I loved practicing psychology. I just loved it. I got into psychology at just the right time. Psychology got its start right after the Second World War with testing and so forth. The state of Wisconsin didn’t have enough people in its system, and it paid me to be trained as a psychologist, and when I graduated, I owed them a year of service in a state institution. It had a wonderful training program. I worked all the way from half time to full time the entire time I was going to school. That helped me, it didn’t make school harder. I was so totally turned off with the academic part, that I don’t know that I could have sustained the effort if I hadn’t gotten a lot of good learning by actually beginning to practice psychology.
I always think the best way to learn something is to do it rather than just think or read about it. I learned to do it, because in each of the placements I went into, I just really dove into it, and I was very active and would not allow them to blind me in terms of what I could experiment with. I had severe problems with a couple of places, particularly Wisconsin School for Girls where I was doing my internship.
I came across a book by Al Elias, a sociologist in New Jersey, who thought that offenders should be treated in groups in order to set up pressure to change behavior, rather than with psychoanalysis. His ideas coincided with things I was starting to get wind of. Freud may have been brilliant, but people were pretty much addicted to his techniques when there was no evidence that they were effective. We weren’t in a place where we could afford to be orthodox about things. We needed to be examining all kinds of possibilities. Elias’ book came along, and made a lot of sense to me, and I suggested that we do less individual treatment, and see what we could do to train cottage parents to set up a new peer culture.
Sy Halleck, the supervisor, fresh out of the Menninger Foundation, and my psychology supervisor both got very upset with me. They were entrenched in one way of doing things. They essentially said, “why do you have this problem?” This was my third placement, and the word was around that I was very impatient with traditional ways of doing things. You can see in my work now, I’m eager to see how we can empower people quickly. It seemed to me that at least we needed to be exploring and trying out other things. Ask Carl Rogers! He asked me to be on his research project because he wanted many people doing many different things.
But in the psychoanalytic tradition, there were strong sanctions against innovation and they used their number one vicious tactic on me—telling me that I had psychological problems! Which led me to have this problem in every placement! They were just that blunt about it. “Marshall, do you realize that you have this problem with authority in each of your placements?” That irritated the hell out of me, and I pulled a power coupe, which was funny. The superintendent of the schools liked my ideas. I was about to be fired from my internship, and he arranged that if I was, I would be made assistant superintendent, which would have placed me directly over three supervisors! They reconsidered and let me continue to experiment.
I saw the tremendous control the psychoanalytic school had by dealing with dissent by diagnosing the dissenter. It’s almost like the Russians, where if you don’t like the State you must be sick—it you don’t like psychoanalytic treatment, you must be “resisting.” Within logic, it’s ad hominem. I learned that from Michael Kakeem, and that had a big impact on me. Later, when I invited him to clinical settings, he would start right out and say, “OK. Let’s get some things straight. I had terrible toilet training, and I’m totally pathological, but it’s ad hominem to exclude my argument on that basis.” Then he would proceed to blast the hell out of the psychiatrists and psychologists.
So, I got into this field to try and figure out about suffering, and picked psychology because it was the best I could think of. Of course, being a Jewish kid, all my relatives had medicine in mind. I looked seriously at that—did I want to be a doctor?—even to the point of working with an embalmer for a while to see if I found the body that interesting.
I got the message from very early on that I was brilliant, and that great things would come of me. There was not much doubt in anybody’s mind that I would be the greatest thing that ever came along. It really was my family’s attitude toward me. My family gave me a tremendous amount of that kind of feeling. Now, that created even more stress, and for about eight years of my life, I was the worst kid in school. Classical stuff—all my teachers would say, “he’s got the ability. We just don’t know what’s wrong with him.” Well, one of the things that was wrong with me was that it was torment for me to sit in class. Then and now, I just don’t have much tolerance for boredom, and until college, school for me was sitting in a classroom looking at the click going crazy and the day will never end.
When I turned thirteen, my torment increased. Now I must leave public school at 3:30, and go to Hebrew school. I handled this by getting kicked out of the first three schools I was in. I was a total terror. I would make life so unbearable that they could not keep me in the school. Once, after I had been kept after Hebrew school—the ultimate torment, no time left in the day to play—I crawled out on a ledge as the principal—who had kept me in his office—was standing in his officious splendor in front of a group of parents, and I hollered in the window as loud as I could “Lachoffer is a shit!” That was my last day in Hebrew School. The oldest son must be Bar Mitzvahed, so my parents had to hire a private tutor. I fought and did everything I could to make him miserable. That was my approach to school.
My poor father was being told by my mother “you wimp, he thinks he can act this way in school, because he doesn’t have a father to teach him a lesson, and he needs to be taught a lesson.” I must admit I was obnoxious. I mean I had a leer, and I was vicious non-verbally. I knew every trick in the worlds for fighting against a system, which was trapping me daily in this prison, and I was the worst con of all. So one day I came home early and the school had called to explain why. My poor father was getting it from my mother. They’d been fighting recently and she was really getting at him. So he asked me why I was sent home, and I said, “look you dirty dog, leave me alone!” Well, he lost it and he beat the hell out of me. He had only done that once before. I couldn’t go to school the next day. I was really beaten up.
I see my father a couple of times a year, and the last two times I have been with him, he’s cried about that. The first time it was sad that he was feeling the pain, and I jumped in too quickly to reassure him about it. That didn’t help. The second time I was able to let him talk more about just how terrible he still feels about it. Then he could hear me say that 99% of the time he was most gentle. If that’s the worst I had to complain about my father, I don’t have much to complain about it. If I was angry at anyone, it was my mother. I understand the power games that were going on there—I fall into them myself.
The last time I was really horrible with one of my kids was when I beat the living shit out of my son Brett. This occurred after I heard one too many times from my ex-wife that I was letting the kid get away with murder. Brett was going through a terrible time in his life. He was choosing not to go to school at age fourteen. I was really trying my best to give him support and to parent him, because he was rejected by his mother who didn’t want him around the house. I left Gloria to live with him in my office. I was getting stuff from her and my mother was saying to me “if that was my child, I would teach him a lesson.” I’m trying to deal with all this, and trying to take care of him, and then one day I looked at my desk, and the amount of money I kept was gone. He’d taken the money. I asked him about it, and he lied, and I blew my top and started to beat him up.
Until high school, school was just terrible. But those three years in high school were great. And just at that time my father, being a hardworking person who had been with a company ten or twelve years, had got enough money for a down payment on a house in what for us felt like the suburbs. Having our own house was a big move up for us as a family. We also moved out of the violent section of town, and I felt relatively safe in high school. I was very accepted and popular and class valedictorian.
The only problem area was the issue of Jewishness and dating. I still ran into anti-Semitism there. With that exception, high school was wonderful. I had two good friends, Robert Adams and Bob Corsini. They were a year older then I, and they went up to the University of Michigan—thirty miles away, and that was the dream of my life, to someday go to the University of Michigan.
I wanted to go there so bad. I had this idealized version of it—me and my friends in a kind of Andy Hardy world. I couldn’t wait to go there. It was very painful when my father told me he couldn’t afford to send me there. It broke both of our hearts to think I couldn’t go. So for the next year I went to Wayne State University, which my father could afford. I took 23 hours of credits, worked forty hours a week, and saved my money. Now I’m going to go up and be with my friends.
Next: University of Michigan