Then I had only to worry about completing a minor area of concentration. Out of my interest in what makes people violent, I picked the minor of social disorganization in the Sociology Department. A friend told me to drop the minor because I would get Hakeem, a guy with real psychological problems, a hard marker who hated clinical psychologists. I wanted to check him out, so I went to his class. He had an obnoxious personality, and was built like a fireplug. An acne hole sat in the middle of his nose. He reminded me of a wart hog. His basic message was that psychology and psychiatry were very dangerous, because they don’t differentiate between scientific and value judgments. This was 1960. The Myth of Mental Illness came out in 1961. Szasz got enlightened by Hakeem, who had a great impact on him and others.
The first assignment in his class was to critique a paper by Menninger. We were not usually asked to critique things—we were asked to feed back stuff. So I wrote a report, which usually got me A’s. I got a D. I don’t need this hassle over a minor. But Hakeem was teaching me more every day than I’d ever learned before. I grew to love him, and we got close. He gave me an A. I went back years later to tell him what a great influence he was. He told me I was a great student—it was easy to teach me how to think. What he had to teach me was very valuable as I was about to become a professional.
I was very fortunate to have this radical perspective before it was generally available. I hate to think of entering the field of clinical psychology as it is practiced without having been hit on the head with this really important stuff. I read Asylums by Erving Goffman who talked about how crazy-making the system could be. I was fortunate to know a few other sociologists, all students of Hakeem, who worked on the dangers of labeling.
Until Hakeem opened my eyes, I never realized that a diagnosis of neurosis is a value judgment couched in pseudo-scientific language used by people who really are not very scientific. I had been working in a mental hospital where everybody used these terms as though they had a reality. He also got me to see the dangers and the politics inherent in this way of looking at people. Hakeem argued that the profession can easily be used as a means of oppression by the state, like it is in Russia. I saw this happen.
A few years after taking Hakeem’s class, when I was in a private practice in St. Louis, a young man was brought to my attention by a radical political organization. He was a student of eastern religions who had protested the Vietnam war by throwing red paint on the plaque of a munitions manufacturer who had given money to his school library. He tried to explain the Middle Way—a non-violent approach—to the judge who thinks he’s talking offensive gibberish, and sends him to the county hospital for observation where he was labeled a schizophrenic and kept in the hospital. I began to see how dangerous it was to give psychology and psychiatry so much power.
Encountering Hakeem was very much a turning point. It was a real eye-opener. I got educated politically. I was naïve politically and never expected that.
I’ve also tried to figure out how big an influence Carl Rogers was. Rogers came to Wisconsin about a year before I graduated. We students felt that the Messiah was coming to end our miseries. The clinical department had no power. To show our rage over how powerless our department was, we called the head of the department ‘Cluck.’ He was the person fighting for us. Now we’re getting a Big Daddy who’s going to kick ass.
I first met Rogers in a group where the chairs had been put in a circle. I didn’t know that I was sitting next to him. I was expecting somebody like Werner Erhard. I was amazed when he starts by saying, “I’d like to get started.” I’m further amazed that he doesn’t say anything else!
Charlie Truax got on Rogers. Charlie was the most vicious, competitive, and astute academic and professional game player I’ve ever met. I grew to be friends with him, and then I loved to see his viciousness directed against the bad guys. But when I was in class with him and he got into his game playing, many times I thought I’d get into it physically with him. So he said to Rogers “come on now with your non-directive stuff. The reality is that you do know more than the rest of us, and you’ve got more training.” Rogers thought about that very seriously, and said to Charlie “I believe that everybody, no matter how uneducated he or she is, probably had a couple of ideas of their own. I’d be glad to tell you mine, but that would take about five minutes and what will we do for the rest of the semester?” I’ve been thinking about that ever since.
It was a wonderful learning experience, an eye-opener, the power of this way of letting things evolve without being didactic and so forth. Ever since I saw Rogers cry about the program one night at his house, he’s really had a lot of power for me as a person. It just tore him up to think that they were to train people to be psychotherapists by running them through this cruel competitive thing. His crying felt good to me. It so matched the pain I was going through in the program.
Rogers also helped me by inviting me to be a participant in his research project. The reason I was selected was because of my viewpoint I had developed back when I was at the school for girls, that we quit trying to therapize people. I like a line from one of Joseph Conrad’s novels that Szasz quotes a lot. “Don’t cure us. Teach us how to live.”
The people who affected me were people like Bandura, Ellis, and Wolpe. Bandura wrote an article back around that time called “Psychotherapy as a learning process.” I thought what if we did just get clear about what people need, and try to teach them how to do stuff, rather than therapize them? I started to think about that in those days.
I could see that the kids I was working with were up against an awful lot—family, school. They needed something more than just a chance to talk. I read a book that Hakeem recommended, Moral Therapy, which shows how effective psychiatry around the turn of the century was in dealing with even severe problems. It points out that the standard approach to therapy was not to think of people as sick, so much as down on their luck. The therapist acted like a kindly and supportive minister and was more successful in helping people then than we were with our scientific approaches. That was all very much on my mind in those days.
