Reflections On My Years in Psychology

Abstract

I want to start out by indicating that the time I have spent in thinking about what I would say has been an awesome one for me. Not the least is the awareness that my professional life has covered a very significant proportion of what many writers on the history of psychology regard as its major significant history; that is, from the time of the adoption of the experimental method as the method of choice for psychology. In brute fact, I took my first course in psychology in 1936 at the local Y in Brooklyn, taught by a young man by the name of Lit – I do not remember his first name - under the auspices of WPA. He was at the time, a graduate student at Columbia University, doing work under Woodworth. I entered Brooklyn College in 1938 at age 17. I was in a Department of Psychology which was nominally within the Philosophy Department; hence, I took both philosophy and psychology courses. One course was with John Pickett Turner who had been a student of Santayana; several other courses with Kurt Rosinger, including logic and philosophy of science. My special honors work was done with Martin Scheerer who had been a student of Kurt Goldstein. I also took a course in Social Psychology with Asch when both of us were attending the lectures of Max Wertheimer at the New School. And while I never took a course with Maslow, I became acquainted with him then and we continued our contact until he died.