The sixteenth essay in the “Creators” series is dedicated to Evgenia (Eugenia) Maksimovna Hanfmann, an outstanding psychologist, professor at Brandeis University. She was born in St. Petersburg, studied in Germany, worked in the United States, where she made a career in research, teaching and psychotherapy. Together with RASA (Russian-American Science Association), T-invariant continues publishing a series of biographical essays “Creators”.
We have been writing essays for the “Creators” series for a year and a half now. And inevitably, our heroes appear on the pages of the T-invariant website. But a special place in the series is occupied by essays about three women – remarkable psychologists. They have many things in common. Not only did they leave the Russian Empire at almost the same time and end up in the United States at almost the same time, they also studied in Germany in the 1920s and were friends and supported each other for more than half a century. There are other biographical coincidences: each of them lived a long, rich life, entirely devoted to science, and neither of them was married.
The eldest of them was named Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina (we talked about her in the essay “The Attraction of the Goal”), the middle one was Tamara Dembo (the essay “The Tamer of Anger”), and the youngest was Evgenia Hanfmann, we will talk about her in this essay.
Eugenia Hanfmann’s student, American psychologist and historian of psychology Marianne Simmel, writes: “Eugénie Hanfmann was a person whose values were crystal clear… The essence matters, but appearance does not.” Marianne Simmel wrote “Dedication to Eugenia Hanfmann 1905-1983” (1). In our essay, we will largely rely on this story of a grateful student and colleague.
Childhood and Revolution
Yevgenia Maksimovna (Moiseyevna) Hanfman was born on March 3, 1905, in St. Petersburg. Her father, Maxim (Moisey) Ganfman, was a political journalist and a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (Cadet Party). He came from a Jewish family, but in order to marry a woman raised in the Russian Orthodox Church, he had to be baptized. His wife, Ekaterina, Evgenia’s mother, received a higher education, was a teacher, an energetic woman, intellectually curious and firm in her convictions. She was the driving force in the family. Evgenia was the first child in the family and the only girl. She was followed by three brothers who later made successful careers in the United States: Alexander, who became an engineer, George (Georgy), a Harvard scholar and later a professor of art history and archaeology, and Andrei (Andrew), an economist and professor at The Evergreen College in Washington State.
In her autobiographical essay, Hanfmann writes about her childhood: “I was twelve years old when the Russian revolution shattered the life of my country and my family and erased all thoughts of the future. During the years of civil war and famine, our concern was to stay alive today and tomorrow. We moved from place to place in search of safety, shelter, and food. I worked now and then so as to have a ration card. My school attendance was sporadic, my plans for the future nil. When, after the end of the Civil War, we left Russia for Lithuania, my father? ‘country of birth, the return to a relatively normal existence seemed a miracle.”
Hanfmann attended the Russian Gymnasium in Kaunas, Lithuania, and graduated in 1921. The following year, she moved to Berlin with her mother and brothers, where the transliteration of their last name from Cyrillic to Latin resulted in the original Russian spelling of “Ganfman” becoming “Hanfmann.” This is the spelling we will use.
Ostjuden in the Weimar Republic
Simmel writes that Eugenia Hanfmann intended to study in Berlin, but found that the university was closed to “Ostjuden” — Eastern Jewish emigrants.
This message from Simmel (confirmed by a quote from Hanfmann’s autobiography, which we will present and discuss further) looks rather unexpected against the background of the biographies of the other heroes of our essays and their colleagues: Tamara Dembo, Bluma Zeigarnik (née Gerstein), and Gita Birenbaum — well-known psychologists in the future — were Eastern Jews (Ostjuden), and they studied with the Jew Kurt Lewin — one of the prominent representatives of Gestalt psychology — precisely at the University of Berlin and at about the same time. It seems that Evgenia Hanfmann would have fit in perfectly with this amazingly talented team (as the future showed, when Hanfmann worked with two of Levin’s students, Dembo and Ovsiankina, in Worcester, and she and Dembo even lived in the same room for some time).
The family moved to Jena, where one of the few German universities was located, which Eugenia Hanfmann was able to attend. Her interests were connected with literature and philosophy in the broadest sense. She, for example, recalled that she “reading William James’ Psychology during a bombardment of Kiev, trying not to take notice of the explosions.” (This echoes the memories of another hero of our essays George Gamow, who during the revolution in Odessa also covered himself with a book from the shelling: “… I remember the day when I was reading a book on Euclidean geometry near the window in our apartment, and the window glass suddenly shattered into pieces from the shock wave of an artillery shell that exploded on the neighboring street.”)
