CHAPTER 3

MIND FIELDS

My father wanted me to become a doctor, or at least a lawyer or a businessman. Something that made money. When it came time for college, I applied to Harvard, but despite my father’s connections, I didn’t get in. Brandeis, where my father’s connections were ironclad—he was still chairman of the board—had a medical school, of course. But Dad didn’t think it fair for me to enroll. Professors would find it too intimidating to grade the chairman’s son.

I attended Tufts University, in Medford, Massachusetts, which was known for premed and engineering and also had a medical school. Medford is just ten miles or so from Newton, and for the first two years, I lived at home, commuting to campus in an old Ford truck I brought from Willenrica. Billy and Len were out of the house by then. It was mostly me and Mother. The outsider feelings I’d harbored in prep school didn’t change much; as a commuter student, it was easy to feel left out of campus life. I enrolled in premed classes but did poorly, flunking biology and organic chemistry.

On the other hand, my feelings of otherness stirred an interest in something else: psychology. The observer stance I’d developed in prep school—what I’d later call the “witness perspective”—made me naturally curious about the study of the mind and behavior. I was used to looking at myself, noticing my thoughts and motivations and trying to assess those of others. Psychology, it seemed to me, offered a systematic way of understanding my inner life.

This was the late 1940s and early ’50s, and psychology was still a relatively new discipline. Though World War II had elevated its status somewhat, as psychology played a part in the war effort, the field was not yet widely appreciated. Psychology itself was dominated either by the ideas of Sigmund Freud, about the compulsions of the unconscious, or by the behaviorist determinism of B. F. Skinner, who studied learning patterns in rats at Harvard with his famous Skinner box, or operant conditioning chamber. Behaviorists focused on observing, measuring, testing, and modifying behavior. The introspective psychology espoused by William James, in which one observed one’s internal phenomena, had been largely pushed aside, and Carl Jung’s more intuitive and anthropological views had yet to gain traction. Neuroscience and psychopharmacology, which focus on the chemical and functional pathways of the brain, were barely emerging, and there was no real model that explained consciousness.

The psychology department at Tufts was tiny, housed in a small building on campus, and it was not much respected. Its professors focused mostly on experimental psychology, in areas like learning and brain function. But there was also a new field called social psychology, or the study of human relations. Within the hierarchy of the department, which ranked “rat psychologists” at the top, social psychology was considered on the margin of science for its lack of measurability. I was intrigued, and not just for intellectual reasons. Given my own precarious social status, I intuited that understanding how people worked would give me power.

Edward M. Bennett was the lone social psychology professor at Tufts; I think the university hired him as a symbolic nod to the new discipline. Nobody else at Tufts knew much about social psychology, and it fell to Bennett to get the university up to speed on contemporary issues. Since social psychology was not considered scientific, he was on the bottom rung of the faculty ladder, viewed as a real oddball.

But I liked him. He was the first person I met who really thought outside the conceptual box. He was a nonconformist, and I found him inspiring. Bennett believed in me and became my mentor, encouraging me to explore my own mind. I learned about looking at myself objectively. When I delved into my ego self, feelings and thoughts bubbled up, and it was exciting to finally have a framework for them. Unlike in my premed courses, I made good grades. I began to apply personality constructs to people around me, seeing psychodynamics and motivations on a new and intuitive level.

This began to give me a sense of control over my life and relationships, which came in handy my junior year, when I joined the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and moved on campus. Going from being a mama’s boy at home to living with my peers was not an easy transition, and I felt nervous and insecure. The fraternity’s president was my roommate. I traded my old truck for a powder-blue Plymouth with a fold-down windshield. Then I applied my charm and psychology insights. In what proved to be an inspired move, I let my new frat brothers borrow an oil immersion microscope I had from one of my biology courses. The guys looked at their moving sperm up close, which was a big hit. In short order, I became an officer in the fraternity.

Even as I found my way, however, I remained self-conscious about my sexuality. One of my frat brothers almost exposed my past. He’d been at Williston, and he threatened to share my reputation for liking boys. I was helped by my brother Leonard, who ran a record store in Harvard Square and knew the guy’s father through his business. He talked to the father, who discouraged the guy from outing me. Meanwhile, I did everything to maintain an acceptable facade. I dated girls, went to all the dances, kidded around with the guys.

But I also began cruising the parks at night, picking up men. This was extremely risky, and not just because of social ostracism. Alfred Kinsey had just published his Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, and the report, which claimed that some 10 percent of American men were homosexual, caused outrage and panic. Homosexuals were thought of as perverts and a threat to society. If I got caught, I could easily get beaten up, thrown in jail, or, worse, killed. I felt some fear, of course, and guilt. But there was also a thrill to it: the tension of the secrecy, the danger of being found out.

I drove down to Texas with some of my frat brothers for a national Alpha Epsilon Pi meeting. We drove straight through in the Plymouth, pedal to the metal. This was before the interstate highway system, and the towns through the rural South were dusty and poor. At the gas stations, a black man or a white guy in overalls would pump the gas for us. I loved that drive. I don’t know how I stayed awake for it. We were running on coffee, cigarettes, whiskey, and adrenaline.

When we got to Dallas, we went to a brothel, or a cat house, as it was called in those days. It wasn’t very clean, and it was my first sex with a woman. I was very unsure of myself. She was older, maybe twenty-four, with light hair and skinny legs. She teased me about my inexperience and awkwardness. I just wanted to get it done. Intercourse felt mechanical, but I managed even in my nervousness. When we all got back to the car and the other guys laughed and shared about their conquests, I realized I’d pulled off a rite of passage.

The guys didn’t notice I had barely anything to say.

Almost every class I took at Tufts as a junior and senior was in psychology or human relations. I studied the earliest stage of social psychology, child development. As Bennett’s protégé, I led the social psych undergrads, a big fish in a small pond.

Choosing social psychology over medicine, over behaviorism, was a big deal. I was putting my chips on people’s inner lives, though I didn’t yet have even a concept of the soul or the spiritual heart. My approach to the world was through the mind: thinking, verbalizing, seeing interpersonal relationships.

I caught a glimpse of people’s deeper selves thanks to a couple of internships that Bennett arranged for me. The summer after my junior year, I worked as a psychological counselor at a camp for diabetic children. Besides counseling the kids, I conducted my first research, measuring the effect of insulin on personality. I felt for these kids, and I discovered that I really enjoyed connecting with them.

After that, I interned at Boston Psychopathic Hospital throughout my senior year and for about six months after graduation. My job was to supervise occupational and recreational therapy for the patients. I was also enlisted to help in a research project, which had me test patients for personality variables and levels of anxiety before and after treatment—how they carried on a conversation, their emotional affect, and so on. Sometimes that treatment was electroshock therapy, and I was recruited to hold patients down for the procedure. Other times, the doctors prescribed a lobotomy. There were not very many good ways to treat mental illness in those days; morphine helped a little, but widespread use of antipsychotics like Thorazine was still a decade off. Doctors turned to lobotomies when nothing else worked.

I was allowed to observe the lobotomy procedure. So was my roommate, the president of our fraternity, who was also an intern. The patient was anesthetized, and then the doctor, using a hammer, inserted an ice-pick-like instrument through the eye socket. Moving the instrument side to side, like a saw, the doctor severed the frontal lobe—associated with behavior and personality—from the rest of the patient’s brain. It was so primitive and medieval that my roommate passed out. Years later, he would become the chief administrator of a big psychiatric hospital, but that day, he nearly upset the whole operation.

After a lobotomy, a patient usually had no personality left. It was as if the personality had died. Because I hung out with patients, helping them with activities before and afterward, I saw this up close. It made me very emotional. I built real relationships and was fond of these people; to see them changed so completely after a lobotomy, basically into vegetables, was deeply distressing. A patient might start out as depressed but heartful, but after a lobotomy, that essence disappeared. He was like a vacant room, zeroed out.

I decided this was barbaric. I did not know much about the soul at that point, and it seemed to me that cutting out a patient’s personality in this way left him with absolutely nothing. In befriending patients, I’d feel empathy and compassion for them in their mental anguish. There had to be better ways, I thought, to help people who were lost in mental or emotional mazes.

I grew so upset about the procedure that I decided to intervene. This wasn’t social psychology theory to me anymore. I took my study results to the head psychiatrist to show how awful and drastic the aftereffects of a lobotomy were. He said he’d look at my notes but insisted that the patients were better off. If I was going to be a good researcher, he admonished, I would need to curb my emotional involvement.

When I tried to speak with the operating doctor, I got the same brush-off. One patient I’d worked with was a construction worker, a nice guy suffering from deep depression. I told the doctor what a good guy he was and pleaded with him not to operate. The doctor told me I didn’t have a medical degree and I should mind my own business. This patient, and my data on him, were part of a research project; he was going ahead. After the lobotomy, the guy had a blank look. He didn’t recognize me or for that matter, himself.

I did my best to focus on my time with patients, but it was hard. One encouraging light was the director of the hospital’s occupational therapy program, a guy named Mac. He was a man full of energy and humor, and he was known around the hospital for how he connected with people. He could cut through a patient’s mindset and show her where she was stuck, what she needed to let go of. He kidded people about their mental illness in a lighthearted, kind way. It made everyone relax and feel like they weren’t hopeless.

Mac was also flamboyantly, exuberantly gay. He had a broad sense of humor that helped him connect with patients and that even extended to his sexuality. Though I was careful to hide my own sexual proclivities, his example helped alleviate some of my shame. I found Mac’s out-front behavior and personal panache admirable. Not only was he not afraid, he used who he was to reach and help other people. I would remember this for a long time.

My father was not pleased by my interest in psychology. He disapproved and tried to think of it as a passing phase. Near the end of my senior year, still hell-bent on my becoming a doctor, he called the president of Tufts, Leonard Carmichael, thinking he could talk some sense into me.

Carmichael summoned me to his office and, without beating around the bush, told me I should go to medical school. In fact, he continued, he was going to make it happen. Looking at me over the stacks of paper on his expansive desk, he picked up the phone and dialed. After a couple of rings, the head of the Tufts University School of Medicine picked up.

“I’ve got George Alpert’s son here,” said Carmichael. “Do you have a place for him in the medical school? His organic chemistry grades aren’t great. Biology is not too terrific either.” He paused, listening and nodding.

Then he hung up.

“Well, that’s that,” he announced. “You’re in.”

I took a breath. “Sir, I wouldn’t go to med school if you paid me. I’m going to be a psychologist.”

Carmichael cocked his head and looked at me carefully. Then, standing up to dismiss me, he said, “You’re making a big mistake, Alpert. You’d be a terrible psychologist.”

Carmichael was himself a psychologist, so he probably thought he knew what he was talking about. The man had good instincts for bureaucratic politics—he went on to become the head of the Smithsonian Institution—and no doubt he thought me foolish for turning down his gesture.

But he was a behavioral psychologist. He didn’t know anything about social psychology. And I resented being “George Alpert’s son,” as if my interests had no bearing. As if the praiseworthy grades and course work I’d finally achieved amounted to nothing. In the social psychology department, I was somebody, and now I was determined to make my own way. I stood up and walked out.

That night, my father and I had a huge blowup. Social psychology was not, he insisted heatedly, a legitimate career. I would not make money, he warned. I would not be successful. I was throwing my future away.

My rebellion felt good. Standing up for myself, against the pressure from my parents and the university president, gave me a sense of confidence and purpose. Dad sent me to Tufts to go to med school, but I was carving out a different path. Psychology was my thing.

I was still an achiever: even as I rebelled against my father, I wanted to prove myself by his measures. I needed a plan. Luckily, before I decided what came next, Bennett approached me with an opportunity. A professor of psychology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut was running a program in achievement motivation research, the study of people’s need and drive for success. He called Tufts to ask if there might be a talented social psychology student graduating who would become his assistant. The professor’s name was David McClelland.

It was the perfect chance to pursue a master’s in psychology. That fall, I moved to Middletown, Connecticut. It was the farthest I’d been from home, and I felt like I was reaching escape velocity from my family’s orbit. I roomed with a German guy, Hans, also a psychology grad student. World War II was still fresh in everyone’s memory, and here I was with a German roommate. I didn’t tell my Jewish parents.

The first year at Wesleyan was intense. I studied hard and didn’t have much of a social life, but I got so anxious around test taking that I did badly on all my exams. This mediocrity made me deeply insecure. I felt like a phony academic, and I was sure everyone would find out.

McClelland helped give me confidence. As his assistant I participated in his experiments in achievement motivation, and I also ran some of them. He was writing a book about his work, to be called Studies in Motivation, which I helped research; it later became widely recognized for championing the psychology of motivation as its own discipline. (Before then psychologists saw motivation as an instinct, like hunger, not an aspect of human behavior worthy of separate study.) McClelland would eventually become well known for his broad body of work on personality and how applying a deeper understanding of it improves both lives and societies. Later in life he’d have a second career as a corporate consultant, applying his theories of human motivation to business.

