The eleventh essay in the “Creators” series is dedicated to Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina, an outstanding psychologist whose work on Gestalt psychology and Rorschach tests has retained its scientific relevance today. She was born in Chita, studied with one of the founders of Gestalt psychology, Kurt Lewin, in the 1920s, and worked for many years at American universities. She had a long-standing friendship and joint work with Tamara Dembo, about whom we wrote in the “Creators” project. Together with RASA (Russian-American Science Association), T-invariant continues publishing a series of biographical essays about people from the Russian Empire who made significant contributions to world science and technology, about those to whom we owe our new reality.
Three Russian Ladies
Leslie Phillips, a physician and scientist who worked at the Worcester Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts in the early 1930s, recalled three Russian ladies who worked with him. All of them were from the Russian Empire. All of them had studied in Berlin. All of them ended up in Worcester. They were friends and often spent their evenings together. During the day, they spoke English, albeit with an accent. But when they got together after work and reminisced about their youth or childhood, they spoke about Berlin and the university in German, and about Russia and childhood in Russian. Phillips was quite surprised that the Russian ladies seemed not to notice what language they were speaking to each other.
The eldest of them was named Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina, the middle one was Tamara Dembo, and the youngest was Eugenia Ganfman.
They all survived the revolution and emigration and after Germany ended up in America. We have already talked about Tamara Dembo in our essays, and we will talk about Evgenia Ganfman ahead. And today we will tell you about Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina.
Double surname
We know very little about the Russian period of Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina’s biography. Maria Arsenyevna Rickers-Ovsiankina was born in Chita on May 18, 1898. Her father was Russian, and her mother was German.
But not everything is clear with the future psychologist’s surname. Some biographers write (1) that her maiden name was Ovsiankina, but in the early 1930s, already in America, she got married and took a double surname – Rickers-Ovsiankina. This is confirmed by the fact that early publications, including the famous work on the Ovsiankina effect, carried out under the supervision of Kurt Lewin, are signed not with a double surname, but only “Ovsiankina”.
But this version is questionable. No trace of her husband can be found in Rickers-Ovsiankina’s biography. Although she was not a recluse during her American life and many of her letters have been preserved, including to a person close to her, psychologist David Shakow. But she did not mention her husband. Her correspondents did not mention him either. Moreover, in a letter to her American colleague Don Adams, written in 1935, Rickers-Ovsiankina writes: “As for your question about my name, I can tell you that I am not married, but my full name is Maria A. Rickers-Ovsiankina, the latter being my Russian surname, which I often omit for simplicity.” Indeed, for the English ear, “Rickers” is simpler than “Ovsiankina” (2).
It is possible that “Rickers” was the maiden name of Rickers-Ovsiankina’s mother. William R. Woodward, a researcher of her biography, tells of an episode that preceded Rickers-Ovsiankina’s final move to America. David Shakow was ready to hire her at the Worcester Mental Hospital, but financial difficulties arose. Woodward writes: “Shakow replied that he could only offer $850 for a “research associate” position at Worcester State Hospital, provided she find a sponsor. She got her maternal uncle, F. W. Rickers of Brooklyn, New York to post a bond (Rickers– Ovsiankina, 1931).” (quoted from Woodward, 2010, 115) (Woodward refers to a letter from Rickers-Ovsiankina to David Shakow dated April 15, 1931).
If the surname of the “maternal uncle” is Rickers, then there is a high probability that his sister, that is, Rickers-Ovsiankina’s mother, has the same surname. At the very least, the assumption that the Rickers-Ovsiankina surname is made up of the parents’ surnames seems more plausible than the report of the elusive “husband.”
Perhaps it was not worth going into such detail about the heroine of this essay’s surname, but these name changes reveal the turning points in her fate: changes of countries, languages, the need to adapt to a new, foreign environment. (One could say that such “changes” of countries did not end even after her death: having lived more than 60 years in America, she was buried in Germany). Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina had to endure a lot of this, as did other emigrants who were thrown out of their native country by the Bolshevik Revolution. But her fate initially seemed almost cloudless.
