In the 1920s, the practice of psychotechnic eligibility assessments took hold in sci- entific discourse (cf., e.g., also Métraux, 1985). If one overlooks the relationships within the German-speaking world, roughly two theoretical models can be distin- guished: (1) a “technological model” (Staeuble, 1990), according to which practical psychologists should contribute to the solution of given problems, set by commerce and industry or the military, and (2) a model—predominantly represented by psy- chologists working within a university context—in which the subjective moment and, therefore, to some extent, the assertion of individual emancipatory pursuit against capitalist reification were taken into consideration. The disputes within Austria show that this difference does not coincide with the differentiation between
“industrial psychotechnic” used in large firms and psychological eligibility assess- ments applied within the context of public career counseling. In Austria, both the technological and personal models were competing within the same institutional field: appointing high school graduates to apprentice positions and appointing unqualified labor force to qualification measures. However, like in Germany the question of purpose was closely connected to the question of the quality of psy- chotechnic eligibility assessment methods.
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To combat the mass unemployment after the war ended, industrial regional commis- sions (Industrielle Bezirkskommissionen) were installed at the federal level. Equally divided between employer and employee representatives, they were to organize the implementation and development of the unemployment insurance and particularly the employment agency. In 1926, a psychotechnic institute was established by the Industrial District Commission of Vienna under the leadership of Karl Hackl (cf.
Hackl-Grümm, 2015).10 At first, the central task was implementing eligibility assess- ments within the context of retraining or additional training. In order to ground their work in scientific approaches, the institute entered into a working collaboration with Arnold Durig, the Chairman of Psychology at the University of Vienna.11 Apparently at first, interest also lay in diagnosing and treating mental disorders, presumably under the influence of former Freud student Fritz Wittels,12 who participated in the
10 For the following cf. Tauber (2002).
11 On Arnold Durig cf. Benetka and Fallend (2002).
12 Wittels was a member of the Psychologischen Mittwoch-Gesellschaft from 1906 to 1910. Due to his polemic against Karl Kraus, he left the Freud circle and after the war joined Wilhelm Stekel, from whom Freud had distanced himself in 1912. In the middle of the 1920s, Wittels approached Freudian psychoanalysis once again and joined in 1927 the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association.
On Wittels cf. Reichmayr (1992) and Timms (1995).
early years of the institute. Contacts to the psychiatric-neurological university clinic also provided free occupational therapeutic treatment. Hackl and Durig planned the buildup of a big “Institute for Ergonomics” comparable to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Labor Psychology (Kaiser Wilhelm Institut für Arbeitsphysiologie) in Berlin, which would also include university psychology as well. Karl Bühler appeared to be quite interested; he established a psychotechnic traineeship at his institute and allowed two dissertations to be supervised at the Durig Institute.
However, in a more formally committed collaboration, he requested quite funda- mental conditions, particularly that the selected staff would guarantee the scientific standards of the applied psychotechnic procedures. The Ergonomic Institute never came into being; in its place was the founding of an umbrella organization to pro- mote scientific collaboration within the field of psychotechnic. In his absence, Karl Bühler’s wife was part of the proponent committee of the Austrian Labor Organization for Psychotechnics (Österreichischen Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Psychotechnik). In the following years, Bühler was a board representative (Benetka, 1995).
In mid-1927, the Psychotechnic Institute of the Industrial District Commission of Vienna (Industriellen Bezirkskommission) relocated to the so-called Seilerstätte in downtown Vienna. Eligibility assessments for apprentices were increasingly con- ducted here, competing with the municipal vocational counseling office. Until approximately 1931, roughly 17,000 examinations took place—in only a few years, the Psychotechnic Institute had become the largest psychotechnic facility within Austria. Approximately half of all examinations were mandated by the Industrial District Commission; the remaining were conducted on behalf of public institutions and private enterprises.
