During the period between ca. 1900 and the mid-1930s, German academic psychiatry was to some degree perceived as a model for clinical practice, research, and institutional organization in the field. However, parallel to the interest of British, American, and other psychiatrists in German psychiatry, there emerged among German psychiatrists themselves a growing multifaceted discontent about academic medicine in general and about aspects of the dominant approach in psychiatry in particular. Already during the 1920s, this discontent led some psychiatrists such as Eilhard von Domarus and Eugen Kahn to look to other academic cultures, in particular to that of the United States, which appeared to be characterized by a more open academic life, better career opportunities, and chances to develop new approaches to mental health care.

The career of Eugen Kahn in Munich and at Yale is an exemplary case study of the mutual perceptions and evaluations of American and German psychiatrists in the late 1920s and early 1930s. It provides insights into the consequences of such mutual images on the decisions and activities of individual psychiatrists as well as of institutions such as universities or the Rockefeller Foundation. Kahn's move from the prestigious Psychiatric Clinic in Munich to the first chair of the Department of Psychiatry and Mental Hygiene at Yale in 1930 also provides some insight into the question of what might happen if such mutual perceptions conceived from a distance were put to the test: The Yale medical faculty, as well as Kahn himself, had opportunites to check on their previous expectations in everyday academic life.