Hanfmann’s choice of psychology as a subject of study was largely determined by her status as an “Eastern Jew,” because even in Jena not everyone was willing to accept it. One of the few exceptions was Wilhelm Peters.
Wilhelm Peters. https://www.fsv.uni-jena.de/en/22664/history
Hanfmann recalls: “(Peters,) a professor of Psychology – an Austrian Jew and a socialist [who] welcomed foreigners in his labs and seminars, as most of his colleagues did not. . . . Outside I often felt a stranger, a person without country and without rights, but within the Psychological Institute, I found companionship, intellectual stimulation, and warmth. My teacher was an eclectic, keenly curious about a wide variety of issues, averse to abstract theorizing, careful in his methods. In assigning a thesis problem to me, he took into account my interest in the psychology of thinking and in systematic introspection. I went to work in earnest.”
According to the constitution of the Weimar Republic (1919), Jews were equated in rights with German citizens of other nationalities. But after the First World War, anti-Semitism in the country rose. It was associated both with the difficult economic situation and hyperinflation, and with the moral state after the defeat in the First World War and the Versailles Peace. They didn’t really look for the culprits: it’s Jews.
Historian Waldemar Schmidt writes in his work on anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic: “In 1920 alone, 7.5 million leaflets and 4.8 million different prospectuses with anti-Semitic content were published.”(3)
Anti-Semitism was also connected with the mass immigration of Eastern Jews: about 100 thousand Ostjuden entered Germany from 1919 to 1923. They were not very popular not only with the Germans, but also with the Westjuden assimilated in Germany, including in the academic environment, who, on the one hand, saw the “newcomers” as competitors, and on the other, considered themselves superior and more educated and were afraid of being confused with this “parochial” crowd.
The general tension was so high that a pogrom broke out in the Scheunenviertel district of Berlin, where Eastern Jews lived and rented low price apartments. Daria Klingenberg, a research fellow at the European University Viadrina, told Deutsche Welle: “On November 5, 1923, an angry crowd of German citizens, incited by organized fascist groups, swept through the Scheunenviertel district. The pogrom participants smashed shop windows and broke goods in stores, beat people, and looted. The police passively watched the violence from the sidelines and did not intervene for two whole days.” This happened 10 years before Hitler came to power.
Archive photo: Scheunenviertel, 1925. https://www.dw.com/ru/pogrom-v-berline-usvoilo-li-nemeckoe-obsestvo-etot-strasnyj-urok/a-67318157
Kurt Lewin was not an Ostjuden. Although he was a Polish Jew, he came from the part of Poland that was part of Germany, his native language was German and he was perceived as “one of our own”. This was further facilitated by the fact that Lewin was a war veteran: he took part in the First World War and was wounded. And the attitude towards veterans in Weimar was respectful.
But both Lewin’s laboratory and Peters’s Psychological Institute were not the norm, but rather rare “islands of tolerance” where Ostjudin émigrés could find “intellectual stimulation and warmth.” That Hanfmann did not end up with Lewin is not surprising, considering that she had only recently arrived in Berlin and was not very fluent in the academic environment. Perhaps she simply did not know that such an “island of tolerance” also existed at the University of Berlin.
In 1927, she received her doctorate with a dissertation on the formation of visual associations. (4) But her academic career stalled thereafter.
At that time, practically the only work for a psychologist in Europe was research, “yet, university positions were few and all but closed to the likes of me; German faculties did not welcome foreigners. In Lithuania I had citizenship rights, but did not speak the language” Hanfmann recalls.
Hanfmann left Jena to join her father, who had moved to Riga at the time, and got a clerical job there. A year later, Professor Peters, who was insistent that she return to research, offered her a position as an assistant at the Jena Psychological Institute. She returned and taught at the university for the next two years and conducted joint research with Peters at the institute.
All Roads Lead to Massachusetts
Peters saw no way to advance her academic career, but he was optimistic about her scientific prospects. He recommended Hanfmann for a temporary two-year position in Kurt Koffka’s laboratory at Smith College, Northampton, USA.