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In the years to follow, Ichheiser began fighting against the Pyrotechnic Institute’s implementation of pyrotechnic eligibility assessments led by Hackl, who was deemed naïve and uncritical. Ichheiser’s annual reports (1930a, 1931a) suggest he was primar- ily interested not only in evaluating whether the assessments were even appropriate but also in the development of assessment methods that would take into account the indi- vidual’s unique characteristics. The underlying assumption of the image of man inher- ent to psychotechnic was also questioned: the uncritical orientation of psychological examination toward—from the subjects’ viewpoint—heteronomous purposes and the ethically problematic exploitation of psychotechnic in the interest of economic ratio- nalization. Eventually, the scientific controversy escalated. Ichheiser openly criticized Hackl’s scientific integrity, and when Hackl sued Ichheiser, the Labor Organization for Psychotechnics (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Psychotechnik) supported Hackl.
Ichheiser fought a losing battle from the start. The political conditions had fundamentally changed. In March 1933, the Dolfuß government disabled parlia- mentary democracy and started dismantling facilities governed by the Red Vienna.
The Vienna Vocational Counselling Bureau was dissolved, staff and inventory were incorporated into the state employment agency of the Psychotechnic Institute, and Ichheiser lost his job.
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What was extraordinary about Ichheiser, what set him apart from his opponents, was his theoretical foundational interest of his activities as occupational psycholo- gist within a general psychology. His work on vocational counseling is thus not simply the work of a “practitioner,” but rather that of a psychologist conducting scientific research and participating explicitly in the scientific discourse of his dis- cipline. The phenomenological psychology for which Ichheiser broadly argued leans on Brentano. Occasionally, he refers to Husserl, but he does not mention any- where his thoughts on phenomenology. Rather, a psychologist interested in descrip- tive psychology arrives at his insights simply through intuition and consideration.
This explains the sometimes-apodictic style of Ichheiser’s elaborations. Empirical presentation in the conventional sense is—in Brentano’s tradition—the subject of genetic psychology. In principle, the descriptive clarification of basic concepts should come before every research. Many shortcomings of outdated psychology can be traced back to this: it has confused, mostly even mistaken, the objectives of descriptive psychology with those of genetic psychology (Benetka, 1999, 2017).
Ichheiser’s work was printed in the then leading journals of scientific psychology and emerging sociology within the German-speaking world. His writing was a proud voice, especially when tackling problems of his practical vocational work, contrary to most of his colleagues within the field of psychotechnic, always from a considerably higher point of observation, namely, from the point of academic science.
Rudmin, Trimpop, Kryl, and Boski (1987), who rediscovered and accordingly particularly appreciated Ichheiser’s early German work, have outlined those fields of social psychology in which the autodidact Ichheiser anticipated issues and ideas that partly came to be established later as self-evident decades in advance: the entire field of what later became known as attribution psychology, central questions of prejudice research, hence a theoretical consequence of what became known as cog- nitive schemes, the issue of automatic thinking (in Ichheiser’s work “instinctive” or
“natural-naïve” interpretation; cf. e.g., Ichheiser, 1934, pp. 132–133), those issues we subsume today under the concept of image building (Ichheiser, 1928b)—and this long before Goffman’s conclusion that we all constantly perform theater—and, lastly, in respect to methodology, the phenomenon of the effect of the experimenter (Versuchsleitereffekt) (1930c) and many more.
It is important to note how consistently Ichheiser anchored practical relevant problems in his theoretical psychology or the other way around—how he deduced them from psychological theory to start with. We can try to outline this below very briefly. Ichheiser’s two most important works on phenomenological psychology can serve as a starting point to exemplify this: the essay on the “socially shared” and
“individually” given contents and their meaning in the structure of consciousness (Über die “gemeinsam” und die “individuell” gegebenen Inhalte und ihre Bedeutung im Aufbau des Bewusstseins; Ichheiser, 1927b) and the essay on “being”
and “appearing” (Über “Sein” und “Erscheinen”; Ichheiser, 1928a). The relevant inventory of concepts for a complete set of later works on the concept of deception is first outlined here: the difference between the directly given and the indirectly
known, the distinction between object and subject consciousness (Gegenstands - und Zustandsbewusstsein), the perception of the other as you-consciousness (Du-Bewusstsein), the social psychological opening, the you-consciousness as part of the collectively shared objective consciousness, the pointing out of how and why the you-consciousness of the others forms the own self-consciousness, etc.
