So where am I going to go? I applied for a job in St. Louis with these two young, very successful whippersnappers1. They are very well known now. They are incorporated as “Psychological Associates.” They hired me as their third partner. My title was Director of Clinical and Education services. They saw my energy and wanted it. They didn’t realize I was gonna start talking this shit about family therapy. Not long after I came to town, they started to get nervous, but they weren’t that scared because I also got a lot of rave2 notices.
Family therapy was just starting to come into vogue and even becoming a little, maybe, legitimate. I went to a conference in St. Louis where it was talked about as a possibility. People were surprised that I had been doing it for three years. The conference made a big change in my career. I had a chip on my shoulder3 because every time I tried something new it kicked off shit, except for the few people like Bernie, and I was always under attack.
When people found out that I had been doing this and was even trying to teach family members to communicate, the whole conference focused on the work I was doing and ended up being like my first workshop. That really affected my thinking. That had a big impact on me because people there seemed excited about what I was doing and were really hungry about it. I saw my work differently. I wasn’t just a troublemaker, but somebody who had new ideas which the mainstream valued.
About a year later, something else happened which had the same radicalizing effect on the power I saw myself having. I did a workshop in Peoria with eighty psychologists and psychiatrists, a very heavy day. By the end of the day, I saw how I had gone in with people skeptical and left with people very excited about what I presented. I was in shock—my God, how excited people were! Not only were my clients responding—they had for years now—but even these well-established professionals were extraordinarily excited about what I was doing. I broke into tears at home—as hard as I can remember crying up to that point. The day was beautiful, a dream, very powerful. It was videotaped, and is still used to train psychologists at Bradley University. I really became aware of the power I had. It radicalized my self-concept. Those two experiences were significant.
I was also a workaholic, which is why my partners put up with me—I was billing sixty thousand dollars a year, and taking in about twenty-five thousand. I had three kids in private school, a beautiful house, half a block from the office, a beautiful office. My partners began to get upset with me when they saw this condition in me they called “the social work phenomenon.” They meant that it’s OK to do charity work if you are a social worker for an agency, but not as psychologists in private practice.
Our clientele was affluent. We saw a lot of kids who weren’t doing well in school, and billed them for a lot of services I didn’t think they needed, tests, interviews with psychiatrists. I cut it out. I thought we just didn’t know why these kids were doing poorly in school. All we had was traditional crap about emotional conflict. I asked around for new ideas, and spent two months educating myself about learning disabilities. Hardly anyone knew much about this in 1962, and all of a sudden people are referring to me as an expert in learning disabilities. This too affected my self-concept. People from all over the U.S. are coming to me, and just a few months before I knew nothing about this. My partners liked this because even though I cut back on how much we charged, we were getting gobs4 of people, and prestige, which was very important. Maybe people thought I was a maverick before, but now schools are sending us a lot of people.
Now is the part that became a strength. It dawned on me that we were still charging a lot, and that I have to go and educate the schools. It seemed to me that the school district needed to know it. I arranged to train people to give the battery of tests that I gave. My partners hit the fan. “You’re thinking like a social worker with a basket!” We had bitter fights about whether I should train people who would then compete with us. Sure, we’d lose money, but kids needed help, and maybe I could get in the business of training teachers. This was not even my main interest. I didn’t want to be in learning disabilities.
MW: There seems to have been a consistency in how you approached problems–empowering people rather than helping them individually—dealing with problems more in a systemic way. Were you aware at that time that these were your guiding principles?
MR: I was aware of the trend, and I was aware that I was constantly seeking out anybody who spoke to this. From the time Hakeem helped me to see the limitations of the clinical model, I knew that I was not going to be able to be satisfied with traditional approaches, even in private practice. I had that very clear. But I had no idea where it would lead.
MW: You don’t seem to have been troubled with self-doubt. There is a confident, robust quality as you tell your story. Was that from being told you were a star and a brilliant boy as a child?
MR: That was very important, very important. Some other things helped. I did get a tremendous amount of external support from well-informed sources that I was in a neurotic situation instead of being a neurotic myself.
In 1965 it dawned on me that I had already reached everything I had hoped for professionally. Once I would have given anything to have some skills that I felt could help one individual suffer less. Well, now I could do psychotherapy, and I had some tangible evidence that I had that power to actually help another soul. And it finally dawned on me that for a woman I had spent a lot of time with, I had been a very transforming power in her life. I had met this major goal that I had hoped to meet by the time I died. Being a psychotherapist, and knowing that I was one, it dawned on me that I’m there to my satisfaction.
Having met one objective, you start to rephrase the question. I started reading things about giving psychology away to the masses written by George Miller who was president of the American Psychological Association back in those days. I also had Jack Kirkwood, a militant black social worker, living a block from me which gave me a lot of chances to interact with him. I had a lot of other experiences which helped me look at “do I want to keep being a psychotherapist?” I’ve reached this and it feels good but how does this tie in with the fact that we are never going to have enough psychotherapists to deal with how societies muck5 people up.
According to George Alvin, the society is mucking people up faster than we’re ever going to cure them. Especially if, to do that, we need intensive training of psychotherapists and therapy means individual one-to-one long-term therapy. You don’t have to know much statistics to see that we are never going to turn out enough psychotherapists. If that’s what it takes to do social change—that we have to unfuck-up enough people with professional therapists—you don’t have to know much mathematics to know that we are going in the wrong direction very rapidly. So what he said had a big impact on me.
George Miller said we’ve got to develop ways of distributing psychology differently. Giving it away, not doing it through a clinical mode to an elite group of verbal people. There is an article I wrote during that time—one of my first for publication that I really like for Human Training News or something—“Community psychology as practiced by a clinician.” That was the direction I was starting to move in those days.
I had a whole other image of what I hoped I could one day say of myself. That I could figure out in my career to get good stuff out to people other than in a clinical way, just being a psychotherapist. Is there a way that I could do that? That’s when I started to think of myself more as a community psychologist. And during that phase of my career, I was doing diagnostic teaching workshops primarily, and workshops on how to individualize instruction and the like. I was teaching the model, of course, but never used the word “model” or anything like that.
So I went through that phase of my career, and then all of a sudden, lo and behold, I had the same experience within another couple of years. I would have thought it might have taken me my whole life to feel some fulfillment in that but all of a sudden now I’m finding out that my book Diagnostic Teaching is considered a best seller and I’m doing workshops with tons of people in cities all over the country. I had reached that objective. And I was glad that I had that image so at least I could tell that that wasn’t enough. Now I started to get tempted by some other possibilities. Now there was not only “can I be a community psychologist and pass these skills on to more people, but can I train other people to do other things?” So then I started having opportunities in cities like San Francisco, Rockford, and Norfolk to actually start projects.
Then that led me into this phase that I am still in to a large extent. It’s the more Freirean sense of seeing that political power in being the kind of community psychologist that I set out to be. That really has tremendous political implications beyond just as an individual giving me a broader base of how to help people. If I can figure out a way to do that through geometrically expanding the number of people who can do this with other groups of people—to be able to get people organized to rapidly disseminate powerful stuff—that process is very exciting.