Leonard Handler, a researcher of Rickers-Ovsiankina’s biography, writes that her father “was the President of the Far Eastern Association and later established the first Russian-Asian Bank. She had three sisters and one brother. The family moved to Vladivostock, in Siberia, where Maria’s father owned coal mines; the entire city was warmed in the winter by Ovsiankina coal (Olga Ovsiankina-Nekrasova, personal communication, May 13, 1994).” (quoted from Handler, 1995? p. 172) (Handler refers to Maria’s sister, Olga Ovsiankina-Nekrasova, whom he contacted on May 13, 1994 (3). It is possible that this refers to the Far Eastern branch of the Russo-Asian Bank, the largest bank in the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century, which actually had branches throughout the country, including in Vladivostok.
Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina’s home name was “Marika”, as her family and close friends called her. She studied at a gymnasium in Vladivostok and graduated with a gold medal. But a revolution happened in Russia, and everything changed. The family was scattered around the world.
Berlin
Rickers-Ovsiankina was unable to continue her studies in St. Petersburg as she had planned and emigrated with her brother and sister. In 1920, she ended up in Berlin. Here she began her studies in the group of psychologist Kurt Lewin. Here she met Tamara Dembo and other Russian emigrants, including Bluma Zeigarnik.
Bluma Zeigarnik wrote: “Every scientist has a time of “his own flowering”. For K. Lewin, this time was the Berlin period of his creative activity” (4).
Kurt Lewin is one of the leading representatives of Gestalt psychology, which was actively developed at that time in Berlin. Perhaps, one can even say that it was mainly developed in the 1920s. In the 1930s, many representatives of Gestalt psychology left Germany, many moved to America. There it was not customary to engage in abstract theories and mainly practical psychology was being developed.
A simple (and probably the most famous example) of Gestalt was given by Wolfgang Köhler: it is a melody. We hear the same melody regardless of the pitch of the notes, the duration of each, or the key in which it is played. From a physical point of view, if we consider the sounds produced by a trumpet or a violin, they will have nothing in common. But the main thing is the relationship between the notes, if they are preserved, the melody is unchanged. Another point related to melody is that if a melody is suddenly interrupted, we most often hear that it is not finished: the whole is not formed in our perception. Tension remains.
Woodward writes: “The Gestalt view that we perceive wholes instead of parts, and relations instead of points, gave rise to variety of novel investigative practices in other areas of psychology. Berlin provided a center, though its proponents taught in Giessen, Frankfurt, Jena, and elsewhere before crossing the ocean to the United States. Kurt Danziger (1990) commented on the cosmopolitan character of this group (pp. 173–175). Kurt Lewin set forth their general methods and goals in an essay in 1927, proposing that instead of taking the average subject based on the statistical frequency of some measure, we design an experiment in which the experimenter attempts to produce a concrete phenomenon under artificial experimental conditions. (2010, p. 112)”
It should be noted that the mention of “points” as some kind of basic substances, on which, by and large, nothing depends, goes back to the great mathematician David Hilbert. Constance Reid in her book about Hilbert cites the following episode: “On the way to Königsberg, at the Berlin station, he thoughtfully remarked to his companions that we must achieve a situation where we can equally successfully talk about tables, chairs and beer mugs instead of points, lines and planes. It was precisely on the basis of such ideas that Hilbert’s book “Foundations of Geometry” (1899) was written: it does not matter what we talk about, what matters is how the objects we talk about relate to each other. Thus, Hilbert constructed the first complete axiomatics of Euclidean geometry (5). Gestalt psychologists were educated people and, quite possibly, knew Hilbert’s works. At least Lewin was quite seriously interested in mathematics.
