My Professors
David Lester
Cambridge
University
Part 1 of my Cambridge University
degree was in Physics and Mathematics, and I switched to psychology in January
of my second year. I knew
nothing about psychology, and so I got a book, from around 1920 from the local
public library to see what I had let myself in for. I had been assigned to Alan
Welford as Director of Studies, and he wrote to me to stop reading that book.
He advised me to read books by Hans Eysenck instead. I was puzzled. A
mathematics book from the 1920s would still be useful. Why not a psychology
book from the 1920s?
Alan Welford
I knew Welford’s specialty was
aging, but I never took a course from him. We met weekly to discuss my
progress, but I don’t recall what we talked about or that he set me any
assignments. He left soon after my three years at Cambridge to go to a
university in Australia.
When I look him up now, I realize
that he was a notable figure. He, along with others, started the Ergonomic
Society which received a Royal Charter and a scholarly journal Ergonomics. The Human Factors and
Ergonomics Society of Australia gives an annual Alan Welford Award, and Ergonomics publishes an annual Alan
Welford Memorial Lecture. This seems to be a pattern in my life in that I often
failed to realize how good and occasionally famous my teachers were.
I applied to only two Universities
in America for graduate study in 1964, and one was in human factors at
Berkeley. They offered me a place and a promise of financial support, but I
turned them down. In retrospect, that application must have been influenced by
Welford.
Hans Eysenck
A mention of Hans Eysenck in America
led to raised eyebrows and signs of disapproval. He published a great deal and,
if someone criticized his work or ideas, he would immediately have a reply in
the journal. He published in many fields (intelligence, personality, and learning
theory) and had ideas which became unpopular. For example, he believed that
intelligence was determined in part by genetics. And he hated psychoanalysis.
But I have always liked Eysenck.
Those books I read by him encouraged me to think that my change of topics was a
good move. Sense and Nonsense in Psychology,
Fact and Fiction in Psychology, and Uses and Abuses of Psychology were all very
interesting reads. I came not to share his ideas, although I have used his
three dimensions of personality in my work (extraversion, neuroticism and
psychoticism), and I have even proposed a physiological basis for them (which
remains unnoticed). But I liked his spirit and energy.
He was the editor of Personality and Individual Differences
for many years and probably made decisions to accept or reject many articles himself
without other reviewers. He accepted many of my papers in my early years, which
is another reason for me to like him.
On one occasion, he accepted a paper
of mine on personality and blood types, but he mentioned that he had a paper
related to mine and asked whether I might cite it. I immediately wrote back and
apologized for not citing it, and I added mention of it to my paper. He wanted
as many citations as possible and, in these days of ResearchGate and Google
Scholar, I cannot blame him.
Alan Watson
After the chair of the Department of
Experimental Psychology, there were three senior people, readers in Cambridge
terminology. Alan Watson was one of the two really brilliant people I have met.
He did not finish his PhD. He said that he widened the mazes in which he ran
his rats, and the results changed drastically. This disillusioned him, and he
stopped working on his dissertation. In his lectures, he organized the material
into a beautiful story as he pieced the results of different studies on learning
together (mainly in rats), and he did it without notes.
Richard Gregory
The second senior person was Richard
Gregory, also without a PhD, but again who was very clever. Looking him up, I
find that was honored by the Queen with the CBE. His topic was perception, and
the book I admired was Eye and Brain.
He was able to explain aspects of perception with simple demonstrations rather
than experiments, such as why the world appears to remain stable when you move
your eyes. He used to joke that his major ideas came from reading, in German,
old scholarly journals from the late 1800s and re-discovering those ideas.
(Perhaps it was not a joke.) I remember that he re-discovered a sea creature in
the Mediterranean with one light receptor that scanned the visual field, much
as television cameras did. He also disagreed vehemently with the ideas of the
American psychologist J. J. Gibson, and I found Gibson’s ideas boring and
Gregory’s exciting.
