Return From the Natives by Mandler Peter

Author:Mandler, Peter.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300187854
Publisher: Yale University Press

Alongside Gorer, Mead found other sources of emotional and intellectual support. She was growing closer to Rhoda Metraux, who had worked as her assistant on the Food Habits committee before moving to OSS and who had now joined the RCC team to work on France, while her husband, Alfred Metraux, took a post as staff anthropologist at the new United Nations headquarters in New York. The French work brought Mead into close association with another social-science couple, Nathan Leites and Martha Wolfenstein. Mead had known Leites a little in the Washington years, when he had worked with Gorer and Benedict on psychological diagnoses of the Germans for OWI.74 He was a complicated character who would cause Mead more than a little grief in their years of collaboration. In many respects he fitted the mould of the kind of cultivated European-Jewish intellectual whose company she so enjoyed – like Gorer or Erwin Schuller, though shyer – with boundless curiosity and a biting sideline in psychoanalytically flavoured critique. But he was also a classic ‘nervous liberal’ with growing doubts about Americans’ backbone, and like many Americans of Russian-Jewish background he was also increasingly exercised by the Soviet threat.75 His wife, Martha Wolfenstein, a New York psychologist, was more sympathetic, and shared Mead's interests in children's issues; on many occasions she served as an emollient mediator between Mead and Leites.

After the war Leites had hoped to stay in government service, perhaps working for an OSS successor organization in the Paris Embassy, but had failed to find a place. Mead wrote references for both him and Wolfenstein when they applied for Guggenheim Fellowships, but warned his potential sponsors that his work on psychological warfare was or should be unpublishable – ‘it would amount to a “Handbook of Terror”, to loosing upon the world recipes for which we have at present no proper antidote’ – which can hardly have helped. Leites thus spent a year with Klineberg's UNESCO Tensions Project in Paris, where Mead met up with him when she passed through in the summer of 1947, and she, Gorer, Leites and Wolfenstein together had fun beginning the job of culture-cracking the French, whom Leites knew very well.76 Mead was delighted, and probably relieved, when Leites and Wolfenstein returned to New York and set to work on a book on the psychological implications of American movies – less sensitive territory, though Leites continued to worry about Americans’ tendency to retreat from public life into filmic fantasies, drawing conclusions not unlike Gorer's on Americans’ endemic loneliness. Between them, Leites and Wolfenstein became part-time substitutes for Gorer's stimulation when he was absent, contributing to RCC's French and Russian seminars, and in general playing the role of provocateur that Mead needed. And yet, she assured Gorer, ‘although Nathan and Martha are very good, still, there is none of that swift movement through uncharted waters’ that she and he enjoyed together.77

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Within a few years of the end of the war, then, Mead had endured the break-up of

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