Salomon Rettig – författare

Having spent more than thirty years in the laboratory studying human behavior under preformatted, controlled conditions, I found myself dissatisfied with my work. It is not that my work produced no new findings on human conduct, or that working almost exclusively with college students gave me little information on other groups of people, but that the study of human beings in the laboratory told me little about the people themselves. Having been born in Europe, socialized in the Middle East, and educated in the United States, I had entered the profession of psychology in order to better understand different people's behavior. What I found instead was that under uniform conditions, imposed by the laboratory, people responded more or less in uniform manners. The resulting behavior told me little about the people and more about my laboratory. After considerable search for a better understanding of my own formal training in psychology on the one hand and my diversified cultural background on the other, I began to see that these two early influences clashed in some basic manner. Upon further reflection it occurred to me that my own radical transformation in a period of six years, from a poorly educated (elementary school only) adult to a doctor of philosophy, made me see a different world. My earlier world of reality revolved around forms of evidence that were not only never questioned by me, but v vi PREFACE were themselves highly unreliable.

Having spent more than thirty years in the laboratory studying human behavior under preformatted, controlled conditions, I found myself dissatisfied with my work. It is not that my work produced no new findings on human conduct, or that working almost exclusively with college students gave me little information on other groups of people, but that the study of human beings in the laboratory told me little about the people themselves. Having been born in Europe, socialized in the Middle East, and educated in the United States, I had entered the profession of psychology in order to better understand different people''s behavior. What I found instead was that under uniform conditions, imposed by the laboratory, people responded more or less in uniform manners. The resulting behavior told me little about the people and more about my laboratory. After considerable search for a better understanding of my own formal training in psychology on the one hand and my diversified cultural background on the other, I began to see that these two early influences clashed in some basic manner. Upon further reflection it occurred to me that my own radical transformation in a period of six years, from a poorly educated (elementary school only) adult to a doctor of philosophy, made me see a different world. My earlier world of reality revolved around forms of evidence that were not only never questioned by me, but v vi PREFACE were themselves highly unreliable.

Having spent more than thirty years in the laboratory studying human behavior under preformatted, controlled conditions, I found myself dissatisfied with my work. It is not that my work produced no new findings on human conduct, or that working almost exclusively with college students gave me little information on other groups of people, but that the study of human beings in the laboratory told me little about the people themselves. Having been born in Europe, socialized in the Middle East, and educated in the United States, I had entered the profession of psychology in order to better understand different people's behavior. What I found instead was that under uniform conditions, imposed by the laboratory, people responded more or less in uniform manners. The resulting behavior told me little about the people and more about my laboratory. After considerable search for a better understanding of my own formal training in psychology on the one hand and my diversified cultural background on the other, I began to see that these two early influences clashed in some basic manner. Upon further reflection it occurred to me that my own radical transformation in a period of six years, from a poorly educated (elementary school only) adult to a doctor of philosophy, made me see a different world. My earlier world of reality revolved around forms of evidence that were not only never questioned by me, but v vi PREFACE were themselves highly unreliable.

What a Life is a unique book that is part memoir, part historical chronicle, part a social psychological dissertation of the impact of a set of diverse social systems upon a single soul. It is the result of a lifetime of evidence-gathering, thought, and introspection. Salomon Rettig, professor emeritus at the Department of Psychology, Hunter College CUNY, was born into and subsequently experienced three radically different social, political, and economic systems of the twentieth century: Nazism, Neo-Marxism (the Israeli kibbutz), and the academic system of the United States of America. Now in his nineties, he attempts to compare this diverse set of experiences, their historical and political context, and their effect on him, especially as he has related to other people. The results are not very pretty. He watched Hitler come to power in his native Berlin and experienced the depersonalization of the Jewish population on the part of the Nazis, prior to escaping at the age of thirteen to an orphanage for Jewish Holocaust refugees in British Mandate Palestine. He subsequently worked on a kibbutz for ten years, subjugating his personal will to the will and interest of the collective. Finally, he arrived in the United States, completed his education, and embarked on a career as a professor of social psychology just as the United States entered a historic, post-war period of rapid, unprecedented economic growth. Was it the estrangement from his nuclear family at a very young age, assimilation into the commune of the kibbutz, or something else that led to his inability to relate to the other people in his life, even those as close to him as his first wife?