| AdminHistory | Copy of M Jahoda's obituary (by Lisl Klein) for The Independent Newspaper 8 May 2001
Marie Jahoda, social psychologist: born Vienna 26 January 1907; Professor of Social Psychology, New York University 1949-58; Research Fellow and Professor of Psychology, Brunel University 1958-65; Professor of Social Psychology, Sussex University 1965-73 (Emeritus); CBE 1974; married 1927 Paul Lazarsfeld (one daughter; marriage dissolved), 1958 Austen Albu (died 1994); died Hassocks, West Sussex 28 April 2001.
In a speech in 1994, Marie Jahoda announced her 'testament': a relevant social psychology draws its themes from the problems of the social present, not from abstract theories; does not look for answers independent of their time, but recognises that social events and human behaviour take place in a context; does not want to prove but to discover.
Because things count which cannot be counted, qualitative methods have their place in it as well as quantitative ones. And with all the difficulties that this brings, the unfashionableness and the lack, in some scientific circles, of prestige, it also brings the deep satisfaction of making it possible to master the problems of the day.
Jahoda's whole life demonstrates the development and honing of this philosophy. She was born in Vienna in 1907, into a middle-class Jewish but agnostic family. One uncle played cards with Freud, another held chamber-music evenings at his home, to one of which someone brought a young friend called Adolf Hitler. In the exhilarating social-democratic Vienna of the 1920s she became a passionate socialist, chairman of the socialist high-school student organisation. There she met Paul Lazarsfeld, whom she married in 1927; their daughter, Lotte Bailyn, is now Professor of Management at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology).
In 1926-27 Lazarsfeld founded a small research institute which aimed to finance social psychological research through commercial market research. There was no precedent for this kind of organisation, as there was none for the study of long-term unemployment which the institute carried out. Die Arbeitslosen von Marienthal (1933) became Marie Jahoda's best-known work, rediscovered and translated into English as Marienthal: the sociography of an unemployed community in 1971 (she was a bit irritated that some people seemed to think it was her only work). In 1933 Paul Lazarsfeld went to the United States and they divorced.
Under the repressive regimes of Dollfuss and Schuschnigg, Jahoda worked underground and in 1937 was caught and held in solitary confinement for nine months, with nightly interrogations. Nearly 60 years later she still recalled the guilt she felt because one night, when her jailers relaxed over a cultural study of Viennese jokes they had found in her office, she too relaxed to the extent of accepting a chair and a cigarette. She was released on condition that she left the country; Lotte was sent with her father to the United States, and Marie Jahoda came to England. As soon as she could after the Second World War she too went to the United States, and lived there for 13 years.
In all three places Austria, England and the US a body of work evolved which was made coherent by the process of intellectual understanding applied to life experiences, leading in turn to the development of intellectual concepts and methods. The broad topics were employment, unemployment and the meaning of work; race relations, prejudice and the authoritarian personality; Freud, psychoanalysis and other approaches to the study of psychology; methods and strategic questions in social research.
Many of the papers and books are seminal. But 'relevant' does not mean biased, she was very clear about that: you can express your political views when you choose a topic for research, and you can express them when you decide what to do with the findings; but absolutely not in between. And in all three countries she was honoured with honorary degrees, awards and appointments.
In 1957 Jahoda returned to Britain and married Austen Albu, the MP for Edmonton, whom she had first met during the war. She became research fellow and then Professor of Psychology at Brunel (College, then University), where she pioneered the 'sandwich' degree, which gives psychology students three solid spells of practical experience in the course of their studies. One of her former students says: 'The trouble about studying under Marie Jahoda is that you think Psychology is going to be like that.' In 1965 she was head-hunted to join Sussex University, where she became Professor of Social Psychology, and consultant, and later Visiting Professor, at the Science Policy Research Unit.
During Austen Albu's long last illness, Jahoda was to some extent housebound and cut off from professional contacts. She turned to poetry. She had discovered Louïze Labé, whose love sonnets, published in 1555, established that a woman could not only love passionately in her own right instead of simply being the object of a man's love virtuous and untouchable or easy and pleasurable, but always passive but could also express her passion in all its aspects. Rainer Maria Rilke had translated these sonnets into German, and now Jahoda translated them into English. The resulting small volume with all three versions on a page Labé's in 16th-century French, Rilke's in German and Jahoda's in English was, of her many publications, the one of which she was most proud.
In 1990 she became a founding Trustee of the Bayswater Institute. When her first stroke robbed her of most of her eyesight she resigned, fearing that she might no longer be able to fulfil the legal obligations. We created the role of President, but she distrusted the idea of a merely formal role. "What does it mean?' she demanded. 'It means you can nag from a position of authority.' 'In that case, I accept.'
And she made full use of the invitation to nag, keeping us straining on our toes for four more years.
For 'Mitzi' Jahoda , all life experiences were subject to enquiry, from the instinct to grasp an outstretched hand, even when it is the hand of the police chief, to memory loss after a stroke ('How many cells does the brain have? How do they die in layers, in clusters?'). Sitting at her bedside, with Lotte and her daughter-in-law Mary only a few hours before she died, it seemed natural to be discussing some research we were planning, on continuity of care in the Health Service. 'Oh, we can supply you with a case study!' they said. I hope to take them up on it she would like the idea that even her dying can make a contribution to social science knowledge and engagement.
Lisl Klein
Also available online at http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/professor-marie-jahoda-729096.html |