The practical, experimental approach was close to American psychologists, but Lewin and his students always had a strong theoretical basis for the experiment. As Zeigarnik recalled, Lewin often said: “Without theory, an experiment is blind and deaf.” But theory was of little interest to anyone in America in the 1920s and 1930s. Both Kurt Lewin and his students made a great deal of effort to finally awaken this interest.
In Berlin, Kurt Lewin’s group conducted a whole series of experiments, and one of them became the basis for the first and perhaps most famous publication by Rickers-Ovsiankina on the “Ovsiankina effect” (6). This experiment was a development of the work of another student of Lewin’s, Bluma Zeigarnik, so let us say a few words about the “Zeigarnik effect”.
Zeigarnik writes “that the experimental works of K. Lewin’s school, which became part of the foundation of psychological science…, were merely the diploma theses of students conducted under his supervision.” One can agree with this, but with one small amendment, “mere diploma theses” are not included in the “fund of psychological science”. So, let’s not belittle the achievements of Tamara Dembo, Maria Ovsiankina and Bluma Zeigarnik herself. She studied the psychological effect that a person remembers interrupted actions better than completed ones.
Bluma Zeigarnik dancing with Kurt Lewin. Picnic near Berlin, 1931.
Zeigarnik described a kind of testing of this hypothesis by Lewin himself. He and his students were sitting in a cafe. Psychologists were discussing psychology. Suddenly, Lewin called the waiter and asked: “What did that couple in the corner order?” The waiter did not even look at the order and answered right away. Then Lewin asked: “What did the couple who are leaving the cafe now order?” The waiter thought about it, but could not remember. Indeed, why remember their order if they had already paid? Lewin thus showed that there is no motivation to retain in memory an event that has ended, and a person easily forgets it. But he remembers an unfinished event very well.
Psychologist Vladimir Khudik writes: “The phenomenon of reproducing unfinished actions was interpreted by K. Lewin from the position of field theory, when access to memory traces is facilitated by maintaining the tension that arises at the beginning of the action and is not completely discharged when it is not fully completed. In K. Lewin’s experiments, children’s creative activity was interrupted and they were offered another activity. In the case of unrealized potential, children tried to complete the unfinished business at the first opportunity” (7).
Zeigarnik’s classic experiment was conducted from 1924 to 1926. The studies were conducted with children and adults (164 people in total), who were offered various simple tasks: “solving puzzles”, “putting on beads”, “counting backwards”, etc. The subjects were allowed to complete some tasks normally, while others were interrupted. As the results of the experiment showed, the subjects were twice as likely to remember unfinished actions than completed ones.
Zeigarnik explained this by three reasons: the very presence of a goal – solving a problem – seems to attract the subject, he wants to achieve the goal himself, and he wants to fulfill the experimenter’s request. In many cases, as Zeigarnik noted, the subjects “resisted interruption”. They probably remembered the action in order to complete it later. And this was checked by Ovsiankina.
Her experiment was also devoted to the “effect of memory of unfinished actions”. The subjects were asked to “assemble a figure cut into pieces”, “draw an object”, “assemble a puzzle”. As in Zeigarnik’s experiment, the tasks consist of numerous small steps. The solution to the problem largely depends linearly on time, and the subject and the experimenter can, in principle, estimate how much time is still needed.
A puzzle from the work of Maria Ovsiankina. Such puzzles were put together by the participants of her experiments
The participants of the experiment (125 people in total) performed various tasks with interruptions of actions that were modeled by the experimenter. For example, as soon as the subject completed about half of the task or was approaching its completion, the experimenter suddenly suggested that he move on to another task. At the same time, the subjects sometimes asked: “Do I no longer need to do this task?” or said: “Now, I have a little left.” But the experimenter always insisted on performing the interruption and immediately moving on to another task. But once the subjects completed this new task, they often sought to complete the task that had been interrupted, even if the experimenter tried to interfere with them, for example, by hiding the materials needed to put together the puzzle.
