Psychology and humanism

Brewster Smith

pp. 199-213

in: Freedman (ed), Social change and personality, Berlin, Springer, 1987

Abstract

Nevitt Sanford has run a large part of the life course in front of me as a kind of quasi-elder brother, an exemplar whose path has crossed mine repeatedly and whom I am accustomed to looking across and up to as a path-finding psychologist. When I found my way to Henry Murray's Harvard Psychological Clinic in the fall of 1940, Nevitt's reputation still clung to the yellow clapboard building with "wisteria on the outside, hysteria on the inside," where he had participated in Murray's (1938) Explorations that had been a primary lure in bringing me to Harvard. Back at Harvard's new Department of Social Relations after the war, I read the ponderous galleys of The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, and Sanford, 1950), with great intellectual excitement. Its fusion of psychoanalytic and social-psychological theory and method in empirical research on central left-liberal social and political issues was a close fit to my own commitments, so much so that I have been repeatedly concerned with the vicissitudes of research on authoritarianism and social character in the three decades that have since elapsed (for example, Smith, 1978d, 1980).

Cited authors

Adorno Theodor