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In a book about the sociopolitical and cultural context of psychoanalysis, Steiner (2000) wrote:
Refugees were in conflict not only with the indigenous members of the American Association, but also those who had come to America during the early 1930s, in the first emigration wave—just think of all those I have just mentioned: Brill, Federn, Lewin,1 Rado, Schilder, and so many others … Jews in conflict with other Jews. Human nature never changes, one might comment, and what this reveals is that, when circumstances of a certain kind arise, there is more than a grain of truth in the old dictum, homo, homini, lupus. [p. 170N]
The above-quoted Latin adage, loosely translated, is reflective of philosopher Thomas Hobbes's deeply pessimistic view of human nature (i.e., “every man is a wolf to every other man”). While the maxim was also a favorite of Freud's, the mutually destructive predilections voiced by Steiner about refugee psychoanalysts disembarking in America after the first third of the twentieth century is disheartening. That some were “Jews in conflict with other Jews” is incontrovertible, but Steiner's inclusion of Lewin in this context seems, at the very least, not to tell the whole story.