzerland financed by the Romanian billionaire Prof. dr. Iosif Constantin Dragan .
