Interest in the fate of the German psychoanalysts who had to flee Hitler's Germany and find refuge in a new nation, such as the United States, has increased. The ‘émigré research’ shows that several themes recur: (1) the theme of ‘loss’ of one's culture, homeland, language, and family; and (2) the ambiva-lent welcome these émigrés received in their new country. We describe the political-social-cultural context that existed in the United States during the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. Documentary evidence found in the FBI files of three émigré psychoanalysts, Clara Happel, Martin Grotjahn, and Otto Fenichel, are then presented in combination with other source material. This provides a provisional impression of how each of these three individuals experienced their emigration. As such, it gives us elements of a history. The FBI documents suggest that the American atmosphere of political insecurity and fear-based ethnocentric nationalism may have reinforced their old fears of National Socialism, and contributed to their inclination to inhibit or seal off parts of them-selves and their personal histories in order to adapt to their new home and become Americanized. They abandoned the rich social, cultural, political tradition that was part of European psychoanalysis. Finally, we look at these elements of a history in order to ask a larger question about the appropriate balance between a liberal democratic government's right to protect itself from internal and external threats on the one hand, or crossover into the blatant invasion of civil rights and due process on the other.
The acquisition of logic involved in the concept of equivalence, and its relationship to attainment of conservation of liquid were studied. Equivalence was operationalized according to set theory model—as relationships characterized by three logical properties of reflexivity (R), symmetry (S), and transitivity (T). Each property was assessed by two procedures. Twenty-eight children (age range 4–0 to 5–5) were administered: (1) Pretest for relational terms, (2) Equivalence Battery, (3) Liquid Conservation Task, (4) Liquid Conservation Task—Reduced saliency condition. The three logical properties (each assessed two ways) do not develop in an invariant ordinal sequence (R S T); however, a “psychometric” order of increasing task difficulty did emerge. For all three abilities, one assessment procedure was consistently easier than the other. A significant positive relationship between age and degree of mastery of equivalence logic was found. In this study, complete mastery of equivalence was a necessary condition for attainment of conservation. The data support the proposition that saliency of perceptual change in a conservation task may be a roadblock to attainment of conservation in some preschool children, indirectly suggesting that mastery of equivalence logic probably is not a sufficient condition for conservation.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.