In Memoriam

The death of Marie Jahoda, a participant in WFMHs early concerns about prejudice and racism, was announced in a New York Times obituary on 10 May 2001. Jahoda, one of the worlds leading social psychologists and an emeritus professor of the University of Sussex, died at her home in England on 28 April at the age of 94. She received her doctorate at the University of Vienna, in the city of her birth where she also absorbed the teachings of Sigmund Freud. Her obituary noted that, as a Social Democrat opposed to the Austrian government even before Hitler annexed the country, she was imprisoned in 1936. She later managed to reach England.

She came to the United States after World War II as a social scientist for the American Jewish Committee and became a faculty member at Columbia University in New York. In the 1950s, as a professor of social psychology at New York University, she was a founding director of its Research Center for Human Relations.

Jahodas research topics over the years encompassed anti-Semitism, ethnic and religious prejudice in the workplace and in intergroup relations, womens mental health, and the effect of unemployment on mental health. In 1960 UNESCO published her book Race Relations and Mental Health, prepared under a contract granted to WFMH in 1958 by UNESCO. Her work came in a period when the Federation was engaged in collaboration with UNESCO regarding the impact of societal and cultural factors on mental health.

This joint activity began with a grant for a study by Margaret Mead of the socioeconomic and cultural problems arising from industrialization in the less developed countries. Her work was published in 1953 by UNESCO, under contract with WFMH, with the title Cultural Patterns and Technical Change.

Among the related activities of WFMH in this era were conferences on:A Positive Approach to Prejudice, organized with the Council of Christians and Jews and the Society of Friends in London in 1957; The Concept of Mental Health in Different Cultures, organized by the WFMH Scientific Committee in 1957; Concepts of Mental Health in Various Religions and Ideologies, organized by the WFMH Scientific Committee in 1958; also in 1958, The Diminution of Prejudice, continuing the 1957 conference; and Social Change and Mental Health in Africa, a panel discussion at UN New York in 1959.

A period of renewed close collaboration between WFMH, UNESCO and the ISSC (International Social Science Council) began in 1985 with the awakening of UNESCOs interest in bioethics. It produced several working papers culminating in the 1993 publication of Biomedical Technology and Human Rights, under the joint auspices of UNESCO, ISSC and WFMH.

Although Jahodas work with WFMH was not mentioned in her New York Times obituary, we remember her as emblematic, along with Margaret Mead, of a productive era in the Federations early history.

Eugene B. Brody