I was recommended to Emanuel Miller by Morris Ginsberg, my then academic mentor, and thus became attached, early in 1928 to the East London Child Guidance Clinic which had just been set up under the auspices of the Jewish Health Organization. We had a suite of bare rooms in the Jews' Free School in Bell Lane, White-chapel. I was supposed to be the educational psychologist. To tell the truth, I had but the vaguest notion of how to conduct an intelligence or aptitude test, let alone how to assess a youngster's personality traits. However, the necessary technical proficiency was not difficult to acquire. What I got from Emanuel Miller was much more important.

The research I was engaged upon was in a field that was already then, in 1928–30, fiercely controversial. I was attempting to devise a non-verbal, culture-free test of intelligence for inter-racial use. In pursuit of this I was immersed in the minutiae and monotony of assembling the primitive test material that was later so brilliantly developed by Raven for his progressive Matrices test (cf. Fortes 1932). Miller helped to open up to me the more exciting intellectual prospects that eventually tempted me away into anthropology.

But let me get back to my subject. In describing it as a subject that would have appealed to Miller, I have in mind, in particular, the interests and points of view reflected in his book, The Generations: A Study of the Cycle of Parents and Children (1938).