I and a couple of others in the program worked at Mendota State Hospital. We were seen as mavericks1. I was because I worked with men and women together. The social workers just about called me a scab2 because, as a psychologist seeing families, they thought I was doing their work. If you take the approach I was thinking of at the time, you see this as teaching people the skills they need to connect as a couple and to resolve their differences. I started calling what I was doing “family therapy.” I had never heard the term before. It just didn’t make sense to see half of a couple. It made common sense to get the husband and wife in there together to talk about stuff.
When I got into private practice in St. Louis, I got flack3 for the first two years for seeing kids with their families because I was using such a different paradigm from the then current psychoanalytic one. Many times over the years I have felt awkward trying to connect with a psychiatrist and explain my ideas to him—there’s almost a kind of hopelessness as though we have no language to bridge the gap between us. Here’s a person whose whole world is based on the idea that there are mental illnesses just like there are physical illnesses. It’s so deeply ingrained—institutions, jargon, a whole way of looking at things based on this conception of “mental illness.”
I think in terms of skills and trying to get clear what skills people have or don’t have. I’m not saying that I’m right, and that I wouldn’t change my position in a discussion with him—the frustrating thing is that there is no point of entry.
What a good learning experience it was to be rotated through five institutions. First was Wisconsin Diagnostic Center, where people nobody else could figure out were sent. I did this as a graduate student. The next year, which doubled as my internship, I went to the school for girls. The third year was split between the school for girls and one for boys—both for delinquents. Then Mendota State Hospital. I loved working at this hospital.
Bernie Banam, a psychiatrist at Mendota State, had great power in shaping my career, and I feel very blessed to have met him. He looked so shabby and horrible, and he spoke about two decibels above everybody else, and used salty, crude language. All the ‘decent’ psychologists and psychiatrists thought he was hayseed4.
I decided I like him. He and I became as close as two people can get. We loved each other. He taught me so much. The first thing he taught me was to get off the doctor shit, the professional shit. Our clients always came to our case conferences. Bernie would never have it where we’d talk about the client in his absence. I was uncomfortable at first, I confess. This wasn’t the kind of professionalism I had longed for. It was known that his people got out quicker and stayed out longer. As maverick as he was, he had to be tolerated, because he was the most effective psychiatrist on the staff.
During this time, my wife was doing a rotation for her nursing program, and I was single-parenting. Bernie had five kids, and the most totally disruptive house you can imagine. I’d go over almost every night after work with my kids. It was so nice not having to worry about them messing up anything. It was total chaos, but a fun place. Bernie drank too much. I drank too much with him. He loved poetry and had a deep feeling of compassion. It would torment him to see how people were treated in the hospital. He had such a brilliant awareness of the foolishness of people and the facades they wear.
It was so helpful to commit myself to getting beyond professionalism and to treating people as human beings, and Bernie was such a great model. I loved him dearly, and he loved me. I wanted to stay there after I graduated, but I owed the state a year and they made me go to Winnebago, Wisconsin where they said they needed an aggressive and ambitious person to make changes. I fought with them, but they had me legally. I might have stayed with Bernie forever. I loved working with somebody I respected.
I can’t tell you how strange it was to go from the very progressive setting at Mendota up to a backwoods hospital. There, fortunately, the chief and only psychologist, Gordon Filmer-Bennet, was dying for help to modernize this primitive place. I was just what he needed. I was a battering ram5, and he had the patience and tact to deal with the waves I created. He put up with a lot, and he gave me tremendous affirmation.
I also teamed up with a very power-hungry, but honest and likeable Nazi, Carl Freulich. Carl had been in the Hitler Jugend, and missed service because he was too young. He was very honest with me, and told me he picked psychiatry because it was a way of making it quick. He didn’t know a bit about it. He saw me as able to create a ward6 that would make a name for him. He was just that blunt. He treated me well and took a lot of flack for what I did. When we opened up the back wards for the first time, we had two suicides. It was the most primitive hospital you can imagine.
I was interested in getting the community responsible for itself. It was hard to get the people together socially. When I got there, the aides had to stand up when anybody with the title “doctor” walked on the ward. That was where we were starting from. Another Nazi doctor raised the question about whether I, psychologist, should be allowed to use the medical library….
I loved Gordon Bennet, and I loved Oshkosh where I lived, but this wasn’t my thing. I had been through five institutions, and had seen what you had to go through to serve people in them. I knew I wanted to get away from having to deal with their bureaucracy and petty and traditional ways of thinking — fighting over offices, titles. I was very idealistic and I was very discouraged.
Next: St. Louis and Psychological Associates
- If you describe someone as a maverick, you mean that they are unconventional and independent, and do not think or behave in the same way as other people. ↩︎
- People who continue to work during a strike are called scabs by the people who are on strike. ↩︎
- (to) get some flack about (sth.) – receive sharp criticism for something ↩︎
- Informal, North-American: a person from the country, especially one who is simple and unsophisticated. “notices of agricultural sales are an irresistible lure for hicks and hayseeds” ↩︎
- A battering ram is a long heavy piece of wood that is used to knock down the locked doors of buildings ↩︎
- department ↩︎