One does not grow up with the aspiration of becoming a rogue psychologist, nor does it happen overnight. While the path varies from person to person, there are certain factors that predispose one to this role. For me, a key element was my growing up in the monoculture of a conventional, middle-class community, only to discover that its values and principles were relative and of limited benefit in preparing me for the broader culture that encompasses a diversity of viewpoints and lifestyles.
I grew up in the staunchly conservative, white-collar town of Bartlesville, Oklahoma, in the stark landscape of the Great Plains, nestled between the flat prairie and the rolling Osage Hills. At the time, this was the headquarters of two oil companies, Phillips and City Service (which has since morphed into Citgo). The community readily endorsed the conventional values of mainstream Christianity, conservative politics, free enterprise, and capitalism. Minority cultures (e.g., African-American, Native American, Jewish, and Catholic) generally either experienced de facto segregation, blended in as best they could, or maintained low profiles to avoid drawing attention to their differences. This hometown culture was hardly a breeding ground for dissent. Any deviation from mainstream conservatism tended to be on the right, not the left. I recall listening in my own home to taped diatribes against communism and socialism in meetings of the Sooner Freedom Forum, a downscaled Oklahoma version of the John Birch Society. Senator Joseph McCarthy, with his anti-communist witch-hunts, would have felt quite at home.
The Daniel family tried hard to fit into the community, but could not quite pull it off. One obstacle was my parents’ mixed marriage – no, not racially (which was generally illegal in the South in those days), but religiously, between Catholic and Protestant. This caused some largely unspoken family tension, even with their prenuptial agreement that the children be raised Catholic. Other areas of conflict or tensions tended to be neglected or ignored, perhaps to meet the cultural ideal of basic family harmony exemplified in the 1950s family comedies, such as Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie and Harriet, and Father Knows Best. The result was more like the repressive communication patterns dramatized in the movie Ordinary People or by the Hall family at holiday dinner in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall. We faked it, yet never got to the point of making it. Years later, I could relate to the SNL skit of the Coneheads, extraterrestrials who desperately tried to fit into American culture, even though my sense of alienation was not of the extraterrestrial, illegal, or even documented variety.
In observance of my parents’ prenuptial agreement, I was indoctrinated in Catholic thought for the first eight grades of my education at our local Catholic parochial school. Only later did I realize the oxymoron of “catholic,” meaning universal, and “parochial,” meaning a narrow, local perspective. Of course, the church’s attempt at reconciling this contradiction amounted to the assumption that its own worldview is the correct one, and all others were false or even heretical. For a while, this stance relieved me of the burden of wrestling with moral and ethical dilemmas, as I could trust in the infallibility of the Pope and the pronouncements of the church in such matters. In the long run, however, the result was catechlysmic. (Yes, I realize that I am synthesizing a new word from catechism and cataclysm, but I just could not resist my urge to neologize [Is that even a word?])
Transitioning into the public schools posed my first significant cultural challenge. I entered junior high in the 9th grade, whereas most of the other students had been sharing classes since the 7th grade, if not earlier. My delayed physical development didn’t help, as I hit puberty a couple of years later than the other boys. I was pretty uptight from my Catholic indoctrination about sin. All in all, I was a pretty nerdy kid. My primary refuge and niche in identity was competitive swimming. I kept busy with daily to twice daily workouts on top of my homework, and by my senior year I was on top in the state in my two distance events. I had earned the nickname, “The Machine,” which was even cited in the Tulsa paper. This notoriety may have just made me more visible in school and my nerdiness all the more apparent.
My next major cultural adjustment came with going off to college. Even though Kansas University was less than 200 miles away, it presented a cultural shock, beginning with meeting my roommates. While one was a Catholic varsity swimmer, rather congruent with my background, the other was a Jewish member of the radical SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) from Miami. (Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore – no, wait! We just got here!) The actual adjustment occurred rather gradually, as my major in chemistry my first three years and my participation in varsity swimming kept me busy and my attention focused on culturally neutral topics and activities. Still, I had various classes in humanities which challenged the parochial worldview I had brought with me from Bartlesville. A required course in the seminal writings in Western Civilization and an introductory course in philosophy exposed me to alternative perspectives on the human condition, and a course in cultural anthropology exposed me to the diverse lifestyles of various cultures. A course in the history of the world’s living religions dislodged Christianity, and Catholicism in particular, from the theological center of the universe, at least from my perspective.
