The repercussions of the international economic crisis, which culminated in the crash of the New York stock exchange, could be contained by neither the National Liberal Party nor the National Peasants’ Party. Therefore, King Carol II opted for a government coalition led by Iorga, which also could not cope with the crisis, being unable to pay wages for months. The convergence of debt, which went up tremendously because of deflation, brought some relief but also led to a credit crisis. Wages went down and unemployment could not be combated, especially among intellectuals. The circle around the king and Mrs. Lupescu were in defiance of public morals. The antipathy that the poor felt toward the king channeled them toward the Iron Guard, which engaged in the fiercest battle against the king and his circles. The United States, Britain, and France were also struggling with deflation and unemployment. Opposing them was Hitler, who left the League of Nations and proceeded to engage in massive rearmament, which got rid of unemployment, even if wages were very low. In this way he boosted his prestige not only domestically but also abroad, while France and Britain ceased their struggle against him and started flirting with him, tolerating his provocations, which started with the occupation of Austria and dismemberment of Czechoslovakia. America itself spoke of the advantages of continuity in political activity, and greater and greater concentration of power in the hands of the new dictatorships, and even started to imitate it. President Roosevelt's third and fourth terms were a result of this imitation. Faced with the arrogance of the dictatorships on one side and the defeatist policies of Britain, France, and even America on the other, Codreanu, openly supported by Hitler, gained in popularity. Worried by his pro-Axis statements, France asked King Carol II, through Titulescu, to dismantle the Iron Guard. Prime Minister Duca did not agree with this measure, because the legionnaire movement was not yet a party of the masses, so it had to be combated by democratic means, not by putting it outside the law, where it could gain popularity.

The morning before Pentecost, two double coaches pulled into the prison courtyard, and we were all taken there to get our civilian clothes. The joy of seeing each other was huge for all. An encouraging sign was the release of the socialists, headed by Motaş and Stănescu.

But where were they taking us? We didn't know and couldn't begin to guess. Just like the detainee song says: “Will we ever go, will we be going soon? / No one knows where, no one knows when.”

The train we were attached to went toward the Olt Valley. We’re going to Aiud or Gherla, we told ourselves. The next day we passed through Blaj, but the cathedral bells weren't ringing, and the Metropolitan of Blaj, Alexandru Rusu, my former teacher of religion from the high school in Blaj, together with his four young bishops—Todea, Hîrţea, Ploscaru, Leluţiu—were sad and deep in thought. Frenţiu and Bălan of the old-timers, as well as Ionel Suciu, my dear desk mate, one of the youngest, had died.

After fifteen kilometers we came to Cisteiu station, across the Târnava river from my village, Obreja. I shouted out the window: “This is Professor Mărgineanu of Obreja, whoever can hear me, come to the station at Podul Mureş or Teiuş, I want to hear news of my mother and brother.”

“What are you doing?” Ionel Mocioni said. “That snake Silber is going to rat on you, like he did with Pătrăşcanu.”

At Podul Mureş, a man approached the window of the coach and yelled: “Professor, I am a man from Cisteiu.”

“Is my mother alive?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Is my brother back?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know anything about my family in Cluj?”

“They are all in good health, they’re waiting for you.”

“Thank you from the bottom of my heart, dear brother, I will never forget you all my life for the good you’ve done today, it's been eight years since I’ve heard anything about them. Tell them I am in good health.”

“Good day, professor, and keep believing in the justice that's going to come,” he added when the train left.

One day in late November, the joy of being together with my distinguished colleague and Petrache Lupu, our good friend, was over, because I was taken to Jilava. I was only dressed in the clothes I had received in the zarcă, and the two shirts and the old underwear, when I received them, were torn. My clothes, which had kept me warm in the zarcă, were still at the Aiud penitentiary, even though I had asked for them when I left .

“Don't worry, you’ll be back here anyway,” said the hurried lieutenant who took me to the penitentiary in Sibiu. He didn't want to lose even five minutes more than he had to.

It was cold and snowing outside, and there was no fire burning in Jilava. I was taken to cell 20, in the fort surrounding its central redoubt. There were two rows of double bunks, one on top of the other, and nineteen inmates were sleeping on them. There were no blankets or mattresses, because the people in the room had their own clothes because they had not been sentenced. Why they put me with the detainees in the fort and not the inmates in the redoubt, I never found out. The next day, however, my new brothers in suffering gathered together all their rags and lined my clothes with them. My good friend, Colonel Petre Petrescu, former director of the ASTRA industrial works, gave me his sweater, because he had a furlined short coat. We were taken out for strolls once a week. I awaited this eagerly in the cold room. It was snowing outside. It was the first walk I had taken outdoors in a year and a half, and the clean air got me almost drunk.