Koffka was impressed by Hanfmann’s dissertation and believed that it fit well within the framework of Gestalt psychology. At Koffka’s request, Wolfgang Köhler interviewed candidates for two vacancies in Koffka’s laboratory while still in Germany and chose Hanfmann and Tamara Dembo.
Peters believed that within two years the political situation in Germany would improve, and then he would be able to offer Hanfmann a career position in Jena. She was not so optimistic, however: when she left for America in 1930, she had arranged for a visa that would allow her to remain in the United States after her tenure at Smith College.
As a leading research faculty member at Smith College, Koffka had received funding for a small laboratory for five years in 1927. It was there that he invited young psychologists from Europe. Hanfmann and Dembo arrived in 1930.
Fritz Heider. https://www.gf.org/fellows/fritz-heider/
That same year, Fritz Heider came to America from William Stern’s laboratory in Hamburg to work at the Clark School for the Deaf, where he soon met and married his colleague Grace Moore. The Heiders participated in many activities in Koffka’s laboratory. Fritz Heider came to a relatively modest position in America, leaving a position in a prestigious laboratory in Europe. He was not Jewish, and his life seemed to be in no danger. But he was worried about the changes taking place in Germany, and on the other hand, he was invited by Koffka, with whom he was interested in working. In any case, Heider won. In America, he became one of the leading specialists in social psychology. Molly Harrower, a future outstanding clinical psychologist, also joined Koffka’s group.
Kurt Koffka and Molly Harrower. Archives of the History of American Psychology. Russian women e´migre´es in psychology: Informal Jewish Networks. William R. Woodward. University of New Hampshire.
This was an intellectually very lively group of young psychologists at the height of their careers. They did a lot of experimental work and were getting acquainted with the big theoretical problems of psychology. Hanfmann later described this laboratory as “a bit of an ivory tower” where she was very happy.
But in 1932 the laboratory’s funds ran out. Hanfmann did not return to Germany, where Hitler was about to come to power. In the Depression-stricken United States, academic work was unavailable. But Hanfmann was in luck. At the suggestion of Maria Rickers-Ovsiankina, David Shakow hired Hanfmann and Dembo “to do a psychologist’s work for an attendant’s salary” (as Hanfmann recalled) at Worcester State Mental Hospital.
Worcester State Hospital. Administration Building. Wikipedia.
Worcester State Hospital was founded in 1830. It was one of the first such hospitals in the country, and over the years it became the leading psychiatric hospital in the United States. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, Adolph Meyer was superintendent of Worcester and laid the foundation for the research activities for which the hospital became famous in the 1930s and 1940s. In the 1920s, a separate research service was created. In 1928, David Shakow became chief psychologist and director of psychological research at Worcester.
Kurt Goldstein. https://www.natureinstitute.org/about/kurt-goldstein
During the four years Hanfmann spent in Worcester, her colleagues included many eminent psychologists and psychiatrists, including Andras Angyal, Henry Murray, and Kurt Goldstein.
Goldstein’s work was highly valued by Hanfmann’s teacher, Wilhelm Peters, and she was most likely familiar with it in Jena. Her acquaintance with Goldstein greatly influenced Hanfmann’s scientific work; she learned a lot from him, in particular, Goldstein’s application of Gestalt psychology ideas in clinical practice, especially in neuropsychology. Goldstein was a public and active person, moreover, a leftist, and very influential in Germany. In fact, he narrowly escaped. In 1933, he was arrested, but quickly released. He was probably saved only by the fact that the Nazi regime had not yet fully unfolded its repressions. Goldstein’s student was the psychologist Abraham Maslow (the “builder” of the famous pyramid), with whom Hanfmann would later work together.
Hanfmann had no previous experience with psychiatric patients or clinical psychology before coming to Worcester, and she was inspired by the new problems and questions she encountered. At first, she worked on social psychological problems, such as how newly admitted patients responded to the hospital environment. She learned about psychological testing, including the Rorschach test, which was just then being used in America by psychologists from Europe. (Rickers-Ovsiankina was one of the first to do so.)
Hanfmann’s exposure to psychoanalytic methods at Smith and Worcester rekindled her long-standing interest in personality psychology. She gradually became involved in the study of cognitive disorders. Together with Goldstein and Rickers-Ovsiankina, she conducted a detailed study of a patient with visual agnosia (impaired visual perception), and the result of these studies was the classic monograph “Case of Lanuti”, published in 1944.