He left Cambridge soon after I did
and ended his career at the University of Bristol University, His Wikipedia
page is impressive! It turns out that he studied and wrote a book on the first
blind personal to have his sight restored, which I read at the time. That
individual died by suicide after a year or so. My first brush with suicide.
Alice Heim
Alice did have a PhD. She supervised
what we call in America my senior thesis. It was on an intelligence test (the
Shaw Blocks Test) which does not penalize creativity. She published my research
as a one-page note in Psychological
Reports in 1964, which started me on my 1,000 notes in Psychological Reports and Perceptual
and Motor Skills. Blame it on Alice!
I kept in touch with her and, when I
went back to Cambridge to be examined for my PhD in social and political science,
I stayed at her house. She was very old but working on a book on memory loss in
old age (Where did I put my spectacles?).
She has over 30 articles in PsycInfo and a book which I liked, Intelligence and Personality, in which
she argued that intelligence was better viewed as a personality trait.
The Others
Oliver Zangwill was the chair of the
department, a neuropsychologist, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. I knew him
only because he interviewed me when I switched from physics to psychology and
approved the switch. I also attended his lectures (I attended every lecture
given by the department in my 1½ years there). He never looked at the audience
(of about 40 of us), and students at back would hold up lighted matches to see
if he would notice them. He never did.
Lawrence Weiskrantz was American and
the third senior person in the department. PsycInfo indicates that he was still
publishing as of 2017. His Wikipedia page is impressive too, with many discoveries
and honors. He too left Cambridge and ended up at Oxford University. However,
for me, he gave the first lecture I had in the department, and he was s
physiological psychologist. His lecture left me wondering whether I had made
the right choice to switch. My notes from that lecture contained the word emigdala, and it was a year before I
found out that he was referring to the amygdala.
The department was a Department of
Experimental Psychology: learning perception and physiological psychology
primarily. But one day in the department’s library, I saw a book Clues to Suicide by Edwin Shneidman and Norman
Farberow. I browsed through it and, at the end, there are 33 pairs of suicide
notes, one genuine and one simulated. I should have tested myself to see how
many I could distinguish correctly, but I did not. It seemed to me to be
obvious which were the genuine ones, and some moved me to tears. Serendipity
indeed!
Brandeis
University
Alan Welford and I had never heard
of Brandeis University, and we had no idea that it was primarily a Jewish
university. But they offered me a fellowship ($3,000 a year) to live on and
free tuition. I was not given the Wien Fellowship for foreign students (that
went to John Benjafield from Canada), but instead a Charles Revson Fellowship.
Revson was the CEO of Revlon Cosmetics, and so I always urged people to buy
Revlon to support my fellowship.
I applied to Brandeis because they had
sent a flier to the Cambridge psychology department. We looked up the faculty,
and we had heard of none of them, including Maslow. The department had 12
faculty, 4 in humanistic psychology, 4 in clinical psychology and 4 in
experimental psychology, and the rumor was that the three groups never spoke to
one another!
Jerome Wodinsky
Jerry was the as brilliant as Alan
Watson at Cambridge. He taught learning and, because he did not offer a
graduate course, I audited his undergraduate curse. From a few notes on the
back of an envelope, he would produce a brilliant lecture. Jerry was unusual in
that he hung out with the graduate students. He would have coffee with us in
the cafeteria (the Castle). I remember him once teasing an elderly graduate
student saying, “Fred, how many Israeli soldiers would it take to defeat the
Viet Cong? A thousand? Two thousand?” He drove a convertible and had it fill
with snow one winter because he forgot to put the roof back up. He was the only
faculty member we called by his first name.
Jerry published occasionally but had
lots of unpublished studies. His scholarly and academic life seemed always to
be in a muddle. He hadn’t even got his grades in from his previous job at the
New School.
Ricardo Morant
Rick was the chair of the department,
and his field was perception. One summer, we worked with him on a project in
Boston to teach illiterates to read. He told us to call him Rick, but I never
could. (The project seemed to be failure on the tests we gave pre and post the
teaching, but I remember one elderly man signing his name for the first time in
his life, and we all had tears. And one woman told us that, for the first time
in her life, she could tell the number of the bus approaching the bus stop and
didn’t have to ask someone else what the number was.)
