Maria Dorothea Simon

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Maria Dorothea Simon (born August 6, 1918 in Vienna ) is an Austrian social scientist .

Life

Simon was born in Vienna as the daughter of an engineer and a student. The parents were assimilated Jews . She first trained as a kindergarten teacher in her hometown before moving to Prague in 1936 to attend a school for social work . 1938 came to Great Britain at the invitation of relatives . Originally Simon was only supposed to spend the summer holidays there, but after the closure of her Prague school and the increasing National Socialist influence in Czechoslovakia after the Munich Agreement , she stayed in Great Britain. Her father came the following year, but mother and grandmother stayed in Prague and Vienna, respectively, and were murdered in the Holocaust . Simon got by as a nanny and cleaning lady in London before she found a job in a children's home in London run by Anna Freud . With a scholarship from the Czech government in exile, she was able to continue her studies at Oxford , which she graduated with a diploma in 1944. She then joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service , the women's division of the British Army, as a teacher , where she reached the rank of non-commissioned officer . During this time, she obtained a bachelor's degree in economics and political science in correspondence courses at London University .

After the end of the war, she spent a year with her family in Denmark and emigrated to the USA in 1946 , where she worked as a social worker for a Jewish welfare organization in Seattle . From 1947 to 1952 she studied again at the University of Vienna , where she worked with Otto Fleischmann and Dr. Alfred Winterstein, the President of the Vienna Psychoanalytical Association, received further training in psychoanalysis and obtained a doctorate in psychology .

From 1957 to 1961 she was an assistant professor at the Medical Center of the University of Arkansas . before she finally returned to Vienna in 1963 for family reasons. She did research as an assistant at the Institute for Advanced Studies .

From 1970 until her retirement in 1983 she was director of the Academy for Social Work of the City of Vienna . In retirement, she does volunteer work, for example, she represented the non-governmental organization World Federation of Mental Health at the United Nations . From 1944 until his death in 1976, Simon was married to the lawyer and resistance fighter Joseph T. Simon , with whom they had four children.

Services

Maria Dorothea Simon's research areas included research into national prejudices among children and the differences in suicides in Vienna and Los Angeles . In addition, she developed methods for investigating family pathologies and conducted studies on the situation of social work and unmarried mothers in Austria. In the seventies, as director of the academy, she made a major contribution to the professionalization and reorientation of social work in Austria.

Fonts

  • Editor of: Joseph T. Simon : Eyewitness. Memories of an Austrian Socialist. A very personal contemporary history , Lit Verlag, Vienna and Berlin, 2nd edition 2008, ISBN 978-3-7000-0803-3
  • About the affect value of word representations: A study on children , Institute for Higher Studies Vienna, 1966
  • with Norman L. Farberow: Suicide in two large cities: A socio-cultural comparison , Institute for Higher Studies Vienna, 1968
  • Psychology, yesterday and today. Austrian Federal Publishing House for Education, Science, etc. Art, 1976, ISBN 3-215-02282-6 .
  • The Relatives of the Mentally Ill's Perspective on Quality of Life. John Wiley, Chichester, NY, 1997.
  • Self-testimony , in: Hermann Heitkamp / Alfred Plewa (ed.): Social work in self-testimony , Volume 2. Freiburg i. Breisgau: Lambertus, 2002, pp. 225-272
  • Franzi Löw (1916–1997) , in: Social Work 7/2013, pp. 296–297, here [1]
  • Franziska Danneberg-Löw - A Jewish welfare worker in Vienna in the time of National Socialism , in: Johannes Pflegerl, Monika Vyslouzil, Gertraud Pantucek (ed.): Custom- fit help. Social work as a contributor to societal and social processes , Vienna: Lit-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-643-50526-2 , pp. 82–91

literature

  • Ilse Korotin / Nastasja Stupnicki: Biographies of important Austrian scientists. "Curiosity drives me to ask questions" , Vienna - Cologne - Weimar: Böhlau 2018, p. 796f; here:
  • Peter Pantuček-Eisenbacher : On the 100th birthday of Maria Dorothea Simon , in: Soziales Kapital 20/2018, pp. 4–8, here:
  • Monika Vyslouzil : Directions instead of recipes. Maria Dorothea Simon influences the profession and its training , in: Johannes Pflegerl, Monika Vyslouzil, Gertraud Pantucek (Eds.): Custom- fit help. Social work as a contributor to societal and social processes , Vienna: Lit-Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-643-50526-2 , pp. 93-101

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Simon, Maria Dorothea
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Austrian social scientist
DATE OF BIRTH August 6, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna