I was born in the Middle West just in time to start seventh grade when
the post-sputnik wave of educational hysteria was engulfing American
education. The result was that I received an excellent background in
physical sciences, foreign languages (including Russian), and so forth,
all designed to make me a good bomb-building nuclear physicist.
Fortunately, it didn't take. I had always been interested in reading
about other societies (Native Americans, archeological studies, etc.),
but my fate was sealed when I was eleven, and read two books, one called
"Four Ways of Being Human," and the other "Primitive Peoples Today." I
decided immediately to become a cultural anthropologist (now that I knew
such people existed), and my mental development was shaped by Clyde
Kluckhohn, Ashley Montagu and many of the other humanists of the
'forties and 'fifties - anthropologist and non-anthropologist. I also
spent three years in extra-curricular dramatics, learning about being
human in ways which AP science courses weren't meant to teach.
After high school I deliberately took two years off in order to find out
what the world is really like. I did - and found out when I started
Boston U. in anthropology that neither academia nor the Sixties reaction
to it meant anything to me, so I did the obvious thing - and went to
Israel to live on a kibbutz. Oddly enough, I soon found myself at
Hebrew University in Chinese Studies and anthropology. However, I became
observant, got married, and dropped out. After returning to the States
I spent ten years as a "full-time homemaker," then a "displaced
homemaker" finishing a two-year degree in computer programming.
After moving to New York twelve years ago I created, on a volunteer
basis, an education/counseling program for Eastern European Orthodox
families of Alzheimer's patients, which put me squarely in the middle of
a high-stakes real-life cross-cultural collision, but successfully
created a program for a population which the official people had assured
me were "in denial" and could never be reached. Sure -
sixty-five-year-old Holocaust survivors aren't going to take the subway
at night to the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I ran the first meeting in
Brooklyn - and got forty people, many of them Old-World-style Chassidim.
At this point I thought about going into medical social work and went
back to school at Brooklyn College in psychology. I started reading
cross-cultural psychology and psychiatry, and eventually wrote a senior
thesis on cross-cultural issues in psychotherapy for Dr. Ching-tse Lee, a
Taiwan-born member of our faculty who has switched from a traditional
experimental paradigm to researching and practicing traditional Chinese
medical modalities, as well as biofeed-back and general behavioral
medicine. I am now a grad student in his lab, almost but not quite the
oldest student in the program and, somewhat confusingly, in the same age
group as most of our faculty. My "official" work is in behavioral
treatment of chronic pain and associated psychological/cultural issues,
and I describe myself as being in "cross-cultural behavioral medicine,"
for the sake of those who need labels.
The person whose influence was pivotal in my current phase of life was
Frances L.K. Hsu, whose work led to many other topics and people. I
also have parallel interests in Russian/Soviet psychology, starting with
Luria and branching out. (I am currently researching a paper to compare
cultural influences on theory development and choice of research topic in
American, Russian and, possibly, Chinese psychologists.) Besides Mike
Cole I am also in touch with Michael Bond, and a great admirer of his
and David Ho's work, especially the collectivism-individualism discussion
and Uichol Kim's group. Anthony Marsella is also someone who has ongoing
and valued input for my development.
Post-modernism is a recent discovery for me, originally through
literature on the cultural construction of medicine, and I am still not
quite sure what some of the basic issues are. It seems to me that some
may be high-abstraction interpretations of concepts from cultural
anthropology that I have always taken for granted. Also, (possibly
because I am a hereditary and incurable "leftie") I tend to "think with
my hands," to want to get a real-world operational description of a
concept, since, as I tell people, "My brain is installed sideways."
What most other people take for granted can be opaque to me, and I make
jumps which are obvious to me but which other people may take many steps
to do. What this means in terms of discourses about discourse is that I
am "semantically challenged," and frequently emit anguished cries for
definitions of what other people may see as elemental, so please bear
with me if I seem dense at times.
I am especially seeking to develop contacts with psychologists in or from
the former Soviet Union or who are of Chinese background. I have many
personal friends who are Russian speaking, more or less speak myself,
have a fondness for the culture, particularly poetry and music, and have
just taught my computer to speak Russian on the net (courtesy of Vadim
Maslov and Sovinformburo). Unfortunately, I no longer read Chinese, so
I am not trying to educate it in that language.
I am looking forward very much to being part of XMCA. I have met Joe
Glick in person, entirely by serendipity, and am in the same building
with Jay Lemke, but outside of that I know exactly two people in my FTF
group with whom I can talk. I can really appreciate the Talmudic
statement on the necessity of having colleagues: "Companionship or
death!" Unlike Rabbi Choni, however, I seem to have found a "simpati"
group.
Motto: "Interdisciplinarity is the wave of the future - not to mention
the present."