Also in the room I found General Traian Teodorescu, former military attaché in Ankara and deputy chief of staff. He was a scholarly officer with a high temper. His systolic blood pressure was over 270 mm Hg, and later, when it went up to 285, a new kind of instrument had to be built to be able to measure it.

It would have been better if, after Leipzig University, I had gone to Berlin University, to learn more about configuration psychology, Gestaltpsychologie, pioneered by Max Wertheimer and developed by Köhler and Lewin in Berlin, and Koffk a at Smith College in the United States. But, as the object of my trip to Germany was not theoretical psychology but professional orientation, I went to the Psychology Institute of Hamburg University, headed by Professor William Stern, who, with Professor Otto Lippmann, were the main promoters of the psychological- exam-based professional orientation movement. Helmuth Bogen, head of the office for professional orientation in Berlin, author of the best treatise on this important issue of applied psychology, was also Stern's student.

Hamburg University was new, because it was set up at the end of World War I in the building of what had been the institute for colonial studies, serving the German colonial empire. Losing the colonies left it without activity. The chair and director of the institute, Professor Stern, came from the University of Breslau. Also there was Heinz Werner, an associate professor of evolutionary psychology. General psychology was handled by F. Heider, who was then professor at Smith College, where Koffka taught as well. Labor psychology in professional orientation was handled by assistants Rollof and Wunderlich. Stern's personality inspired everyone to enthusiasm, including the students. Krueger was courteous, but very protocol bound. However, Stern was the perfect conversationalist, not only in private but also in the classroom. Krueger and Köhler concentrated on general psychology. Stern granted the same importance to differential psychology, which he founded, as he did to evolutionary psychology, with Werner as his deputy. Stern also dealt with child psychology, which was also studied by Martha Muchow, an incredibly capable assistant. Social psychology proper, as well as mathematical psychology, was handled by P. R. Hofstätter, but only two decades later, when he came to head the institute. During Stern's tenure, the guiding spirit there was based on his personality-centered psychology and on the principle of freedom of thought, which was granted to everyone there. The tradition of this freedom of thinking was preserved by Professor Bondy, Stern's successor to the chair, and also nowadays, under Hofstätter.

After Armand Călinescu was assassinated in September 1939, the king and his acolytes lost their heads, and so they appointed a number of people to the government who, lacking competence and a sense of responsibility, were animated by a single wish: to brownnose the king on the one hand, and to seek Hitler's trust on the other. This servile attitude only increased the king's audacity in doing with our poor country as he pleased. As part of the compact with Molotov, he agree to cede Bessarabia and most of Bukovina, with its capital Cernăuţi (Chernivtsi), which had never been Soviet territory. Ignorant of the secret clauses in this sinister agreement, King Carol's government asked for Germany's help, but the German minister to Bucharest, who knew of the secret agreement, warned that if war broke out, the Soviet Union might occupy Prahova Valley, whose oil the Germans absolutely needed. To get as close as possible to this valley, two months later the Germans imposed the Vienna Award.

“Bless their heads, they moved the border right to the middle of the country,” said a peasant to his companion as we were going by train from Braşov to Teiuş, crossing the new frontier.

Italy's foreign minister Count Ciano insisted that Cluj, the capital of Transylvania, also be ceded, as a reward for the services provided by his cabinet head secretary, Baroness Ovary, of Hungarian origin.

In a speech after meeting with Hitler, Prime Minister Gigurtu had tried to prepare public opinion for the loss of Northern Transylvania, but the new frontiers were a painful surprise even for his foreign minister, M. Manoilescu, who fainted. As he came to his senses, after cold water was sprinkled on his face, he still put his signature on the document, and that evening attended the feast to celebrate the victory of Hitler and Mussolini’s, who were ready to do as they pleased in Europe. Manoilescu was not a man lacking in intelligence, but he lacked the dignity to respond to the drama. However, he did learn that attitude in jail, and he died respected by all around him. Just like Gigurtu, in fact, who didn't once complain of the inhumane conditions in the Communist jails. In the end they proved they were men, but only after seeing the living example set by most of the other brothers in struggle and suffering.