It turned out that 86% of subjects returned to the unfulfilled task, although no one asked them to do so. Thus, it was shown that the very consent to perform the task forms a “quasi-need”, the satisfaction of which is necessary for the subject himself. The “tension” that arose during the performance required “discharge”, otherwise the person felt dissatisfied. Commenting on Ovsiankina’s work, K. Lewin wrote that until the need is satisfied, the tension remains and leads to action in the direction of the goal. (Quoted from Vladimir Khudik.) This is a vivid illustration of Kurt Lewin’s field theory.
From a prison in Berlin to a mental hospital in Worcester
Everything was fine. There was university, there were friends. There was Kurt Lewin. But all this ended. And it was time to arrange my life. And not only her own. In Rickers-Ovsiankina’s letters, the theme of family is constantly heard. Although, probably, she was never married, and she did not have children. But she always remembers her relatives in her letters. Especially often, when she had already settled in America. But this did not happen right away.
At first, she worked as an assistant at the university, a prison psychologist, a researcher at a school for mentally retarded children (as they called it at that time, politically incorrectly). This continued for three years – from 1928 to 1931. But then she got lucky. A young American psychologist, Donald MacKinnon, who studied with Lewin, helped her.
He wrote a letter to David Shakow, who worked at the Worcester State Mental Hospital. Woodworth quotes from this letter: “Here in Berlin I am getting all sorts of psychology from Lewin, Köhler, Spranger, Walther Jaensch, and the psychoanalysts. I have come particularly to work with Lewin . . . . He is tremendously alive . . . I don’t know what your situation is at present, but thinking that you might be looking for a good assistant I that I’d let you know that Ovsiankina is, so to speak, on the market for a job and hoping for something in America. Ovsiankina, in case you didn’t know, is Fraulein Dr . . . as she made her doctorate under Lewin. You must know her “Die Wiederaufnahme unterbrochener Handlungen” [The resumption of interrupted tasks] (Rickers Ovsiankina, 1928). She is a Russian, an anticommunist who got out of her hometown, Vladivostock, just in time. She is at present an assistant to Lewin but such a position here doesn’t bring much money and so she is looking for something else . . . . She probably knows Lewin’s system, methods and techniques as well as anyone. . . . She has also done a little straight mental testing . . . Certainly one would look far and wide in America to find one with as good training and capacities as Ovsiankina. (Mackinnon, 1930, paragraph 4).” (quoted from Woodward, 2010? p. 115)
David Shakow, 1965
Shakow was interested in this offer. In general, he took on immigrant interns quite easily. He was simply trying to help. At that moment, Shakow wrote the very letter we talked about at the beginning of the essay, saying that he was ready to take Ovsiankina, but needed financial support for her position. And very fortunately, an American uncle appeared – Rickers, who helped Maria. She moved to America to Massachusetts, to Worcester, where by that time Tamara Dembo and Evgenia Ganfman were already working. It was a great success. Maria formed long-standing friendships with many of the staff at Worcester and with David Shakow’s family. Their communication never ceased until Shakow’s death in 1980.
In those days, there was little entertainment in Worcester, and the staff would gather weekly at Shakow’s house to listen to Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and sing along to the recordings. Thus Rickers-Ovsiankina’s had made steps towards her academic career in America. And she succeeded in it.
Unstable Equilibrium
In 1935, Rickers-Ovsiankina began teaching at Wheaton College. It is a small women’s university in Massachusetts. It was largely due to Shakow that she got this modest part-time position. He wrote dozens of letters of recommendation and eventually got his way. At first, she taught psychology and Russian at Wheaton. Rickers-Ovsiankina received a permanent position 14 years later – in 1949, she became a professor at Wheaton.
Her activity during these years is impressive. She taught summer sessions at Mount Holyoke College, MIT, and the University of Oregon, held a summer research position at Cornell, was a research fellow at Harvard, taught informal Rorschach inkblot seminars in Boston, and taught courses on Rorschach at Northeastern University in Massachusetts. She seemed to take any job that was offered to her and that she could get. Judging by her letters to colleagues, she was constantly sending money to her relatives in Germany and possibly Russia. She was able to bring some of her relatives to America, and they also needed help.