From all this, then, we turn toward the epistemological and with it the prepara- tion for the turn toward the practical. His essay Exploration of the psychic life as a task and the problem of “illusion” (Die Erforschung des Seelenlebens als Aufgabe und das Problem der “Täuschung”, Ichheiser, 1928c) differentiates between the directly experienced and the developing of the experienced into a (social) psychol- ogy of self-deception. Many methodological problems of the earlier psychology may be derived from the fact that the value of the social cognitive which psycho- logically caused difficulties for the—as Ichheiser calls it—“transposition” of the experienced into the known was not taken into account accordingly, then applying this concept to the practical problem of psychological assessment of others.
Ichheiser’s 1930 essay anticipates much of the later contributions to the psychology of attribution, particularly, however, to the psychology of misattribution, e.g., the notion that, through the understanding of the other, what is incomprehensible in principle is squeezed into a “formal context of comprehension”—an early indica- tion of what is known today as the fundamental attribution error (Jones & Harris, 1967). In this context, a work from the prior year (Ichheiser 1929a, 1929b) is impor- tant. Here Ichheiser warns how easily one is inclined to extrapolate in the assess- ment of people from individual and observable aspects of people’s life management to their overall personality.
In 1930, his first book is published, Critique of Success (Kritik des Erfolges;
Ichheiser, 1930b), and encompasses a theme that had been on his mind since the early studies of Machiavelli. “Successful,” according to Ichheiser, are those ready to break with “social norms.”13 From the decoupling of “success” from “performance”
arises the ambiguity of the term productivity (Tüchtigkeit) (Ichheiser, 1931b)—and thereof an approach to the critique of the concept of eligibility in psychotechnic:
But if someone wanted to assert that the “really productive” … understands the access to an adequate … position, the following would have to be answered: 1. In an economically rationalized society, as ours is, in which the money (and other privileges) mean so terribly much, the talent so terribly little, this will only be possible in rare cases. …. 2. In those cases, however, in which this employment conquest of a position really takes place, it is almost never due to the “productivity-oriented,” but almost always due to the “success- oriented” qualities. (Ichheiser, 1931b, p. 87)14
13 Or the ones that can afford to break with social norms due to their social situation.
14 Translated from the German: “Wollte aber jemand behaupten, dass der, wirklich Tüchtige, sich […] den Zugang zu einer angemessen [….] Stellung zu bahnen versteht, so wäre darauf folgendes zu erwidern: 1. In einer ökonomisch derart rationalisierten Gesellschaft, wie es die unsere ist, in der das Geld (und andere Privilegien) so furchtbar viel, die Begabung so furchtbar wenig bedeutet, wird dies nur in seltenen Fällen möglich sein; [….] 2. In jenen Fällen aber, in denen diese person- albedingte Eroberung einer Stellung wirklich erfolgt, ist sie fast nie den ‘leistungstüchtigen’, sondern fast immer den ‘erfolgstüchtigen’ Eigenschaften zu verdanken” (Ibid., p. 87).
Precisely it is this differentiation between the actually achieved and the produc- tivity of which the conventional psychotechnic knows nothing: “It has certainly seen only the technical performance of the profession and has left the specifically sociological almost completely misunderstood”15 (pp. 465–466). Without a doubt, the skills and behavioral abilities (Fähigkeiten und Verhaltenskönnungen), as the psychotechnic measures them, are vocationally relevant, just as performance-based
“depth-psychological” features (e.g., “persistence, endurance, diligence, reliability”
but also “occupational psychological reactive dispositions”): if someone prefers to work independently rather than in a group, then “the compulsory inclusion in group work” will mean “a severe psychological strain“ (Ichheiser, 1929b, p. 463); how- ever, factors must be considered that are not directly related to the performance aspect (the “social value of the image” (soziale Eindruckswert) (e.g., beauty or like- able appearance) and the “vocational ability for success” (berufliche Erfolgstüchtigkeit) (everything someone does to “market” oneself as well as possi- ble). This is what precisely remains fully neglected within traditional psychotech- nic. Wrongfully so, as Ichheiser writes, especially regarding prestigious occupations, because the higher “an occupation ranks in the social hierarchy,” the bigger and more crucial the relative share of these “artificial” personality traits unrelated to performance usually are (Ichheiser, 1929b, pp. 469–470). As Ichheiser points out,
“‘Productive’ is the one who knows how to behave in order to be perceived as productive”16 (Ichheiser, 1929b, p. 470).