The Making of a Rogue Psychologist
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.
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 downscale Oklahoma version of the John
Birch Society. Sen. 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. I was a pretty nerdy kid. My
primary refuge and niche in identity was competitive swimming. I kept busy with twice a day 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 varsity swimmer, the other was of 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 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, on top of 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 nine months 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 required 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 of 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 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 more personal realm of clinical 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: 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 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. Howard Pollio’s phenomenology lab utilized a methodology to study human experiences, such
as love 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 demonstrate 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.
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. 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, but at other
times to the general public. I was coming down from the bleachers and onto the practice field in testing
the waters to see if my perspective would float. 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 trepidation, out of concern
that some analytic types will explain away my insights in relative, personal terms, 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 a 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 on the field by sharing
your outlook of the subject, whether you align yourself with one team or another, or have a more
neutral reaction.