| |
| |
| |
| |
“I get up every morning determined to both change the world and have one hell of a good time. Sometimes this makes planning the day difficult.”
—E.B. White
From a very early age I have been blessed (and cursed) with a penchant for seeing what could be improved in the world. Usually unwilling to “suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,” I have more often than not been willing to “take arms against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.”
In high school I was a “science brain,” what is now called a “nerd” on this side of the pond, and I went on to college at Caltech, studying chemistry in order to better humanity by unravelling the secrets of the genetic code—at that time something far beyond our reach, but now frighteningly close at hand. I have often been grateful for the rigorous foundation in the hard sciences and mathematics that I learned there.
One of these understandings is the philosophy of “radical empiricism” described by Karl Popper and Hans Vaihinger that is the basis of all the sciences. Briefly put, it is the understanding that there is no “truth,” or how things “really are,” only “useful lies,” descriptions of the world that are more or less useful to us most of the time. If we are clever enough, or lucky enough, we will discover understandings that fit with each other reasonably well for a while—until better, or more comprehensive, or more detailed, understandings are developed.
About half-way through college I began exploring psychology and literature as more promising ways to learn more about humanity. In 1958 I went to graduate school at Brandeis, where Abe Maslow had a little island of pseudo-sanity in the swamp of psychology. It is hard to remember what a wasteland the field was forty years ago. Essentially there was either behaviorism or Freud, and about the only thing they agreed upon was that if you loved someone, it was because they resembled your mother (or father). At that time there were a few other pioneering voices besides Maslow crying out in the wilderness (Angyal, Barron, Frankl, Fromm, Kubie, Perls, Rogers, Satir, Schachtel). They are now dead and all but forgotten, but their legacy lives on in the wide variety of broader and more human approaches that are being explored and experimented with today.
After two years of graduate school, the only way I could avoid doing research on rats was to drop out. After a year working as a chemist, I taught psychology in Junior college for the next seven years—very badly at first, but over the years I learned a bit about teaching. While I was teaching, my mother, Barry Stevens, wrote Person to Person, adding her own unprofessional commentary to professional psychology papers that she thought were particularly interesting, by Carl Rogers and students of Rogers. After a number of rejections from publishers, I decided to publish the book myself in 1967, and Real People Press was born. I found myself with several thousand books in my garage, and a hobby job that eventually became my major source of support, as other books followed.
| |
| |
| |
| |
