SERENDIPITY
David Lester
How did we get where we are? There is
nature (our genes) and nurture (our experiences), of course. But there is also
serendipity, completely unpredictable events that have a major impact on one’s
life. What serendipitous events helped me to be where I am?
Romance, for one. Meeting a
17-year-old girl at summer school in France in 1963 and falling in love with
her was a huge event by itself, but also a serendipitous event. We never
married, but her parents sponsored me as an immigrant to the USA so that I came
on a green card. I would have remained in England had it not been for meeting
Mary.
And Bijou, of course. I never went to
division meetings at the college, but I was bored in September 1985, and so I
went. I needed an economist to write a chapter in a book on the death penalty,
and there she was, an econometrician from the University of Pennsylvania. Bijou
changed my life personally and professionally. I had almost given up suicide
research, and I never went to professional meetings. All that changed
drastically. For example, I published 31 articles in 1985 before I met Bijou,
71 in 1987 and 97 in 1988. I went to my first annual meeting of the American
Association of Suicidology in 1987 wearing my newly purchased suit, and I was
President of the International Association for Suicide from 1991 to 1995.
The psychology department at Cambridge
University focused on experimental psychology. One day, sitting in the
department library I saw a book Clues to Suicide by Ed Sheidman and Norm
Farberow. It shouldn’t have been there. The department was not interested in
those kinds of topics. I took it and looked at the 33 pairs of suicide notes at
the back, each consisting of one genuine note and one simulated note. It seemed
to me that I could correctly choose the genuine one easily, although I never
formally checked that. Years later, when I was asked to choose a topic for my
dissertation, I said SUICIDE because of that book. (Sidebar: Ed and I never got
along!)
In England, one applies to one
university and only one. I choose Cambridge University. (That gave me the
choice of five colleges there to rank order in preference, and I made St. John’s
College my first choice of the five.) When I emigrated to the USA, I applied to
one university – the University of California at Berkeley. That was it. One
day, the bulletin board in the psychology department had an advertisement from
Brandeis University offering scholarships for foreign students. Why not apply
there too? I did. My supervisor of studies (Alan Welford) and I had never heard
of Brandeis University. I didn’t know it was primarily a Jewish university. I looked
up the faculty. We had never heard of Abraham Maslow or the other professors
there. Brandeis offered me a generous fellowship (a Charles Revson Fellowship –
of Revlon cosmetics fame), and Berkeley said that, maybe, there would be
financial support. I chose to go to Brandeis. The psychology department at
Brandeis let me choose my dissertation topic (suicide) and, in addition, allowed
me to run rat research for fun (and paid for the rats and supplies) and to publish
scholarly works as a graduate student. I met Maslow, became his TA, and had him
on my dissertation committee. Hence my only NIMH grant (for rat research) and
my multiple self theory of personality (a theory of the mind).
There are other events about which
I’ve questioned their serendipity, but one expects to catch the flu
occasionally. One expects to run into interesting researchers at conferences
and later collaborate with them. One doesn’t expect to go to summer school in
France and end up in the USA. That is serendipity!