After six months of zarcă I got taken to Jilava once again. This time they gave me cold food for the road: half a kilo of bread, fifty grams of fatback and fifty grams of marmalade. Right after I climbed on the coach at five in the afternoon, I started feasting, because I had once again lost weight in the zarcă. Later that morning I would be in Bucharest, I told myself, starving as I was. To my dismay, the coach turned from Deva to Petroşani to pick up more detainees. From Petroşani we returned to Sibiu through Deva, then Făgăraş, then Bucharest, which we reached only after three days and three nights. It was ten degrees below outside, but in the coach I had stripped down to my shirt, because it was filled with over 120 inmates, mostly nonpolitical, who had bread and fatback in their packages from home. Their head was a man around sixty, Zsigmond Baci, who was condemned to forced labor for life for a string of murders. With such a conviction, his authority was full and uncontested. Especially since he had a strong fist. He got food for me from the others, as if it was his.

“Eat, professor, you are weak,” he told me after he found out who I was. To keep me company, he told me stories of his life, which was the spitting image of Valjean's from Hugo's Les Miserables.

The Communist authorities, unlike the bourgeois ones, did not take pity on him and, as I found out later, he died in prison.

In Făgăraş, they put five policemen from the former regime into the coach. They were the only category of political prisoners who got parcels from home and cigarettes once a month. During the day they could sometimes leave their rooms. What was the reason for this difference in treatment? It was never known.

We arrived at the Interior Ministry after four o’clock. We were taken in through the entrance opposite Hotel Excelsior, where the Information Bureau is now. The clerks at the gate signed the papers, and the secret service agents, who belonged to the presidency of the Council of Ministers, left. Titel Petrescu and I were invited to have a seat on the chairs against the wall of the courtyard and wait. To our left and right they put two agents who prevented passersby from talking to us.

“I think they’re going to let us go home,” Titel Petrescu said.

“I don't think so, Mr. President,” I said. As evidence, I told him the business with the ghost government dictated by Burdea, in which Titel Petrescu was minister of foreign affairs.

“But that's ridiculous, I never admitted to that. I said I don't know you or Mr. Popp. In fact, they only showed me your statements, not Popp’s, which proves that he didn't admit it either. I knew from barrister Rădulescu (administrative director at Reşita Company and member of the Social Democratic Party) that Mr. Popp was gravely ill and I ask myself if he is still alive. Then, even if he had admitted it (Popp didn't admit anything, because, being gravely ill, they couldn't beat him), the statements of the accused, unconfirmed by witnesses and material evidence, have no weight in court. It is a cheap affair, tied together with weak string. Such stupidity could only come from the mind of Burdea, who is a complete idiot.”

“What worries me very much, Mr. President, is the fact that the secret service submits a daily report on these investigations to the prime minister and others in the government and party, and Groza, who knows that the second meal was held at his request, has not intervened.”

“This is very sad, and raises suspicions. God, oh God, what is happening to us? I took part in the second International Congress of the Socialist Party in Paris, when we sang the International, dedicated to human rights and freedom, for the first time. And now look what is happening to us. I think there are almost 100,000 people in prison.

I took my graduation exam after three years; my very good grades meant I could spend the fourth year exempt from attendance requirements.

I signed up for my PhD right away, with the intention of conducting research on the thesis proposed by Professor Goangă on the effects of practice on individual differences in skill development.

I worked on my thesis eight to ten hours a day, because the professor asked me to finish it as quickly as possible so that I could go to Germany to look into new labs and professional selection and orientation, which our Ministry of Labor wanted to introduce into our country as well. My thesis research, as well as its printing, were underwritten by the ministry.

In Germany I was to go to the professional orientation offices in big cities— Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Leipzig—and the psychology labs of the railway system in Berlin, Dresden, and Munich. Professor Goangă recommended I go to the railway lab in Dresden, which was led by a former colleague of his from Wundt Laboratories, then to Leipzig, the Mecca of psychology, where he had studied. Then I could decide which centers I would go to, and in what order.

