Neuropsychology in New York City (1930-1960).

In this paper a description is provided of the history of what was to become the specialty of clinical neuropsychology as it occurred in New York City over a period extending from about 1930 to 1960. An effort will be made to demonstrate that the field of clinical neuropsychology was essentially founded in New York because of a number of historical forces that will be discussed. Beginning with a personal note I will remark on how I got into neuropsychology because it will provide a perspective and context in which this history is expressed. I had the good fortune of living in New York City from birth until 1956 and attended the City College of New York (CCNY), where much of this history occurred. At that time CCNY had a world class psychology department chaired by Gardner Murphy and staffed by several individuals who were to become major founders of what was to become neuropsychology. One of them was Herbert Birch (Fig. 1). Birch was an experimental psychologist at CCNY who worked mainly with animals and was interested in learning theory. While there, he made an existential decision to give up that career, go to medical school, and become a pediatric neurologist. He succeeded in doing that and subsequently joined the faculty of Yeshiva University and ultimately became what can reasonably be thought of as the founder of child developmental neuropsychology. His enormous literature on development during early life and the influence of deprivation, malnutrition, being disadvantaged, and on learning disability and autism had a profound influence on our field (e.g., Hertzig & Birch, 1971; Richardson & Birch, 1973). Birch is still memorialized by the International Neuropsychology Society’s Birch Lecture and a child development center named after him at the Einstein Medical College in the Bronx. His work continues to be read and applied. Also at CCNY at that time was Kurt Goldstein (Fig. 2). His collaborator Martin Scheerer (Fig. 3) had left shortly before I arrived, and I did not study with him there, but did so later. Kurt Goldstein, of course, was a major theoretician, philosopher, and clinician (Goldstein, 1939). The Goldstein-Scheerer tests (Goldstein & Scheerer, 1941) were probably the first neuropsychological battery, and Kurt Goldstein’s theoretical work continues to have a major influence on concepts of brain function and on what is now called the process approach to neuropsychological assessment. Kurt Goldstein was a powerful and charismatic teacher, and I attended his lectures regularly where he spoke about holistic or organismic theory of brain function, the abstract attitude, and what is now called the process approach to assessment. Martin Scheerer had left CCNY but had organized the experimental psychology course and so I was initially influenced by him at a distance, getting to work with him quite closely later on. Despite his strong German accent he was born in New York, actually in the Bronx. He left America and returned to Germany as a young child and returned to New York to avoid the holocaust. His collaboration with Kurt Goldstein brought sorting tests into neuropsychology, largely in the form of the Goldstein-Scheerer tests’ descendants, the Halstead Category Test and the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test. Scheerer was also a strong advocate of what is now called the process approach, and he wrote a paper in which he provided a strong defense of it (Scheerer, 1946). He called it performance analysis. We understand that Heinz Werner’s (Fig. 4) paper “Process and Achievement” (Werner, 1937) is generally credited for first formulating that view of assessment, but there is an interesting story about that. Scheerer and Werner were friends and colleagues at Hamburg, and shared similar views about cognition