| Harry Slochower | |
| Birth Name: | Hersch Zloczower |
| Birth Date: | 1 September 1900 |
| Birth Place: | Bukowina, Austro-Hungarian Empire |
| Death Place: | Brooklyn, New York, U.S. |
| Education: |
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Harry Slochower (born Hersch Zloczower; September 1, 1900 – May 11, 1991) was an Austrian-American scholar, literary critic, philosopher and psychoanalyst.
Slochower was born Hersch Zloczower in Bukowina, formerly part of Austria 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.[1] [2] Slochower grew up in the Bronx and studied philosophy and German at the City College of New York, graduating in 1923.[3] He also studied at the universities of Berlin, Munich and Heidelberg, before receiving his PhD from Columbia for a book on Richard Dehmel.[4] Slochower was made a Guggenheim Fellow in 1929 for his study on the "infiltration of Schopenhauer's pessimism into German literature".[5]
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 invoked the Fifth Amendment, refusing to answer a Congressional committee whether he was a member of the Communist Party. He was fired from his teaching post and 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.
Slochower died at the age of 90, in Brooklyn.
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.