My cultural awakening came to a head during my senior year at Kansas. The sixties were now in full swing. Relevance was a key concern, and the study of chemistry just did not seem as relevant as how it was being applied – such as by dropping napalm and Agent Orange over Vietnam, which did not fit my idea of “better living through chemistry.” Just prior to the fall semester, I realized that I could earn a major in psychology, in addition to my major in chemistry, without having to extend my undergraduate education beyond the standard four years. I jumped at the opportunity. After the conclusion of my inauspicious varsity swimming career in late winter, (where I had been a little fish in a medium-sized pond, in contrast to my big-fish-in-a-little-pond days in high school), I had more time and freedom to test the waters of campus politics, which ranged from liberal to radical in those days. I participated in anti-war and civil rights events and appeared before the student conduct board for having participated in an anti-ROTC demonstration. I avoided censure only because I quite literally remained in the bleachers rather than getting down on the playing field to disrupt the ceremony.
My plans for graduate school in social psychology the following year were interrupted by Uncle Sam, who claimed two years of my life, including a nine-month tour in Vietnam. On the basis of my Bachelor’s degree in psychology and on-the-job training, I was given the opportunity to serve as a social work/psychology specialist, thus sparing me the horror of active combat and the moral dilemma of fighting in a war in which I did not believe. Just as I had avoided the forbidden playing field during the college protests, I escaped the battlefield of armed combat in Vietnam. Like most American soldiers in the country, I was in a supportive role, one for which my economically and educationally privileged life had given me an advantage over those less fortunate, yet no less deserving. I did not feel compelled to protest this injustice, though. Nevertheless, the experience of working under psychiatrists and social workers shifted my interest in psychology from the social and political realm to the more personal focus of mental health.
While my transition in studies from chemistry to psychology was rather marked, it was not nearly as challenging as my shift within psychology from academic study to clinical practice, which occurred during my time in the clinical psychology program at the University of Tennessee. This program offered three parallel tracks, according to theoretical school – behavioral, existential, and psychodynamic. While the behavioral school operated within the objective realm of science, with which I had been quite familiar through my academic studies, the existential and psychodynamic approaches presented a more subjective perspective on human functioning. Even these more subjective orientations had their theoretical formulations, toward which I gravitated out of my own familiarity and comfort with objective understanding. I recall how I focused on the conceptual explanations in the texts, skimming through the case studies that provided the specific examples required to bring these rather abstract concepts to life. Back then, I lacked the interest in the particularities of individual experience needed to wade through a biographical account such as this one you are now reading.
My mechanistic understanding of what makes people tick, while perhaps befitting my high school nickname of “The Machine,” had not prepared me for the task of conducting psychotherapy. I grew to realize that therapy was more about healing emotional wounds and fostering growth than about solving problems. I was challenged with the task of relating to emotional distress on a personal level, rather than understanding it from an abstract theoretical perspective. For this understanding, I had to look inward. While science was expanding our bounds into outer space, my calling was to explore inner space. From my cultural background, which encouraged social conformity, and my educational background, that fostered an objective perspective, this was unfamiliar territory – I certainly was not in Kansas anymore. I was much like the Tinman, who sought out the Wizard to find his heart. Of course, our sophisticated world has little room for wizards, so I settled for the next best thing I could find – a psychotherapist. Through this process, I realized I had a more personal reason for shifting my focus within psychology from the social and political to the therapeutic branch of psychology.
Along with my personal quest, I broadened my intellectual exploration to include the humanities, with the practice of psychotherapy being more of an art than a science. In Howard Pollio’s Psychology of Humor graduate course, I learned to appreciate the difference between problem and paradox. Here I was exposed to Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, which identified problems as the proper study of science, whereas paradox provided a central motif for the arts, both comedy and tragedy. In Dan Schneider’s class on early 20th century English literature, I was exposed to the fiction of D. H. Lawrence. While he was notorious for the sensuality in his novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I became intrigued by his exploration of the interplay of subjective and objective modes of experiencing, which he explored through both symbolism and dramatization, decades before this issue was studied in mainstream psychology. These experiences, along with my more traditional psychological courses and practicums, helped me to appreciate the value of subjective understanding, with my coming to recognize it as having a comparable status to objective knowledge, though quite different qualitatively.
