Interview with David Baltimore - Caltech Oral Histories

Baltimore-4
LIPPINCOTT: Oh! That was around in those days
BALTIMORE: Oh, yes. Well, this was the school in exile for the great German philosophers and
psychologists; and her interest was in child psychology—experimental psychology, really. And
so she took classes from the greats of psychology of the day. She knew Wolfgang Köhler, who
was old by then—he was a founder of Gestalt psychology. Hans Wallach, Solomon Asch—these
were the greatest of people, and they had all been given intellectual homes on the East Coast,
either at The New School or at Swarthmore College. Wallach and Asch were both at
Swarthmore—I took classes from Asch when I was at Swarthmore. That’s one of the reasons I
went there—there were multiple reasons, but that’s certainly one of them. My mother got a
master’s degree at that time in experimental psychology. She did everything for her PhD but
write her thesis, and I’ve never known why she didn’t. She had a block in writing. Not that she
didn’t write well—she wrote perfectly well—but she didn’t seem to want to write things up. She
was not aggressive in pursuing her own position in academic psychology.
LIPPINCOTT: She wasn’t interested in practicing
BALTIMORE: Oh, no, this was not about practicing. This was all experimental psychology. She
was interested in the nature of perception—that was the big question for the Gestalt
psychologists—and in other theoretical questions. She worked with animals some, but a lot with
children, and developed, apparently, very sophisticated thinking about childhood development. I
can’t tell you very much about it. But she had a mentor, Mary Henley, who was sort of the last
of the Gestalt psychologists.
LIPPINCOTT: Did she want an academic career
BALTIMORE: Yes, so she had one. She taught at The New School, once she had finished her
training, for quite a number of years [1958-1966] and also at Sarah Lawrence [1965-1977],
where she got tenure at age sixty-two.
LIPPINCOTT: Gee! There’s hope for us all!