 He received his Ph.D. degree in Psychology from Yale University in 1935, and that same year he became a social science research fellow at the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Vienna for one year before returning to Yale as a faculty member in 1936.He spent a total of 30 years at Yale University (1936–1966), and in 1950 he was appointed professor at Yale, a position he held until 1966.In 1966 he began teaching at Rockefeller University and afterwards spent the early 1970s teaching at Cornell University Medical College.