Morant was good to me. In my fights
with the faculty of the department, he would call me into his office, sit me
down and look for a solution (or a way around) the problem. I used to threaten
to quit, saying I could get a PhD from Cambridge and didn’t need them (which I
eventually did, getting my second PhD). My major fight was with my first
advisor who was threatened by the fact that I was publishing many articles
while still a graduate student. He had a rule passed saying that graduate
students would have to get each article approved by the faculty before
submission. My argument was that I had published more than he had, and so he
needed approval too. Rick’s solution was to have a friend who had just earned
her PhD (Denise Thum) approve my articles. Denise ok’d the first paper I showed
her without reading it, and then I stopped showing them to her.
MA degrees were given as consolation
prizes when the department threw you out, but I wanted to earn an honest MA.
The rules said that one could submit published papers for an MA, so I submitted
my paper in Psychological Bulletin on
the fear of death along with a few others. When the university asked Rick to
sign the form, he was astounded. “You didn’t have to do that,” he said. “We
would have given you an MA.” But he made up a title and contents, and I was
awarded the MA. I was the only graduate student to do that.
Marianne Simmel
Marianne was the granddaughter of
Georg Simmel, the German sociologist. Marianne was a warm person, and I
remained friends with her after she retired, often visiting her at her home on
Cape Cod. Her main interest was phantom pain, and she re-worked the data from a
couple of studies that she had conducted into paper after paper. She shepherded
two students to their PhDs (John Benjafield and Claire Golomb), quite an
achievement in that department where few students finished their studies.
I remember her also for two things
she said to me. In England, I had been the top student until my BA when,
instead of getting a first, I got an upper second. or 2-1. (They awarded only
one first in psychology that year. I have checked on him, and he’s never
published!). With a 2-1, I could have stayed at Cambridge for my PhD. (With a
2-2 or lower, one had to go to a provincial [red brick] university.) Now that I
wasn’t perfect, all I wanted at Brandeis was to pass. After one qualifying
exam, Marianne said to me, “You passed, David, but you should have done
better.” I acknowledged her criticism but, back in the graduate student lounge,
rejoiced that I had passed.
The second thing that Marianne said
to me? I commented once that Maslow had only one good idea in his life.
Marianne said to me, “David, if you have one good idea in your life, you will
be very happy.” I’m still waiting for that one good idea!
Which brings me, at last to Maslow.
Abraham Maslow
Although we had not heard of Maslow
at Cambridge, I quickly learned how famous he was. He refused to teach graduate
students because, he said, they were too arrogant, and so I audited an
undergraduate course with him. He taught the course on utopias with a
historian, Frank Manuel. Manual was a noisy energetic teacher, often hitting
the table with his trouser leg. (Manual had only one leg, and so one trouser
leg was free.) In fact, Manual dominated the seminar, and Maslow was content to
let him do so.
Because I had been in that course,
Abe asked me to be his TA for his undergraduate course on eupsychia. On one
occasion, the students told Abe he was talking too much and that he was to
remain quiet during discussions until they asked him a question. He let them do
this for a few classes, and then took over again.
One another occasion, the students
asked him to clarify a point. He had said that people were inflexible in one
lecture but that they were inflexible in another lecture. Abe said that child
rearing shaped us in many ways. He said that, if he had been born in Germany,
he might have come to accept many fascist views. But in many ways, especially
as far as genetics and physiological processes were concerned, we were
inflexible. For example, he said, one day when his wife was out, he tried to
breast feed his infant daughter. He held her to his nipple but, not only didn’t
it feel good to him, but also she didn’t get any milk.
There was panic in the students.
They did not know how to respond. Was this funny? Or was it serious? They kept
looking at one another, but no one laughed, so they concluded that it was
serious, and they all bent over to write notes. For myself, in the corner at
the back, I clapped my hand over my mouth trying to mask my laughter. If one
student had laughed, they all would have joined in. An example of the social
comparison process. I couldn’t wait to get to the graduate student lounge and
tell the others the story.