I stepped into Wundt's psychology lab feeling quite emotional. For four decades, that lab was not only the main center for psychology in Germany, but the entire world. The development of psychology as an experimental science had also occurred there, under Wundt's methodological and theoretical direction, built on the model of physics and physiology developed by Helmholtz, whose student he had been. His three-volume treatise on physiological psychology is inspired by the theory and methodology of those sciences, which, in his view, psychology had to imitate in order to become a scientific discipline itself. This was a place of apprenticeship not only for Stanley Hall and John McCattell, who set up the first psychology labs in the United States, but also for Charles Spearman, who set up the one in London; it represented the same thing for professors Motru and Goangă, as well as for Gusti, Neniţescu, Toronţiu, and Topciu.

At the Congress for the Progress of Science at the World's Fair, I met Professor C. Spearman of the University of London, founder of simple factor analysis, which Professor Thurstone developed into multiple factor analysis. At the dinner offered by Thurstone in honor of the distinguished professor from London—to which I was invited—my teacher from Chicago asked if, considering that I had started working on my paper about the mathematical analysis of psychological factors, it wouldn't be a good idea to study for a month or two with Professor Spearman. The venerable professor from London agreed, and in late June 1934, after I finished my work with Thurstone, I went back to New York to tell Stacy May of my plan. He agreed, but, as my second year of scholarship ended in July, he told me that if my studies with Professor Spearman could not be concluded within a month, then I should apply for a research grant from the foundation's Paris office, to which he wrote in any case.

Stacy May also showed me a letter from Professor Goangă, who was concerned that I might stay to teach at Columbia or Duke. This would indicate, wrote Professor Goangă, that the Rockefeller Foundation does not prepare its scholarship recipients for their profession in their country of origin, but for American universities, toward which they are partial. He said that had he known this, he would have never given me two years’ leave for my scholarship.

I had received a similar letter after I asked for his opinion regarding professors McDougall and Thorndike's proposal. In that letter, I specified that by no means did I consider staying in the United States for good because neither my wife's parents nor mine would agree to it, and my wife and I did not wish to upset them. For this reason I meant to stay on for only a few years until I could take up a similar position at Cluj University—because the salary that I expected at Cluj was modest, insufficient for raising a family.

America lives, I would say, under the sign of three “religions”: one is that of a population without academic studies, the second is the predominantly scientific and progressive ideology of the universities, and the third is democracy, which reflects on the first two and with which it is closely interconnected.

In terms of religion strictly, America's population lives as countless denominations and sects, one of them being that of Christian science. These denominations and sects are not divided by theological disputes, but by ethical understanding, as the great writer George Bernard Shaw put it. Hence the spirit of tolerance and mutual understanding which characterizes them. Hence also the spirit of Christian love toward those less fortunate, who are constantly helped by numerous charitable contributions.

In virtue of the same wide tolerance issuing from their shared interest in social ethics, not theological discussions, university churches are not simply exponents of their denominations but also exponents of other denominations and sects, which also have their own students, no matter how few.

The university church also hosts science conferences with a large audience, larger than fits in the university amphitheaters. The lecture held by Professor Eddington from Cambridge University on the expansion of the universe was attended in the University of Chicago church by over three thousand people.

Even more impressive is the democratic mutual understanding in scientific debates in universities. With its pragmatic spirit, American science does not emphasize the theories that divide it, but the methodology that unites it. In Contemporary German Psychology I analyzed over fifteen different schools. America had a single school, Watson's behaviorism. It lost its adepts quickly, and most psychologists started studying extrospective behavior, completed by the introspective study of the conscious and unconscious promoted by German psychology, especially psychoanalysis. After Hitler came to power, the United States was the preferred destination for adepts of psychoanalysis, both of Semitic origin and of Aryan origin, as they said in those unfortunate times. In virtue of this inclination toward empirical, fact-based research methodology, America was only divided on the great issues, and was not divided by schools. Schools in psychology, sociology, economics, and sociocultural anthropology were left to Europe, which afterward—under the shadow of American methodology, which it borrowed—started to disappear from the Old Continent.

After the second Christmas I spent in Jilava, I was taken to the Interior Ministry detention area again for two weeks, during which I was asked to prepare the organization of the work of detainees at the Canal. From ministry detention, of course.

“I don't see what kind of work I can organize from here in terms of digging with a spade,” I answered. “Under these conditions, I am afraid I might end up prosecuted for sabotage too.”

A year or two later, that's exactly what happened to four of the six detainee engineers who had managed the work there. As digging the canal was progressing slowly because the detainees were weak with hunger and had no strength in them, the engineers were accused of sabotage, given a death sentence, and executed.

