Psychologists League

The Psychologists League was an organization of left-wing psychologists, including Karen Machover and Dan Harris, that tried to protect the interests of unemployed psychologists during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Initially formed by clinicians at Bellevue Hospital, it soon attracted a wide membership, organizing public discussions and taking part in the May Day Parade. As a Marxist group with Communist sympathies, it tried not just to create more employment opportunities for psychologists, but also to work towards the establishment of non-capitalist institutions that would assure the proper social utilization of psychologists. Yet although the Psychologists League did manage to create some job opportunities for psychologists, especially through the Works Progress Administration, in its more ambitious goals it proved to be less successful. In fact its influence on the policies of the American Psychological Association was largely negligible. After the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939, the organization split between Socialists and Communists and soon disbanded.

References

• Lorenz J. Finison, Unemployment, Politics and the History of Organized Psychology in American Psychologist Vol 31(11), Nov 1976 pp 747–755.
• Lorenz J. Finison, Unemployment, Politics and the History of Organized Psychology: II. The psychologists league, the WPA and the national health program in American Psychologist Vol 33(5), May 1978 pp 471–477.
• Benjamin Harris, "Don't be Unconscious; Join Our Ranks": Psychology, Politics and Communist Education in Rethinking MARXISM, Volume 6, Number 1 (spring 1993), pp 46–47
• Benjamin Harris, Psychology in Mari Jo Buhle, Paul Buhle and Dan Georgakas (eds): the Encyclopedia of the American Left. Garland Publishing, Inc, New York and London 1990 pp 610