For all his sharp intellectualism, McClelland—whom I came to know as Dave—was also a patient, tolerant mentor. He cared for me as a person, almost like a father. Away from my family, my adult persona and intellect were just starting to form, and he encouraged me to think and argue for myself. We’d hang out in his living room, discussing his theories on motivation. From my present vantage point, I see human motives as desires and attachments, the seeds of karma that perpetuate the illusion of separation. But back then, we talked about motives as the forces that shape our identity. I was challenged to think about the self in new ways.

This gave me some helpful perspective on my family. Families are such a microcosm for social relations, and I could begin to identify the motivations and needs that drove each of us. My inner work and meditation practice since then have made me even more aware of my drive for power and my need for achievement; this awareness has made it possible to let them go.

My second year, Dave invited me to live with his family. He and his wife, Mary, had a big house in the woods near the university. Foss House, it was called. They had twin boys, Nick and Duncan, and a daughter, Sara. (Another son, Jabez, came later.) The McClellands were generous, relaxed landlords. It was the only family scene I’d been a part of besides my own, and their values were vastly different from those in the Alpert home: less materialistic, more thoughtful.

While Dave introduced me to the rigors of the mind, it was Mary who offered me an inkling of the soul. She was an artist, a painter of animals and mystical, unearthly images—whirling dervishes and the like. She was not a power person. She came from her soul and intuition, a loving presence. She was a different kind of mother, not wrapped up in her children’s identity or success. Though physically delicate, she emanated inner strength. She was a contemplative Quaker and deeply reflective. Mary was the first truly spiritual person I ever met. Dave also had a spiritual side; he was a Quaker too, and it seeped around the edges of his intellect. But it was Mary who opened me to the idea of an inner life.

Their spirituality was nothing like the Jewish rites and rituals I grew up with. When the McClellands invited me to a Quaker meeting, I accepted. I’d never been to a Christian service before. Sitting in the silence was my first taste of anything resembling meditation. It opened a door. The Quaker community held a summer retreat at Yelping Hill, a collection of homes near West Cornwall, Connecticut. It was peaceful and simple and intentional. Because of psychology, I’d started to ask fundamental questions about reality. Thanks to the McClellands, I realized that I was also seeking something more profound about my own being.

Besides my work with Dave, I took classes with Michael Wertheimer, an experimental psychologist who taught me statistics and behaviorism. I also studied with an anthropology professor named David P. McAllester, a deep and soft guy with a love of music; he established Wesleyan’s ethnomusicology department. McAllester was interested in Native American practices like drumming and rituals, and he had spent time with the Hopi and Navajo tribes in the Southwest. His courses broadened my appreciation for the spiritual ethos of other cultures.

I enjoyed what I was learning, but my test anxiety did not improve. It was so paralyzing, in fact, that when it came time for my final oral exam—the one that would grant me my master’s degree—I flunked it. However, Dave McClelland had faith that I understood the material because of all our hours together, and he arranged for me to get my degree anyway. He’d already recommended me as a PhD candidate to a former professor of his, Robert R. Sears, who was the head of the psychology department at Stanford University. I’d gotten my acceptance before I even flunked that final exam.

I drove west to California in the powder-blue Plymouth, from gas station to gas station, on US Route 66. The open skies, the mountains, the towns, the vast landscapes—and the increasing distance from my family—gave me an extraordinary sense of freedom. This was tempered when I arrived at Stanford. With its wide avenues and sprawling buildings, the campus was huge compared to the Little Ivy League of Tufts and Wesleyan. In the psychology hall, I recognized the names on the office doors: these were people whose papers I’d read, giants in the field. I felt like a country boy in the city. This was the big league.

Stanford was a high-level research scene, and in psychology especially, research was the pinnacle of the profession. Bob Sears specialized in the psychology of children, and as his PhD student, I helped both him and his wife, Professor Pauline Sears—or Pat—in their work. Bob was conducting a three-year project to test Freud’s theories about child development. There were two parts, one with parents and one with kids. I served as the faculty interface with the nursery school that was collaborating on the children’s portion.

The research was to investigate whether certain parent-child patterns engendered guilt, as Freud had hypothesized, and I was tasked with designing the study to test this. We built a box and placed a hamster in it. Then we’d bring a kid into the room and tell her that she was responsible for watching over the hamster and keeping it safe in the box. After some minutes, we’d use a remote control from outside the room to trigger a false bottom in the box, and the hamster would disappear. We’d then observe the kids’ reactions through a one-way mirror, noting their distress levels—some of them got very upset—and whether they lied about the hamster’s whereabouts afterward.