“But engineer Popp,” the ministry officer told me, “agreed to manage the steelworks in Reşita from here, in the ministry.”

“That's his business,” I answered. “Steelwork is something else, and Popp is an expert with deep experience.”

I got sent to Jilava once again, but right after the third Christmas I spent in Jilava, therefore in 1952, I was brought back to the ministry, where the same officer told me, “We’re sending Popp and you back to Aiud Penitentiary, where there's a factory with twenty-five hundred detainee workers. In the technical office at the factory you’ll find engineers Manciu and Ioan, plus the other directors from Reşita: Rădulescu, Radoveanu, and Roiescu. Popp and you will be in charge of reducing the amount of waste and increasing product quality without decreasing output. I believe we need to set up an apprenticeship course for a maximum of four months, where the detainees can learn one trade or another. After all, there are as many trades as in Reşiţa there, and almost the same, I am sure.”

I agreed with this new proposal, and the next morning I was taken to a bus and put into one of the booths alone.

After my civil trial in Bucharest was over, months passed, but I wasn't taken to Aiud. I wasn't sorry, even if the living conditions in Jilava were much worse. However, we had new detainees coming in almost daily. A prisoner doesn't live only on the wretched food he gets but also on the news from the outside, which make him feel less trapped. Without such scraps of news, the jails became veritable graves, where the feeling of belonging to the outside world was killed.

Toward the end of summer, a group of us detainees was taken out of our rooms. We had been convicted for high treason, and were taken to the penitentiary in Piteşti. Here we were welcomed with a lot of threats, but we weren't physically abused.

“A big shot needs to be shot, hit in the head, you need to drive a tank over him.” This enthusiastic person was Captain Mândreş, head of the jail, a former metal worker at the railroad workshops in Craiova. By his speech and gestures, though, he seemed more Gypsy than Oltenian. That night we slept on the cement in the room in the basement, which was our quarantine, not for proper sanitary measures, but in order to curb the enthusiasm we had come from Jilava with.

“This is my Academy,” Mândreş continued to clamor, “and you only leave it for the grave, you big shot bastards, ‘cause you’ve had a really good life until now. Hit ‘em over the head so they know where they are,” he told the guards who were searching us, not forgetting to check the place where the rectum evacuates.

Meanwhile, they were taking down our names and data, when the name of aviation Captain C. Agarici was heard. When he heard it, Mândreş started, left us alone, and headed toward him.

“Looky here! Agarici, who hunts Bolsheviks, you’ve made it to my academy?”

“The one with the song is my cousin, captain sir, it's not me,” said Costel Agarici, one of the gentlest and kindest men I’ve met.

The first psychology courses in our country were held by Titu Maiorescu at his department of philosophy and logic. Aside from his unsurpassed treatise on logic, he also published the study On Experience, where he uses not only French and German but also English reference material. The study contributes some personal observations, which are still useful now due to their original nature on the one hand, and due to their positivist methodology on the other. In both logic and psychology, Maiorescu was obviously influenced by John Stuart Mill, even though he studied philosophy and law in France and Germany. The influence of German philosophy is evident in his literary criticism and aesthetics articles, which are the masterpieces of his life.

The credit for introducing and systematically promoting scientific psychology into our country belongs to Constantin Rădulescu-Motru, who did his undergraduate thesis with Maiorescu, and his PhD with Wundt, with a philosophy dissertation on Kant's theory on physical causality. The dissertation was published in Wundt's journal, Philosophische Studien, and got a favorable review from H. Bergson in his Matter and Memory. Coming back to our country in 1896, Rădulescu-Motru was appointed senior lecturer at Maiorescu's philosophy department, teaching mostly psychology. In 1898 he published Problems in Psychology, where he defended the need to institute psychology as an exact science, modeled after the natural sciences, an idea promoted by Wundt and supported by Maiorescu. Two years later, his philosophy seat was turned into a psychology department, and Rădulescu-Motru became the first head of a psychology department in our country. As such, he published Power of the Spirit in 1908, and in 1922 his Course in Psychology, which is a synthesis of his lectures in theoretical psychology taught over two decades.

Professor Rădulescu-Motru's treatise is very well constructed, with bibliographical references in German and French running up to the year right before the year of publication. The only references to English and American psychology, however, are from a few works translated into French and German. He mentions psychoanalysis with obvious skepticism.