Figures for the concept formation test. Figures with inscriptions were proposed by Vygotsky and Sakharov. Hanfmann and Kasanin changed the instructions for the test and used it to identify defects in schizophrenia, when the subject cannot correctly classify the figures. They also introduced a time limit.
Hanfmann’s studies of schizophrenic thinking attracted the attention of Yakov Kasanin from Chicago, who sought to develop and continue Lev Vygotsky’s research. Kasanin received funds from the Masonic Foundation for his research, and in 1936 Hanfmann left Worcester to work with Kasanin at Michael Reese Hospital in Chicago, where she spent a highly productive three years. The result of this work was a series of articles and a monograph, Conceptual Thinking in Schizophrenia, based largely on what became known as the Hanfmann-Kasanin Test.
Jacob (Yakov) Kasanin. https://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_397744
By the end of the 1930s, Hanfmann faced a difficult task of a far from academic nature. She needed to get her mother and brothers out of Nazi Germany and into the United States. There were barriers on both sides: it was difficult to get them out, as Germany was getting increasingly closed, and it was difficult to get them in, as they needed American visas. Hanfmann was the eldest sister in the family, and it fell to her to care for the lives of her brothers and mother. She used all her academic connections. And she managed. The fact that her brothers survived and made successful careers in the United States is, of course, largely due to her.
1933, Scheunenviertel district. Photo: akg-images/picture-alliance. https://www.dw.com/ru/pogrom-v-berline-usvoilo-li-nemeckoe-obsestvo-etot-strasnyj-urok/a-67318157
In 1939, Hanfmann got her first academic position, teaching at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts. She stayed there for five years, during which time she was promoted to assistant professor. However, after her previous work with Koffka, Shakow, and Kasanin, Mount Holyoke was a disappointment.
She describes the period as “relatively barren”. Hanfmann writes: “I enjoyed the few courses where I could use my first-hand knowledge of a field to get students involved. Yet I often had to lecture to a politely uninterested audience, using prescribed textbooks which endlessly discussed nature- nurture (T-i), or other unproductive dilemmas.”
The nature-nurture problem can be defined as follows: does human development depend on heredity or on social environment? This question still lingers in psychology. It has become especially acute in recent years in connection with the possibility of “designer babies”, i.e. babies whose genome has been specially modified. But in the 1930s and 1940s, the nature-nurture question may well have seemed “futile”: too little was known about heredity.
However, psychologist and future politician John William Gardner, who was then a faculty member at Mount Holyoke with Hanfmann, remembers her as a wonderful teacher, a scholar, a well-informed, and highly respected colleague.
It was a difficult time for her, but fortunately she had friends and associates. And they were not far from South Hadley. She bought a car, and although she never liked driving, it allowed her to visit the Hyders in Northampton (it was just 15-20 km away), the Shakows in Worcester (it was further away, about 100 km), and Rickers-Ovsiankina, who taught at Wheaton College, in Norton (it was a little over 100 km away). She occasionally met Goldstein, but he was at Columbia University in New York, a long way away. In her last year at Mount Holyoke, Tamara Dembo joined the faculty, and the two friends lived in the same house, as they had in Worcester.
“The Mysterious Invitation”
In 1944, Hanfmann received a “mysterious invitation.” She was offered to take part in important work in Washington. Among her acquaintances in the project were her colleague from Mount Holyoke, John Gardner (he probably recommended her) and psychologist Henry Alexander Murray, whom she had known since Worcester. She agreed and joined the newly formed secret Office of Strategic Services (OSS, which later became the CIA) at Station S, located on a country estate in Fairfax, Virginia.
Murray headed the so-called The OSS Assessment Staff, which included many famous psychologists. Kurt Lewin, who had long since moved to America by that time, also worked with Murray. The psychologists’ task was to evaluate the suitability of candidates for intelligence, sabotage, or propaganda work behind enemy lines.
In Murray’s words, “The assessment of men-we trust Samuel Butler would agree – is the scientific art of arriving at sufficient conclusions from insufficient data.” Psychologists had to develop their own methods and criteria as best they could and upgrade them as they went along.
