Lawrence Kelso Frank

Background

He was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of August A. Frank, a prosperous retail grocer, and Grace Kelso.

Education

He received a B. A. in economics from Columbia in 1912.

Career

He first worked as a systems analyst for the New York Telephone Company. During World War I he worked for the War Industries Board in Washington, D. C.

In 1923, Frank made a fateful shift to foundation work, a change that had significa nce not only for his own career but for the emerging field of the behavioral sciences.

He was first associated with the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (1923 - 1930).

Frank's primary interest during these years was in the field of human development, with special emphasis on infancy and adolescence. He was a prolific writer whose work ranged from chatty and informal columns on child-rearing and family relationships, to erudite and provocative essays for professional journals and abstract theoretical discussions of human development, the interaction of culture and personality, methodology, and testing techniques. His style was as varied as his subject matter.

Thus, his works include Babies Are Puppies, Puppies Are Babies (1953); How to Be a Woman (1954), coauthored with his wife Mary; and such substantial works as Nature and Human Nature (1951) and Feelings and Emotions (1954). In 1947, Frank shared the Lasker Award with Catherine MacKenzie of the New York Times for his contribution to popular adult education in mental health, especially parent-child relations.

Certainly he expanded and enriched the role of the foundation both in research and in the implementation of new ideas in social theory. He subsidized research and writing projects, child-study groups, and experimental nursery schools as well. The line between Frank's professional and personal life was vague. His country house, Coventry, on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, became the center of the lively and productive Holderness intellectual community, among whose members were the sociologists Helen and Robert Lynd; the psychologists Ruth Munroe, John Levy, Lois and Gardiner Murphy, and Dorothy Fisher; the anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson; the psychoanalyst Peter Blos; and the educator Harold Taylor.

In 1955, Frank retired from the Caroline Zachry Institute and moved to Melmont, Massachussets He lectured at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and continued to write until his death. Ironically, Frank is remembered less for his prolific output than for his stimulating, critical and widely acknowledged effect on his peers.

Achievements

• Frank became a professional generalist, with interests encompassing psychology, sociology, anthropology, culture, and politics. He was interested as well in the assessment of intelligence and personality and in new tools (such as the Rorschach test) that were evolving to achieve this. He was also involved in the work of Ruth Benedict, Caroline Zachry, Lloyd Warner, and John Dollard. He converted friends into colleagues and colleagues into friends. His house in Greenwich Village in New York City was a center for shoptalk and an informal commune in which Margaret Mead and her daughter, who was often left in the care of the Franks, lived for many years.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Feelings and Emotions

    (Doubleday Papers In Psychology, No. 3.)

  • Society as the patient;: Essays on culture and personality (Essay and general literature index reprint series)

    (Book by Frank, Lawrence Kelso)

  • Nature and human nature;: Man's new image of himself

    (Book by Frank, Lawrence Kelso)

  • On the Importance of Infancy,

    (rare)

  • Society as the Patient: Essays on Culture and Personality

Views

He was one of the first to discuss projective testing and was a pioneer in the interdisciplinary approach to personality studies and a valued collaborator with many of the liveliest minds of his day in the social sciences. He not only was privy to the new thinking in many fields but was a catalyst in their interaction. His role of intellectual guru was enhanced by his creativity as a powerful foundation director with an ability to channel funds into the various projects he believed in.

Membership

Later he became a member of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund (1930 - 1931); the General Education Board (1931 - 1936); the Josiah Macy, Jr. , Foundation (1936 - 1942); and the Caroline Zachry Institute of Human Development (1945 - 1950).

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• As Margaret Mead put it, "He used foundations in the way the Lord meant them to be used. "
  
  He is spoken of fondly as a "generative man" and often quoted. If it is an overstatement to say, as Margaret Mead put it, that "he invented the behavioral sciences, " certainly he left his thumbprint on effective foundation work in those areas.

Connections

On April 14, 1917, Frank married Alice Bryant; they had three children. She died in 1928, and on January 5, 1929, he married Dorothea Dairs; they had two children.

His second wife died in 1934, and on January 27, 1939, he married Mary Hughes, his collaborator on many articles and books; they had two children.

Father:

August A. Frank

mother Grace Kelso

1st wife:

Alice Bryant

2nd wife Dorothea Dairs 3rd wife Mary Hughes