Upon returning to campus from my internship at Yale Medical School, I faced my last hurdle for becoming a psychologist – writing my dissertation. In keeping with the American Psychological Association’s scientist-practitioner model for psychological practice, most graduate programs offering Ph.D.s adopted the controlled scientific experiment as the research method of choice (i.e., a quantified difference on the dependent variable between experimental and control groups of subjects needs to reach a level of statistical significance in order to confirm the hypothesis regarding the impact of the independent variable). In some sense, this approach is an attempt to prove what we already know intuitively. More qualitative approaches, such as case studies, were not considered of much use in furthering the general knowledge of human functioning. The psychology department at Tennessee offered such options, though. In particular, Howard Pollio’s phenomenology lab utilized a methodology to study human experiences, such as with time, love, aloneness, and death, from an experiential perspective through in-depth interviews with “normal” people on these subjects. Clinical psychology students found this to present an opportunity to explore existential ideas which were explored in Charlie Cohen’s classes. These approaches offered me sufficient encouragement to propose my psycholiterary study of the issues of developing selfhood as reflected in the fictional writings of D. H. Lawrence. I was fortunate that Harold Fine supported my endeavor in his role as my dissertation chairman, and I proceeded to undertake a project that was intellectually and personally meaningful for me. Through my exploration of Lawrence’s fiction, I came to an understanding that objective and subjective outlooks, while often viewed as opposing viewpoints, actually provide complementary perspectives that are necessary for healthy personal development. I cited Lawrence’s symbolism and narrative to document how integration of these perspectives encourages healthy, realistic selfhood, in contrast to egotistical narcissism at one extreme, and self-reproach at the other. While this is rather heady intellectual stuff, its dramatization in the fictional narrative brought these concepts to life for me in a personally meaningful way. I hope to share this appreciation in my upcoming posts in this area.
Looking back on the unorthodox project, I will note that I only had one table in the work – the table of contents, and that practically all the numbers were in the top right-hand corner of the pages, or were dates and page and volume numbers of cited references. This observation reveals an aspect of my rogue tendencies, that of questioning or challenging the conventional approach and exploring the road less traveled. This path was sidetracked to a considerable degree upon earning my doctorate, when I faced the task of earning a living. I settled into a traditional role of clinical psychologist, first in a community mental health center, then in private practice. I assume that I lost some focus on my particular perspective in settling into the conventional day-to-day world and adopting many of its values and assumptions, often without even questioning them. My rogue tendencies usually stayed underground, with my own particular perspective influencing my work in subtle ways that escaped the notice of others, and perhaps even of myself. On occasion, I wrote therapeutic fables, such as those on this website, to make my points in an allegorical fashion – a rather subversive strategy, as alluded to in President Bush – Lost in Cyberspace: Can You Help Find Him?. Later, my group work with substance abusers presented me with a challenge of articulating my ideas in a way that is personally relevant to those who struggle with such issues in their daily lives. I began writing self-help articles that incorporated my particular perspective on topics such as identity, self-esteem, conflict, and vicious cycle patterns in relationships. I also gave occasional presentations, sometimes to my professional peers, and at other times to the general public. I was coming down from the bleachers and onto the practice field in testing whether my particular perspective passed muster with an audience. It was not until I exercised my freedom to cut back on my clinical hours that I refocused my energies on stating my stand more explicitly and offering it as an alternative to cognitive behaviorism, the self-proclaimed leader in the fields of psychology and mental health.
This abridged autobiography should serve to deepen the reader’s appreciation for the more personal development of the ideas of this rogue psychologist. I present this with some apprehension, out of concern that some analytic types will explain away my insights as a product of a particular experience, rather than recognizing the more universal truths that were clarified through the interplay of subjective experience and objective reflection. On the other hand, I present my development as a rogue psychologist as somewhat of a case study, much as I used D. H. Lawrence’s fiction to shed light on the challenges of developing a viable selfhood. My presenting my ideas on this website represents my effort to move from the practice field to the playing field, with bleachers on both sides. With this format, I have no control over who or how many show up for the game. If the ideas presented here appeal to you, I’d ask you to spread the word. If they evoke a reaction in you, I encourage you to come down onto the field by sharing your comments on the subject, whether you align yourself with one team or another, or have a more neutral reaction.