This large teaching load that Rickers-Ovsiankina took on also speaks to her insecurity about her situation. Yes, there is a lot today, but tomorrow there may be nothing left. Who will help then? This instability, unfortunately, does not immediately leave the emigrant.
Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina, 1931, summer swimming.
Leonard Handler writes that Rickers-Ovsiankina did not really like life in Wheaton. The university was a very patriarchal and conservative place. And the times were not at all feminist. Women were expected to be nice and accommodating. But Rickers-Ovsiankina did not fit this standard. She behaved harshly and spoke directly and frankly if she did not like something. Her style caused resistance from both teachers and administrators.
The differences between the American and European university education systems were a real shock for Rickers-Ovsiankina. She could not get used to the fact that knowledge could be tested with tests. The preparation of the students also disappointed her, especially at first. Then she noticed that the students were not so poorly prepared, it was just that their preparation was very different from what she was used to in Europe.
Instead of avoiding arguments, Rickers-Ovsiankina directly accused the teachers of conservatism. This somewhat explosive style, although it greatly spoiled her relationships with colleagues, unexpectedly pleased the students very much. And this caused even more tension in her relationships with the teachers.
To get an idea of Rickers-Ovsiankina’s life in Wheaton, watch the movie “Mona Lisa Smile” (2003, directed by Mike Newell) starring Julia Roberts. The film is set in the 1950s. The heroine (an art history professor) comes to the all-female Wellesley College in Massachusetts. There she encounters resistance and rejection of her methods by other professors, and meets the love of the students. The college atmosphere in the film is probably close to Wheaton, and Roberts’s character resembles Rickers-Ovsiankina.
Handler mentions that a note in her personnel file from the college president states that she seemed “dissatisfied with everything,” including her salary in 1942 of $2,200 (plus housing on campus and even food). Rickers-Ovsiankina was displeased with the modest salary increase, which amounted to only $100.
She complained that this meager salary was not enough to care for four dependents, who were probably relatives who had fled the war in Europe. At one point, after signing a contract in May for the next school year, she announced that she was leaving for another Wheaton campus, in Illinois, for a significantly higher salary. The president of Wheaton, explaining her behavior, wrote that she had “different mentality, compared with the ‘average American’” and described her as “a woman most of whose life was spent in other countries where she had to do a great deal of grabbing and pushing.” (quoted from Handler, 1995, p 174) Both the college president and other Wheaton faculty were not at all thrilled with such an assertive “Russian lady.” But she was well-liked and appreciated by the students. And when the situation became especially acute, the president of Wheaton defended her.
In late summer 1939, Rickers-Ovsiankina was able to travel to France to see her relatives who remained in Europe. And on September 1, World War II began. Rickers-Ovsiankina planned to board a German liner in Cherbourg to return to America. But her plans had to be changed abruptly. She was forced to go to Antwerp, and there she and 800 other Americans boarded the Belgian ship Westerland, heading to the United States. The ship crossed the English Channel, constantly at risk of hitting a mine. It was “greeted” by a German submarine, but did not attack, since it was sailing under the neutral Belgian flag. Less than a year later, on May 10, 1940, the neutrality of Belgium did not bother the German army and, crossing out the peaceful country with tanks, Germany invaded France.