Hanfmann fit right in with the intense work. She particularly enjoyed conducting open-ended interviews with candidates and integrating observations from many staff members to create complete profiles of the subjects. “I was emerging as a clinician,” she recalled. Yet these were not the typical clinical patients. They were individuals of considerable personal strength, stability. At the end of the program, she was one of five staff members who wrote major sections of the final report, “Assessment of Men.”
Training the first American operatives at OSS school, where classroom training in espionage and sabotage was as important as the emotional resilience needed to survive behind enemy lines.
https://sofrep.com/specialoperations/how-oss-operatives-were-assessed-and-selected/
One of the tests on the basis of which conclusions were drawn and candidates were evaluated was the so-called “Construction Test” (5). The candidate was given ten minutes to build a five-foot square box from scrap materials. He was assigned two “helpers” to do the job. In reality, both assistants were psychologists or assistants who interfered with the subject. One of them seemed completely incompetent and did something wrong all the time, the other aggressively criticized the work. This task was never completed within the allotted time. That is, despite the simplicity of the task, it was impossible to complete it, but the subject did not know this. This was a real test not only of leadership and social relations, but also of emotional stability. Some candidates physically attacked their “helpers” during the test. After passing the test, the subject was given a grade on a five-point scale.
If the candidate exerted physical pressure on the “helper”, he usually received a low grade. But there was also this option. The candidate who had shown aggression could convincingly and calmly explain that he had behaved this way not because he had lost his composure, but because he had considered it necessary to stop the “assistant” who had put the project at risk.
A Woman at Harvard
After her turbulent years with the OSS, Hanfmann could have, but chose not to, return to Mount Holyoke. Instead, in 1946, she accepted a position as a lecturer in clinical psychology in Harvard’s new Department of Social Relations. She also began working at Harvard’s Russian Research Center. The Cold War had begun, and the center’s staff probably became America’s first “Sovietologists.”
Hanfmann enjoyed working with the bright undergraduates whose graduate theses she supervised and with the mature postwar graduate students whose dissertations she supervised. She was active in many new endeavors at the clinic and in the department.
As part of the Russian Research Center’s Iron Curtain study, Hanfmann traveled to Germany with a small group of researchers to interview Soviet citizens who had remained in Europe after the war, refusing to return to their homeland. Of the experience, she wrote: “This was a true reunion with my past. I met, face to face, people similar in many vital ways to those I knew in my childhood, but who had suffered catastrophes and hardships and were still leading the insecure life of the displaced. I had had no illusions about the Soviet state, but the reality conveyed through these interviews proved worse than the worst fantasy; yet most of the people we studied had fully preserved their humanity”.
Things weren’t all smooth sailing at Harvard. Hanfmann had faced discrimination of one kind or another almost her entire life. In Germany, she was an Ostjuden, in America, she was stateless for many years, but it was at enlightened Harvard that she was reminded that she was… a woman.
Hanfmann writes: “At the end of my first year at Harvard, my chairman told me, beaming, that the department had unanimously recommended a three years’ appointment for me. Shortly afterward, he told me, with a long face, that the dean had turned down the request. His reason? The three years’ appointment would have entitled me to be present at faculty meetings, and no woman had ever attended a meeting of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences! Then it is high time one did, I told the chair- man (although I personally would be content to renounce the privilege). The dean had a different solution: he guaranteed me three successive yearly appointments. In the course of those three years, the terms of a donation made for establishing a chair at Radcliffe made it mandatory and feasible to appoint to a full professor- ship a prominent woman historian. Given this precedent, my next reappointment was a regular three years’ one. I attended one faculty meeting – just to confirm my suspicion that I had not been missing much. . . . The memory of my first reap- pointment, and of some other incidents highlighting the anomaly of “a woman at Harvard,” has stayed with me as a story of absurd anachronisms with which to regale my friends.” In doing so, Hanfmann broke another wall: she became the first woman “to attend meetings of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences.” That was not so long ago—in 1950.
Brandeis University Professor
In 1952, at the urging of Abraham Maslow, Hanfmann moved to Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts, as a professor of psychology and director of the then-nascent Counseling Center. It was a challenge she embraced with enthusiasm.
Abraham Maslow. Wikipedia.