Abe was on my dissertation
committee. My original thesis advisor had thrown me out after I had complained
about the rule he had passed about graduate students publishing. I then turned
to James Klee who agree to be in charge of my already-written thesis. John
Senden and Abe were on the committee, along with Irving Zola, a sociologist. Senden
wanted changes in my dissertation, but I made a plea. I said that, in published
articles, one had to lie. You pretended that you knew your hypothesis before
you ran the study, and you left out parts that were in conflict with your
hypothesis. Since your PhD dissertation was unpublished, you could be honest
and detail the false steps you made and the wrong turnings you made on the
journey. Zola was delighted. “David,” he said. “Don’t change a word.” In fact,
one chapter moved to an appendix, and that was all.
When I went in to Abe’s office, he
was lying on his couch, and I sat in his chair. “David, I would never write a
thesis like this,” he said. I had a mild anxiety attack. “But who am I to tell
you how to write your thesis. I think
you will be a good psychologist. Are you happy with your thesis?” I said that I
was. “Well then, I am too,” and he signed it. Abe was one of the few
psychologists who lived according to his theoretical ideas.
George Kelly
I was lucky that George Kelly,
another leading personality theorist, retired from Ohio State University, and
came to Brandeis. I took his graduate student seminar which was, of course, on
his theory of personal constructs. I admire his theory, but I do not believe
that it is correct. Nonetheless, I have incorporated some of the ideas in the
theory in my own subself theory of personality, especially the idea of having
propositions and corollaries in a theory.
Kelly was strict in his professional
and personal views. One story was that he had the junior faculty over to his
home, and my hated original advisor made the mistake of lighting a cigarette
before realizing that there were no ash trays anywhere in the room. When he
came to Brandeis, Kelly brought a graduate student who liked his theory with
him (Jack Adams-Webber). In the seminar, Jack and a few others who clearly
liked the theory sat quietly, while others challenged the theory. At an early
meeting of the seminar, Kelly said that he did want his disciples to hear the
criticisms and that he wanted to split the seminar into two seminars – those
for him and those against him. Those for him objected. They said they wanted to
hear the criticism and Kelly’s response to them. So we stayed together. So much
for Kelly’s idea of constructive
alternativism!
My thesis consisted of several
studies on suicide, and I used Kelly’s RES Test in one of those studies, but I
did not want Kelly on my committee.
My Dissertation
My entering group of eight graduate
students was the last group at Brandeis to be allowed to choose their own topic
for their dissertation rather than being assigned to work on a professor’s
research. Although I was running rats for fun on research into exploratory
behavior (and later received a NIMH small grant for the research), I chose suicide, the influence of that
serendipitous event at Cambridge.
Morant suggested we get Edwin
Shneidman to be the outside reader on my committee, an idea I vetoed. I had had
two interactions with Ed. Once he called the department and asked to speak to
me. I was astounded. He told me that he liked my research on suicide but that I
needed clinical experience. My wife at the time and I later visited Ed at his
NIMH office (where he ran a section on suicide research). He started by
focusing on my wife. What did she study? Perception, and he took off his
glasses. The meeting went on in that tone, until he said, “Ok, kiddies. That’s
all.” He loaded me with reprints of his work and sent us on our way.
At conferences, Ed always knew that
I did not like him. He could have helped me in many ways in my career, but
never offered to do so. When Antoon Leenaars proposed a festschrift for Ed, Ed rejected the idea of having me write a chapter.
If my chapter had been included, it would have been the only one which took
Ed’s ideas and enlarged on them. In the chapters that were included, the
authors talked of their own research, not Ed’s. I published my chapter in a
journal and sent a copy to Ed, noting that it had been written for his
festschrift. As he lay dying, bedridden at home, I talked to him a couple of
times on the telephone. After all, his book had shaped by scholarly career, and
his ideas and research were ground-breaking. Sometimes I can forgive, He
admitted that he had been wrong to reject my chapter.