He did argue for building psychology as a scientific discipline, with an empirical and even experimental character, but without proceeding to put this program into practice.

Freed from serfdom, the Transylvanian serfs started purchasing small plots of land to patch together their own households and no longer be forced to work on the lands of the grafs and barons, which they had been serving almost as thralls. Sometimes a village or two's worth of people associated to buy a part of their former masters’ land, masters who had lost entire estates overnight in card games. This happened to Baron Wesselenyi in my village, Obreja, close to where the river Târnava flows into the Mureş. At the river crossing you find Mihalţ, where the 1848 revolution broke out, which was also fought over owning land.

Toward the end of the century, however, land purchases by Romanian peasants had increased so much that the House of Magnates deemed it necessary to issue the law of preemption, under which the land holdings of a graf or baron could be sold to Romanians only if the state refused to purchase it. In practice, enforcing this law was not very efficient, since the state back then did not dabble in agriculture, and Hungarian buyers were few and far between. However, the Hungarian grafs and barons who were selling them were many.

In time, the wealthier peasants started here and there to send a child to school to make them not only teachers or priests who would enlighten the community but also doctors or lawyers, to defend their health and justice. It is true that the number of these peasant children sent to school was very small. In my village, for instance, my paternal grandfather's brother went, and he became a priest. In the next generation, two young people went, and they became teachers. Of my generation, I was the only one to go. Today, however, there are almost a hundred of them.

Romanian high schools were also few and far between under Hungarian rule. A high school in Blaj, a second in Braşov, and a third in Năsăud. Then there was a four-year gymnasium in Beiuş, and another in Brad. And now there are a hundred! The difference is too great for its significance to need any commentary. Now rulers in their own country, Romanian peasants toiled not only to own land and set up beautiful households but also to send their children to school to make them “gentlemen.”

The purpose of the two friendship associations with the United States was better mutual knowledge for peaceful cooperation. Getting to know the United States better was made possible by the association libraries—where the public could find American books and magazines—and by the conferences held by the members of the two associations on American history and its literary, scientific, and cultural realities. Our knowledge of contemporary history and realities was advanced by the books we had on offer and by discussions with the members of the American mission to Romania during their visits, and with visiting American citizens at the Association.

ARLUS had the same purpose and function as any association of friendship with a foreign country nowadays, except now they are kept and guided by the State. State management, of course, provides more possibilities than private initiatives, but it also has the flaw of bureaucracy, which private companies, set up with the participation of enthusiastic citizens, don't have. Official relations between states are conducted by the Foreign Ministry, which has cultural attachés in more important legations. Unfortunately, in most cases these positions were handed out as sinecures for the relatives of political bosses. This was true both in the past and today, since political regimes change, but people don’t.

As part of the first cycle of conferences in Sibiu, inaugurated after Christmas, Professor Borza spoke about the activities of some Romanian-American citizens, such as General Pomuţiu during the War of Independence. The second conference was held by the writer of these lines, about Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president of the United States. The large hall in the Sibiu prefecture building was packed for both lectures, especially mine. That was because of the topic, since at that moment President Roosevelt was the supreme symbol of his country. In my discussion of the background to the present moment, I related how President Woodrow Wilson, following the First World War, had worked to create the League of Nations and to have the United States join it. In the presidential election season of 1920, the Democratic candidates for president and vice-president, James M. Cox and Franklin D. Roosevelt, respectively, pressed Wilson to change his position on the United States joining the League. They argued that otherwise the Republican Party, which opposed membership, might win the elections.

Indeed, ten days after the inspector's visit, one afternoon, Popp and I were taken to the penitentiary head office. They shackled us. Another chain linked my right wrist to Popp's left. We got into a jeep with two Securitate sergeants and a lieutenant major.

“Don't try to run, we’ll shoot you on the spot,” said the lieutenant.

“You must be joking, lieutenant,” I said. “But let us hope you won't shoot us right away.” The fact that we were in chains was reason not to worry, because under those conditions we could not be accused of trying to escape.

We arrived in Sibiu after seven o’clock, but instead of being put into cells, we were left in the care of a guard in the holding area duty room. We asked for dinner, to which we were entitled.

“But you’re not registered for a meal,” said the lieutenant. “You’ll just have to put up with it,” he added. “I can go two or three days without eating anything.”