For a long time, Rickers-Ovsiankina never forgot (and was not allowed to forget) that she was an immigrant. She had a particularly hard time during the war and then during the McCarthy era. If during the war her German origins were constantly in doubt, then during the McCarthy era, her Russian origins were. Her precarious status is reflected in a letter from Wheaton President to George C. Marshall, then Secretary of State. It says, in part: “I do not believe that she is or has been associated with any communist or fascist organizations. I believe her to be a law-abiding and thoroughly responsible American citizen. I have no hesitation in certifying as to her good character of devotion to the government of the United States” (quoted from Woodward, 2010, p. 119)
Rickers-Ovsiankina was very concerned about her relatives back in Germany and tried to help them. In a letter to colleague Dr. Alexander H. Minily on December 29, 1944, she wrote:“I have not heard from my sister (or any member of my family) for 18 months. And they are all in enemy lands.” (Handler, 1995, p. 174)At one point during the war, Rickers-Ovsiankina was about to join the Office of Strategic Services (the predecessor of the CIA). They wanted to offer her a job for which she was well suited. She was a professional psychologist with an excellent knowledge of Germany and the German language, and she was supposed to help select intelligence agents. But the appointment did not take place “for administrative reasons,” although most likely for political reasons. She was not trusted. And she knew it.
Wheaton College. 1945
In 1949, Rickers-Ovsiankina came to the University of Connecticut to develop a doctoral program in clinical psychology. Psychologist Sam Vitriol, who helped Rickers-Ovsiankina develop the program, reported to Handler that she was a popular teacher, respected by her graduate students. But she was not very good at statistics and did not fully understand the American style of research. As it turned out, Rickers-Ovsiankina returned to full-time, focused research work after almost 20 years. She approached psychology not quantitatively, but rather phenomenologically. That was how she had been trained, and she had been a student of Kurt Lewin.
Vitriol writes that Rickers-Ovsiankina enriched the curriculum with “all kinds of European ideas” (such as the work of Vygotsky) that eventually became popular in American psychology. In an era when clinical and experimental psychology were not always compatible in academic settings, Rickers-Ovsiankina tried to bring them together by writing a book about Rorschach inkblots.
Rorschach Inkblots
In Connecticut, Rickers-Ovsiankina began to compile the book “Rorschach Psychology”. She was the one who compiled it and edited the book. She wrote only the introductory chapter. But she managed to attract a number of remarkable American psychologists to the work, who were fascinated by Rickers-Ovsiankina’s ideas.
In 1921, the Swiss psychologist Hermann Rorschach wrote the book “Psychodiagnostics”, in which he proposed a test that has since become known as the “Rorschach inkblots”.
Hermann Rorschach. Early 1920s
Imagine a sheet of white paper. You drip ink on it, and then, without letting the ink dry, fold the sheet in half. When you open the sheet, there will be a strange figure on it, almost random, but symmetrical along the vertical axis (along the fold line).
Rorschach blots are, of course, not random blots, but the element of randomness itself is obligatory in them. There should be no direct and unambiguous interpretation, everyone should see something of their own.
You can take a version of the Rorschach test to see with your own eyes how it works. But you should keep in mind that the most difficult thing in this test is its interpretation, and it requires the qualifications of a professional psychologist.
Rorschach was the first interpreter of his test. He came to the conclusion that if you ask a patient to tell you what he sees in the picture, you can make interesting conclusions about his psychological state. Hermann Rorschach died at the age of 37, a year after writing the book, and did not even have time to publish it. It was published only in 1927. But this test gradually gained popularity, although it also caused a lot of doubts and skepticism. To this day, the interpretation of a patient’s answers to the Rorschach test is far from clear, despite attempts by psychologists to formalize it. Almost any symmetrical picture is static, but some patients to whom Rorschach showed his ink blots saw movement. He believed that this was an indicator of some mental instability and believed that looking at these “blots” a person unconsciously recalls his dreams.
Rorschach Blot
Rickers-Ovsiankina asked her authors to focus not on what happens to the patient, but on how it happens. Moreover, to conceptualize the results and interpretations, the psychologists used a powerful theoretical basis. The book included concepts based on the theories of Jung, Freud, and Gestalt psychologists.
In the first chapter of the book she wrote, Rickers-Ovsiankina cites Rudolf Arnheim, an American writer and German Gestalt psychologist who studied in Berlin at the same time as she did, only not with Lewin, but with Wolfgang Köhler. Arnheim wrote: “Visual forms are striving in certain directions, they contain directed tension. They represent a happening, rather than a being.” Therefore, she adds, the phenomenon of experiencing locomotion when viewing certain Rorschach cards is “not an illusion or an imagination, but an inherent feature of visual perception” (Arnheim, 1969, p. 269). In these words, it is difficult not to recognize the main intention of the works of Dembo, Zeigarnik and Ovsiankina herself: “an event, not being,” tension, not statics.