Her colleague, psychologist Ricardo Morant, with whom Hanfmann worked for more than 20 years, described her beginnings at Brandeis in his 1983 eulogy after her death:
“Starting from scratch, Hanfmann developed what many considered to be by the end of her Directorship, the finest University Counseling Center in the country. The odds against this happening were prodigious. This was 1952, Brandeis had been in existence for only 4 years, had no endowment to speak of, few faculty and was not accredited. It was simply not the sort of place to attract normal, stable, upwardly mobile, well adjusted youngsters. And it didn’t. Who would come to an unaccredited school not knowing whether the degree to be awarded four years later would have any value in the academic marketplace? Two groups came . . . a group of mostly non-Jewish athletes who had been recruited to get our name quickly in the newspapers-even if only on the Sports pages. The other, a strange mixture of underachievers who had not been accepted elsewhere but caught fire when they got here, and a group of mavericks, who were extraordinarily bright, highly gifted, argumentative, irreverent and totally committed to proving the faculty wrong no matter what it espoused. …Hanfmann’s success with the Counseling Center was due in large measure to her ability to persuade both students and a very hesitant administration that the Center should not be a place of last resort for sick or depressed youngsters but rather an extension of the educational process where students could go to learn more about themselves”(6)
Brandeis University Humanities Building. 1965. Wikipedia.
The administration was not always favorable to the Center’s activities. In some cases, Hanfmann won the fight, for example, in the fight for the privacy of students and the confidentiality of conversations with the psychologist, but in other matters she had to give in. But this was work that brought her great satisfaction and subsequently led to several major scientific results.
Her teaching activities at the Counseling Center were not limited to therapy for students. She was a teacher for her junior colleagues and became an example and a personal friend for many of them. Beginning in the early 1960s, other schools began to turn to her for advice and assistance, including Vassar College and New College in Sarasota, Florida.
In her early years at Brandeis, Hanfmann taught courses and seminars and was active in the psychology department, but as the Center grew, she had little time for these activities. An exception was a graduate seminar in psychopathology, which she taught for many years, sometimes in collaboration with psychiatrist Harry Rand. After Maslow relinquished the department chair, Morant took over, but Hanfmann served as his replacement for a year.
While immersed in the daily activities of the Counseling Center, her therapeutic, teaching, and administrative duties, and in the preparation of publications, Hanfmann continued to work on systematic problems. In 1953, she wrote a chapter on the Vygotsky test for a collection published by Arthur Weider and David Wechsler. In the early 1960s, she edited and translated Vygotsky’s Thought and Language together with Gertrude Wakar. She wrote a chapter on “Goldstein and Vygotsky” for a collection of articles dedicated to the memory of Kurt Goldstein.
Simmel divides Hanfmann’s scientific activity into two periods: the analysis of cognitive processes in the first half of her career, and personality psychology – in the broadest sense – in the second. Of course, her research interests overlapped greatly, but the trajectory of the search was roughly this: from the part to the whole.
Simmel writes that Hanfmann’s dissertation and subsequent work with Peters and then Koffka dealt with problems of perception and the connection of perceptual activity with “higher mental processes.” These higher mental processes became one of the focuses of her research at Worcester: the study of thought disorders in patients with brain injuries or diseases, including schizophrenia. This was followed by work on concept formation in schizophrenia with Jacob Kasanin. The Hanfmann-Kasanin test brought her to the attention of a wide circle of psychologists. In the 1940s, the name Eugenia Hanfmann was familiar to anyone with even the slightest interest in schizophrenic thinking. “That is still true today,” Simmel notes.
Just as her experience at Worcester had given rise to the scientific understanding of schizophrenia, her experience in the OSS assessment program led Hanfmann to focus on personality issues. She became an excellent interviewer, but she did not get bogged down in details. Her colleagues, first at OSS and then at the Harvard Psychological Clinic and the Russian Research Center, valued her ability to synthesize and integrate many different types of data from many different sources. She contributed several chapters to the book “Assessment of Men”, published after the OSS program. (7)
After translating Vygotsky, Hanfmann embarked on another major editing project.
Laws of the Whole
Andras Angyal. Wikipedia
While working in Worcester, she met Andras Angyal and was deeply impressed by his thinking. When he died, he left behind an unfinished manuscript. Now that Hanfmann was actively involved in psychotherapy herself, she faced the same problems that had troubled Angyal, and she decided that his ideas could not be lost.
