May Brenner on Becoming a Psychologist
  May Brenner     Biography    
Recorded: 14 Jun 2005

Why psychology? I started to read English, English literature. I interrupted my studies to get married in 1939 when the war broke out. I married a man who had been born in New York and wanted to go back to America. So I went to United States. Thought I did many jobs, had many adventures; but I also got involved in working with young children and with damaged children and from that—but I’d always been interested in psychology and I’d read a lot of Freud and so on. Those were in the days when we believed we could stick Freud and Marx together and create a wonderful world. Wonderful system for perfect people. Perfect people, maybe it would be. If working with children, then I wanted to do psychology properly. So when I came back to university, I had to start at the beginning again. Of course, everything had changed and this time I choose psychology. I met Sydney because he came to lecture to the psychology students on statistics, statistical variations and populations or something like that. That was all he needed to do.

Well, he was invited to give a lecture because he very often was. He was known as a very good lecturer

May Brenner was married to Sydney Brenner from December 1952 until her death in January 2010. She was engaged in doing a Ph.D. in Psychology in London.