Psychologists League

It drew an audience of 200 psychologists and featured speakers carefully chosen to represent the socialist and communist movements, and a variety of academic and clinical fields.

At the end of the evening, thirty members of the audience volunteered to form an organization combining political activism with reformist pressure within psychology, which would become the Psychologists League.

The League ridiculed conservative appeals to objectivity and neutrality, criticized elitist assumptions in existing schools of thought, and called for new theories that would stress psychological change and transformation as understood in through a broad lens.

As League member Goodwin Watson explained at a 1936 forum, narrowly focused disciplines were incapable of dealing with the current social crisis, which he compared to a "sinking ship full of holes and rapidly filling with water."

In Watson's analogy, "sinkologists" absorbed themselves with intensive research on how to repair the ship, while the "sinkiatrists" rushed [in] with all sizes of buckets to scoop the water out, but no solution was reached.