“When we were at our normal weight we could too. But now, as you see, we’ve lost almost half our weight, we’re just bones and skin.”

“I wasn't the one who put you in jail,” the lieutenant replied.

“That's besides the point, we have the right to dinner.”

“Fine,” he told the guard, “see if there's anything left in the kitchen.”

The guard returned with a single tin dish full of potatoes.

“That's quite a lot you brought,” the lieutenant said.

“There's a lot left over, comrade lieutenant.”

“Well, yes, but the left overs go to the pigs,” he replied.

“There plenty left for them too, comrade lieutenant.”

Each detention or penitentiary had a few pigs, fed on stuff taken from the inmates. The pigs were not slaughtered for the inmates, though; they were for the supervision and management personnel. Aiud, for instance, had twenty-five to thirty pigs, and the head screw came in during every meal to make sure enough was set aside for them. Often, the portion for the pigs was larger than what was distributed among the inmates.

Columbia University back then had thirty-six thousand students. Today it has over sixty thousand. It was—and is—the largest university in the United States. Living up to the superlative the greatest in the world was an obsession not only for President Butler of Columbia, a former professor of philosophy at that same institution, but also for the whole of America.

In addition to the the four usual sections of a European university—letters, science, law, and medicine—Columbia also had economics, polytechnics, fine arts, music, and drama. It covered, in fact, all of higher education. The faculty was, of course, huge. It had one instructor for every twenty students.

At Columbia University, the experts in personality psychology were Gardner Murphy from the psychology department and Percival Symonds and Goodwin Watson from the Teachers College. The supreme authority on the psychology of education was Professor E. L. Thorndike. Professor Woodworth from the psychology department was about as well known. Also, of course, there was Professor John Dewey from the philosophy department, who was not only the greatest authority in American philosophy at that time but also a world authority in education, whose principles of social labor were applied all over the world.

Gardner Murphy, the same age as Allport, thirty-six, had published not only the best experimental social psychology in collaboration with his wife and with Newcomb, a young collaborator, but also Approaches to Personality, in which he very competently analyzed Freud's psychoanalysis, Jung's analytical psychology, Adler's individual psychology, Pierre Janet's behavioral psychology, Kretschmer's biotypology, and the psychobiology of Adolf Meyer and his students, Sullivan and Plant. He also studied in Europe, not for too long, but he was fluent in German and French, which was fairly rare in the United States. Symonds and Watson, for instance, used only English-language bibliography in their works, and they knew German and French psychology only from translations, which were very few. A few years after Allport's personality psychology, Murphy published his treatise as well, which was published in several editions. The treatise was a synthesis of American psychology, while Allport's was a synthesis of American and German psychology.

Right after my postdoctoral exam—which coincided with Liviu Rusu’s—I worked up my courage and told Professor Goangă I was planning to apply for a Rockefeller Foundation scholarship to study the above mentioned issues in England and America.

“But that foundation grants scholarships only for medical school,” the professor told me, “and so far only physicians have gone.”

“Since 1926 the Rockefeller Foundation has widened its program, and they are now granting scholarships for all sciences,” I said. “In Germany I met some of their grantees who were doing psychology.”

“And what would you like to study?”

“Personality psychology and its new experimental and psychometric methodology,” I answered, keeping silent on the matter of clinical methodology with logical qualitative interpretation.

“It would be better if you studied character examination tests published by Hartshorne and May in their Studies in Deceit, which was very impressive.”

I myself had drawn my teacher's attention to the three volumes published by my future professors, in order to prepare him to accept my proposal.

“Fine, Mărgineanu, I have nothing against it,” he said, finally, “but I’m afraid you’re clutching at shadows.”

“I believe I will be recommended by my professors in Germany, by Stern in any case “That would surely help you a lot.”

I learned the procedure for obtaining a Rockefeller scholarship while in Germany. It had two stages: one for screening the applications, the other for granting the scholarships.

As a result, I sent the Rockefeller Foundation social sciences department in Paris my application, with my studies and papers, and the names of professors Stern, Köhler, and Goangă. In addition, the foundation consulted its handpicked experts. The foundation resorted to my references only if they were fully established experts in the science. The candidate would not know whether or not they had been consulted, because their response to the foundation was confidential. But, as the recommendation of experts I had proposed was favorable, professors Stern and Köhler were kind enough to send me a copy of their recommendations, to which they added their wishes for success.