Harry Slochower

Harry Slochower (born Hersch Zloczower; September 1, 1900 – May 11, 1991) was an Austrian-born American scholar, literary critic, philosopher and psychoanalyst.

Harry Slochower
Born	Hersch Zloczower (1900-09-01)September 1, 1900 Bukowina, Austria-Hungary
Died	May 11, 1991(1991-05-11) (aged 90) Brooklyn, New York, U.S.
Education	College of the City of New York, (BS in philosophy and German, 1923) Columbia University (MA, 1924; PhD, 1928) Universities of Munich, Berlin, Heidelberg (1925–26)[1]
Occupations	Literary critic, philosopher psychoanalyst

Biography

Early life and education

Slochower was born Hersch Zloczower in Bukowina, formerly part of Austria-Hungary and now divided between Romania and Ukraine. He arrived in the United States on the SS Frankfurt in October 1913, joining his parents who had arrived in February 1911.^[2][3] Slochower grew up in the Bronx and studied philosophy and German at the City College of New York, graduating in 1923.^[4] He also studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich and Heidelberg, before receiving his PhD from Columbia for a book on Richard Dehmel.^[5] Slochower was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1929 for his study on the "infiltration of Schopenhauer's pessimism into German literature".^[1]

Career

From 1924, Slochower taught German and English, for immigrants, at various schools in New York. From 1928 to 1952, he taught German literature, comparative literature and philosophy at Brooklyn College in New York.^[6]

In 1952, Slochower denied having been involved with the Communist Party for the past 11 years. He invoked the Fifth Amendment when questioned by the McCarren Committee as to whether he had formerly been a member of the Communist Party. Due to this testimony, he was fired from his teaching post by the Board of Higher Education, alongside Vera Shlakman of Queens College and Bernard Riess of Hunter College. He then sued the college. The Supreme Court ruled, in 1956, that he had been "denied due process" and Slochower was reinstated and given back pay of $40,000, before being suspended again for the charge of lying before the Senate committee. Following this, he resigned his professorship and then worked as a psychoanalyst. From 1964 to 1989 he taught at The New School for Social Research in New York.^[6]

Death

Slochower died at the age of 90, in Brooklyn.^[6]

Works

Slochower engaged primarily with psychoanalytic literary interpretations. His works include Three Ways of Modern Man (1937), Thomas Mann's Joseph Story: An Interpretation (1938) and No Voice is Wholly Lost (1945). He also contributed to various philosophical, literary and psychoanalytic journals. Slochower was president of the Association for Applied Psychoanalysis and, from 1964 until his death, was editor of the psychoanalysis journal American Imago.^[3]

Publications

Books

• Richard Dehmel: Der Mensch und der Denker (Dresden, 1928)
• Three Ways of Modern Man (New York, 1937)
• Thomas Mann's Joseph Story: An Interpretation (New York, 1938)
• No Voice Is Wholly Lost (New York, 1945)
• Mythopoesis: Mythic Patterns in the Literary Classics (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1970)