Preparing and editing someone else’s manuscript, especially when the scientist is no longer alive, is painstaking and generally thankless work, but Hanfmann felt it was her duty to complete her colleague’s work. It was a difficult project, but she did not back down. In 1968, together with Richard Jones, she published Angyal’s book entitled “Neurosis and Treatment: A Holistic Theory”.(8)
Cover of András Angyal’s book. Neurosis and Treatment: A Holistic Theory. https://archive.org/details/neurosistreatmen0000angy
In the classic book by Calvin Hall and Gardner Lindsay, Theories of Personality (9), there is a chapter called “Organismic Theory.” The authors write: “The organism always behaves as a whole, not as a collection of disparate parts. Mind and body are not separate entities, and mind is not composed of independent faculties or elements as a body is not composed of independent organs and processes… The laws of the whole govern the functioning of the parts. Therefore, in order to understand the functioning of any component of the organism, it is necessary to discover the general laws of the functioning of the whole organism. This is the main thread of organismic theory.”
In this chapter, the psychologists present three “organismic theories” — Kurt Goldstein, Abraham Maslow, and Andras Angyal. Hanfmann had many years of acquaintance and scientific collaboration with all of these outstanding psychologists. And in presenting Angyal’s theory, Hall and Lindsay rely on a book prepared by Hanfmann (it had just been published at that time). Hanfmann did not create her own theory of personality, but she did a lot to make theoretical views close to her known to the scientific community.
When these “organismic theories” were created – in the 1950s and 1960s – they looked quite abstract, but today we already know a lot, for example, about the impact of the intestinal microbiome on the brain (and vice versa), about the mechanisms of memory and learning of the immune system and its interaction with the nervous system, and many other points that demonstrate the deep connection of “higher mental processes” with the entire organism. The theory of the “single organism” no longer seems arbitrary. Psychologists are again looking at the “organism as a whole.”
Eugenia Hanfmann was 78 when she suffered a stroke. She died two weeks later, on September 14, 1983, in Waltham Hospital.
Simmel writes: “Though Hanfmann did not think of herself as important, she knew what issues were important, and she could bring formidable energies and persuasiveness to their defense. She was a warm and devoted friend to patients, students, and colleagues, as well as to her mother, her brothers, and to their families; a staunch supporter in times of adversity, a happy celebrant on joyous occasions. She had a wonderful sense of the incongruous, the comic. Under what was almost a cloak of inconspicuousness she was the essence of the strong Russian woman. She was a rare human being.”
Nones
(1) Marianne L. Simmel. A tribute to Eugenia Hanfmann, 1905-1983.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/1520-6696(198610)22:4%3C348::AID-JHBS2300220406%3E3.0.CO;2-E.
(2) Agnes N. O’Connell and Nancy Felipe Russo, Models of Achievement: Refections of Eminent Women in Psychology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 141-142. This and subsequent quotations from the autobiography are from the essay Marianne Simmel.
(3) Waldemar Schmidt. The Weimar Republic Press on Anti-Semitism (1919–1923). — History of Everyday Life. – 2024. – No. 1. – P. 166–182 https://lengu.ru/mag/istoriya-povsednevnosti/archive/126/1084.
(4) Eugenia Hanfmann, “Die Entstehung visueller Assoziationen,” Zeitschrift fur Psychologie 105 (1928).
(5) Quote. by A thesis presented to the Faculty of the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree MASTER OF MILITARY ART AND SCIENCE. by LOUIE M. BANKS III, M.A.J., USA B.A., University of New Orleans, Louisiana, 1980 M.A., University of Southern Mississippi, 1983 Ph.D., University of Southern Mississippi, 1985 https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/citations/ADA299376.
(6) Memorial minutes entered by Ricardo Morant, Brandeis University Faculty Meeting, 16 September 1983. Cip. based on an essay by Marianne Simmel.
(7) The OSS Assessment Staff, Assessment of Men: Selection of Personnel for the Office of Strategic Services (New York: Rinehart & Co., 1948, reprint, New York: Johnson Reprint Corp., 1978),
(8) Andras Angyal, Neurosis and Treatment: A Holistic Theory, ed. Eugenia Hanfmann and Richard M. Jones (New York: John Wiley, 1965; New York: Da Capo Press, 1982.
(9) C. S. Hall, G. Lindsey. Theories of Personality. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1970
translation: Calvin S. Hall and Lindsay Gardner. Theories of Personality. Translated by I.B. Grinshpun. M.: “KSP+”, 1997)
Vladimir Gubailovskii 28.01.2025