El jesuita José Antonio de Laburu destacó como orador sagrado y conferenciante en las décadas de 1930 y 1940, pero además las investigaciones histológicas que publicó en el Boletín de la Sociedad Española de Biología, presidida por el Nobel Santiago Ramón y Cajal, le dieron a conocer entre los biólogos e investigadores médicos. Sus escritos sobre los cursos de psicología que dictó en la Argentina durante la II Guerra Mundial le consagraron como divulgador de la psicología científica en los países latinoamericanos, pero fueron poco conocidos en España debido principalmente a que no fueron publicados en nuestro país. En este artículo nos proponemos una primera aproximación a su obra psicológica examinando su participación en el Primer Curso Eugénico español del año 1928, su diagnóstico contrario a las supuestas apariciones de la Virgen en el pueblecito guipuzcoano de Ezkioga durante el año 1931, y su concepción de la psicología científica tal y como aparece en sus libros de psicología médica.

In the late 1930s, the Institute of Human Relations of Yale University developed a research program on conflict and anxiety as an outcome of Clark Hull's informal seminar on the integration of Freud's and Pavlov's theories. The program was launched at the 1937 Annual Meeting of the APA in a session chaired by Clark L. Hull, and the experiments continued through 1941, when the United States entered the Second World War. In an effort to apply the findings from animal experiments to the war situation, John Dollard and Neal E. Miller decided to study soldiers' fear reactions in combat. As a first step, they arranged interviews with a few veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Taking these interviews as a point of departure, Dollard devised a questionnaire to which 300 former Lincoln brigaders responded. The present paper analyzes the main outcomes of the questionnaire, together with the war experiences reported in the interview transcripts. Our purpose was to evaluate a project which was initially investigated by the FBI because of the communists among the Lincoln ranks, but eventually supported by the American Army, and which exerted great influence on the military psychology of the time.

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On November 16, 1989 the world was shocked by the news of the assassination of six Jesuits at the campus of the Universidad Centro Americana José Simeón Cañas (UCA) in San Salvador, El Salvador. Among those murdered by government soldiers was Ignacio Martín-Baró, a PhD in social psychology from the University of Chicago who at that time was the Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs and Vice-President of the Interamerican Society of Psychology (SIP). Drawing on Martín-Baró's published writings and non-published academic papers and correspondence, this article traces the evolution of the Spanish-born Jesuit who became a leading authority among Latin American social psychologists. In particular, it analyzes his project of becoming a clinical psychologist under the influence of psychoanalysis, his critical social psychology aimed to "de-ideologize" the oppressed social classes of El Salvador, and his ultimate project of a psychology of liberation for Latin America. Martín-Baró's work came to a tragic end just when it began to bear fruit, but it stands as a testimony to a lifetime committed to the human values of democracy, social justice and service to society's poorest and most neglected.

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