Those poor kids! We tricked them. I’m so embarrassed when I think about doing this. The experiment appears in Identification and Child Rearing, a major psychology text that Sears published about ten years later; he was the primary author, but both I and another faculty member, Lucy Rau, included our research and served as coauthors. I consider the experiment a cruel lapse: abuse in the name of science. Deceiving these children was a breach of ethics. I recently read about a study that tests kids for empathy and compassion; now that’s a good experiment. It turns out kids have innate compassion to a remarkable degree.

Part of my original attraction to psychology had been to better understand my family, in particular my relationship with Mother. Freudian psychology, of course, focuses a lot on child development and mother-infant relations. Sears knew a Freudian psychoanalyst in Palo Alto and connected us. I decided to undergo Freudian analysis myself.

Freudian psychoanalysis was going mainstream: Time magazine put Freud on its cover in the spring of 1956. But I wasn’t doing it just for personal insight. Clinical psychology was becoming a vocation, a valid part of social psychology. After my experience at Boston Psychopathic, I believed therapy might spare people from such horrors as lobotomies. I was interested in learning about approaches that restored patients without medical intervention. I marched into Stanford’s counseling center and announced that I wanted to study clinical psychology and work as a therapist. I was accepted with the condition that, as part of my training, I undergo psychoanalysis myself, which I already planned to do.

Freudian psychoanalysis was a further education in witnessing—in observing the workings of the mind, as I’d already been practicing—in a profoundly personal way. My ego was observing itself as a thinking mind and seeing my analyst’s ego caught up in his role as psychiatrist. Though I couldn’t articulate it then, what was missing was the soul.

Years later, having someone see my soul and love me fully would change my life. But then, lying on that analyst’s couch, what I was most aware of were undercurrents of manipulation and power. If I made a comment that prompted the therapist to make a note—well, aha! I learned what comments would prompt more scribbling. It was an endless game. I’d challenge the therapist on applying Freudian principles and try to provoke him with statements about, say, his wife. He would just scribble some more. “You hired me so I wouldn’t make comments,” he told me. “I have nothing to say, and now you’re mad at me.” I really disliked the guy.

Working as a therapist myself proved much more rewarding. My training at the counseling center was supervised by a woman who let me practice while I was still learning. I’d envisioned therapy as a sideline, but I really got into it. Students came in for help, and it was satisfying to feel like I held a few keys that could unlock answers for people who were suffering. I remained mixed up about power and love—I still yearned for recognition and achievement, still thought of love as something I had to earn and wield—but I recognized something deep in those connections.

My first patient was Victor Lovell, a graduate student in psychology. He also wrote pornographic novels. I was a very spit-and-polish guy then, with papers and plants on my desk. Vic would come in, put his boots up on the desk, and nudge the plants as close to the edge as possible just to provoke me.

Vic introduced me to pot. He also introduced me to his friends, a group of academics, writers, and freewheeling artists who lived just off campus on Perry Avenue. The street was a block long, with several cottages packed in, and everyone called it Perry Lane. Marijuana and all manner of new ideas wafted freely. I got invited to parties and, over time, became a therapist for others on the street: the unofficial shrink of Perry Lane. I met Ken Kesey, a graduate student in creative writing who would, some years later on Vic’s suggestion, participate in a series of government-sponsored psychopharmacology experiments and write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Psychoanalysis took me inside. On the outside, my academic career was faltering. I wasn’t big on research, and research at Stanford was paramount. I was weak in statistics and experimental design, and though I liked working with kids, I felt tests and number crunching offered only a snapshot of reality. The data we worked with was supposed to be statistically significant, but in actuality, we wrote off a big part of it as “error.” Anything I’d now consider spiritual fell into this error category. For all the supposedly objective science we were doing, I couldn’t shake the feeling that our research was engineered. We were all in a race to find the best data to fit our theories.

What I loved was teaching. As a grad student, I was assigned to grade papers and hold office hours for one of the sections in Psychology 101. It was a seminar of about thirty undergrads, but I developed such good rapport with the students that after several semesters I was put in charge of the other graduate teaching assistants in psychology.

As at Wesleyan, I was terrified people would find out how little I actually knew, but I discovered that connecting with audiences brought out my charismatic, confident self—the self that had once loved being the emcee for music nights at Willenrica and delivering Dad’s speech at Williston. I was funny and warm, with a knack for explaining things in accessible ways. I still didn’t know much, but I was popular.