The great escape: World War II, neo‐Freudianism, and the origins of U.S. psychocultural analysis

Abstract

Psychocultural analysis stands as a signal accomplishment of the 1930s U.S. assimilation of European refugee-intellectuals. Scholars in the U.S. had been moving toward a kind of psychocultural analysis well in advance of the Great Migration--the U.S. was not an intellectual vacuum or wasteland--nevertheless, it was through their interdisciplinary collaboration, fueled by the specter of war, that these international peers stimulated one of the most wide-ranging, dynamic, and productive exchanges of ideas of the century. Through the lens of Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom, this article explores psychoculturalism's emergence in the interstices between cultures, nations, ideas, and disciplines--between Europeans and Americans, psychoanalysts and social scientists.

Citizen, Academic, Expert, or International Worker? Juggling with Identities at UNESCO's Social Science Department, 1946–1955

“…The project was initially almost exclusively staffed by US scholars who approached the problem of tensions and conflict through the lenses of the controversial “culture and personality” perspective. In the US, the “culture and personality” approach – and the related “national character” – studies had been developed in war-related agencies during World War II by psychologists such as Franz Alexander, Karen Horney, Harry Stack Sullivan and by cultural anthropologists such as Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Geoffrey Gorer, and Edward Sapir (Gitre 2010; Gitre 2011; Herman 1996). These scholars wanted to delineate regularities in culture patterns and in the character structure of the members of a culture in order to understand how to crack the morale of the enemy or how to induce friendly feelings in populations towards the Allied powers.…”

“… 11 These places included the Columbia University's Research in Contemporary Cultures, operating with a contract from the Office of Naval Research under the direction of Benedict and Mead, the Natural History Museum Studies in Soviet Culture Project with a contract from the Californian think tank, the RAND Corporation, under the direction of Mead, the Coordinated Investigations of Micronesian Anthropology funded by the Office of Naval Research under the leadership of George P. Murdock, the Foreign Service Institute, or Yale´s Human Relations Area Files (Mead 1961; Howard 1989; Mandler 2009; Gitre 2011). …”

“…These places included the Columbia University's Research in Contemporary Cultures, operating with a contract from the Office of Naval Research under the direction of Benedict and Mead, the Natural History Museum Studies in Soviet Culture Project with a contract from the Californian think tank, the RAND Corporation, under the direction of Mead, the Coordinated Investigations of Micronesian Anthropology funded by the Office of Naval Research under the leadership of George P. Murdock, the Foreign Service Institute, or Yale´s Human Relations Area Files(Mead 1961;Howard 1989;Mandler 2009;Gitre 2011). 12 Letter Walter Laves to Robert Redfield, May 17th 1947, Robert Redfield Papers, Box 36, Folder 5, University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center.13 Only four months before signing his contract with UNESCO, Shils wrote a letter to Redfield about his work at the London School of Economics, (from 1946 to 1950, Shils held a joint appointment at Chicago University and the London School of Economics and Political Science in the Sociology Department): "since I have come here, I have begun to develop some sense of responsibility for drawing sociology out of the ludicrous twentieth century adaptations of Spencerian Evolutionism in which it is enshrouded in academic circles here, and from the barbarous, thoughtless, uncritical [empirical] enthusiasms which are emerging among the non-academic sociologists.…”

Introduction: The Social Sciences in a Cross‐Disciplinary Age

“…If some essays published in this journal point to the necessity of writing the history of the social sciences with paying heed to the natural sciences, an even more significant number of them have emphasized the cross‐disciplinary nature of social scientific knowledge in the postwar era. Whether authors consider leading social scientists, such as Robert K. Merton (Nichols, ), Talcott Parsons (Owens, ), and David Easton (Gunnel, ); influential works, such as William F. Whyte's sociological classic Street Corner Society (Andersson, ); committees, such as the University of Chicago's Committee on Education, Training, and Research in Race Relations (Gordon, ); think tanks, such as the RAND Corporation and the Cowles Commission (Van Horn & Klaes, ) and the Simulmatics Corporation (Rohde, ); international organizations, such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO; Selcer, ); educational models, such as the research‐based model of business education (Bottom, ); research movements, such as measurement of decision making (Heukelom, ), the projective test movement (Lemov, ), the peace research movement (Tomás Rangil, ), and behavioralism in political science (Hauptmann, ); or disciplines and fields, such as psychoanalysis (Gitre, , ), linguistics (Martin‐Nielsen, ), International Relations (Guilhot, ), and British sociology (Steinmetz, ), their narratives point invariably to the historical significance of cross‐disciplinary engagements…”