The book, The Psychology of the Rorschach, edited by Rickers-Ovsiankina, was published in 1960. Rickers-Ovsiankina herself retired in 1965 and moved to Berkeley, California. She continued to work there. It became much easier for her. She finally felt at peace both in her life and in her finances. She was 67 years old.
Woodward believes that, having moved to America, “Marika did benefit from the emphasis on applied work in the United States, as well as from the abundance of departments of psychology who hired scholars to do clinical work. She found tenure – track positions in a small women’s college and a state university, with additional part-time and summer teaching positions. Soft money also came her way after retirement. She rode the wave of clinical psychology, editing a classic in the field and holding two tenure-track positions. Her research became socially relevant, if not quantitative”
Rorschach psychology. Title page. Rorschach psychology by Rickers-Ovsiankina, Maria A. (Maria Arsenjevna), editor, 1977. Publisher Huntington, N.Y., R.E. Krieger Pub.
In 1977, Rickers-Ovsiankina prepared the second edition of “Rorschach psychology”, in which many chapters were deeply revised by the authors. Leonard Handler writes in his 1994 article about how he assigns chapters from this now classic book to his students: “They enjoy the conceptual focus and the link between theory and clinical application and report that the clinical examples are all the more meaningful because they are linked to theory.”
In short, European psychologists achieved what they wanted, although it took half a century: American psychology, at least in its academic part, became a deeply theoretical discipline. And both Kurt Lewin and his student, Rickers-Ovsiankina, contributed to this.
She died on September 28, 1993, and her ashes were buried in the family plot in Rendsburg, Germany.
In her obituary, fellow psychologists wrote: “Marika went to Berkeley, California, following her retirement and continued a very active and energetic life. She taught extension courses for the University of California at Berkeley, often attended colloquia there, and was also a participant in hikes. Members of the university community, though they interacted with Marika only toward the end of her life, describe her as vigorous, energetic, and articulate.” (quoted in Woodward).
In these rather general words, Rickers-Ovsiankina’s childhood name, Marika, unexpectedly sounded. As if she had returned home. It is not far from Berkeley to Vladivostok – just the Pacific Ocean.
Notes
(1) See, for example: «Anfang der 30er-Jahre verheiratete sie sich und trug in der Folge den Namen Rikkers-Ovsiankina». Bernadette Lindorfer (Wien). Maria A. Rickers-Ovsiankina (1898 – 1993).
(2) Цит. по William R. Woodward. Russian women émigrées in psychology: Informal Jewish Networks. History of Psychology 2010, Vol. 13, No. 2, 111–137. University of New Hampshire.
(3) Leonard Handler & Marvin W. Acklin (1995) Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina: A Russian Expatriate in America. A Review of Rorschach Psychology, Journal of Personality Assessment, 65:1, 169-185, DOI: 10.1207/s15327752jpa6501_13.
(4) Зейгарник Б. В. Теория личности Курта Левина. М.: Издательство Московского университета, 1981, стр. 118. Далее ссылки на источник даются по фамилии автора.
(5) Constance Reid. Hilbert. With an appreciation of Hilbert’s mathematical work
by Hermann Weyl. Springer–Verlag. Berlin, Heidelberg, New York, 1970
(6) Ovsiankina M. Die Wiederaufnahme von unterhrochenen Handlungen. Psycbologische Forschung, 1928, 2, 302‒389.
(7) Владимир Худик. Курт Левин: учитель и ученики, их вклад в мировую психологическую науку (к 125-летию со дня рождения). Коррекционно-педагогическое образование. 2015. № 3.
Vladimir Gubailovskii 10.07.2024