Vienna’s Bühler institute trained a left-Freudian network that reshaped American social research.

Evidence

Contact with Sanford was established through Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an acquaintance of Horkheimer’s, who told him that Sanford was open to `European ideas’. Frenkel-Brunswik, at that time a research associate, like Sanford himself, at the Institute of Child Welfare at Berkeley, had left Austria in 1938 as a refugee. She and her later husband, E. Brunswik, had been the first research assistants at Karl and Charlotte Bühler’s Vienna Psychological Institute, where Paul Lazarsfeld, Marie Jahoda and Herta Herzog had also worked, and where young left-wingers, most of whom were also enthusiastic about Freudian psychoanalysis, had learnt how to go about sophisticated empirical research. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 383

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the reader’s earlier highlights on Lazarsfeld, the Frankfurt circle’s empirical turn, and Horkheimer’s recruitment of Adorno alongside Lazarsfeld.
• SHARE: Send to anyone working on the migration of the Vienna Psychological Institute’s empirical style into Cold War American social science.