The University of Wisconsin had a reputation of being a terrible place to learn clinical psychology, but I was advised by people who liked me very much that I was lucky to be able to go there. They had a great reputation for producing total psychologists, and I could always learn to be a clinician later. I’d also heard stories about it being really tough, but I had a kind of omnipotent feeling that I could handle it.
I got up there, and it was horrible. It was the most competitive situation imaginable, just cruel. A description that might give you a peek at what it was like is Rogers’ book Freedom to Learn, in which he wrote about the illogical assumptions made about graduate education in psychology, focusing on Wisconsin. The proseminar, which everybody had to take the first year, was designed to flunk out half the class. Everybody knew this was going to happen. It was like boot camp.
I formed two close friends who were really very helpful as things turned out, particularly one of them, Slafer. I got to be as open and honest with him as I ever had been with a male, at a time when I needed somebody to talk to. I had the pain left over from my undergraduate years, and now this additional stuff. The only problem was that he was really crazy in a lot of ways, but a wonderful person. He kept me going in a direction I didn’t need to keep going in—drinking, macho stuff, like bar fights in which we were almost killed a couple of times.
My other friend was Cliff Erickson from Deer Lodge, Montana—a sensitive creature. He literally shit his pants on the third proseminar test. The stress was unbelievable. It created such ugliness among the students, like hoarding reading materials. Cliff had the good sense to quit school. Last I heard he was writing novels in Oregon.
Of the twenty-seven of us in my first year class, only three got through—not the ones with the qualities one would want them to have. I got through, because I had been through worse in Detroit. I got through on sheer meanness. I was not going to let these people get rid of me. The proseminar was peaches and cream compared to the preliminary examinations, which some students studied for, for two or three years while they worked on their research.
I didn’t want to spend that time, so I said to my wife that as soon as the kid is born, I’m going to study for three good months. I had my Masters, and was ready to go to Michigan State for a Ph.D. They had already accepted me. Much to everybody’s surprise, I had, as a clinical student, done well on the generals. I passed everything but methodology. That should have meant that I was out, but since I had done so well otherwise, they gave me a break and let me take it again six months later. I decided to stay and take it. Again, I failed methodology by a three to two vote against me. They gave me an unprecedented third crack. Jesus Christ.
My ex-wife talks about these years as “The Black Cloud.” There was an omnipresent sense of doom over everything. I passed the third time after hiring the star methodology student to tutor me, and by breaking up the Cloud by talking and drinking and acting crazy with Slafer.