Part 1

The American Psychological Association is the main national organization for psychologists, comparable to the American Medical Association for physicians. I've been a member for years, but never attended an annual conference. This year, the conference was in Chicago, so I had to go! There were hundreds of programs packed into five full days--a saturation experience that extended beyond the conference itself. Everyday events suddenly seemed full of psychological meaning, as if life itself was demonstrating the ideas I was thinking about because of the conference. Even the behavior of psychologists themselves seemed to speak to me in the language of psychology--and not always because they meant it to.

The APA conference was huge! Based in the Hyatt Regency Hotel on East Wacker in Chicago, it spilled over into the adjacent Fairmont Hotel, went north to the Sheraton on North Michigan, and south to the Palmer House Hilton. There were literally thousands of psychologists attending from across America and abroad, and the catalog of programs was as large as the near north suburban telephone directory. Psychology is a vast discipline, represented by 50 or more divisions within the APA. They include Experimental Psychology, Clinical Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology, Pediatric Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and on and on. The first page of the catalog was a letter of congratulations from Bill Clinton: "You are helping to create a brighter and healthier future for us all."

The hotels are among Chicago's finest, and I hardly ever get to them, so I thoroughly enjoyed just being there. Most of the sessions I attended were at the Palmer House Hilton, where I luxuriated in the splendid lobby, wading through the catalog under a ceiling evoking the aura of an oriental palace. At the bar over the lobby at the Hyatt Regency, I sipped Weiss beer while enjoying the spectacular view through its wall of windows, and watching the endless variety of guests and conference-goers below. A bored waitress, blaming her neglect on "too many people," provided a psychology lesson herself. The two waitresses weren't enough to work the room efficiently, but they moved as if in a trance. Seeing the part of a problem that life is causing us, but not the part that we are causing ourselves, is typical human psychology.

Walking from the Monroe Street Garage--the best parking bargain in town, unknown to the out-of-town drivers who parked at hotel rates--between the hotels, I passed hundreds of walkers with the distinctive blue and white APA convention name tags. Although I didn't know them, I felt a relationship with them, for all of us were trying to find better ways for people to live through a knowledge of human nature and behavior. But perhaps this feeling was illusory: the history of psychology as an organized discipline is riven with conflict and the rise and fall of dogma; which some of the presentations, in fact, referred to. A homeless man, reading my name tag, greeted me by name. How much relationship do we really have, I wondered, when we really don't know each other and only recognize one another by a badge?

Well, I've never seen so many psychologists in one place at one time. This profession didn't even exist at the turn of the century, yet now helps to define the culture in which it evolved. But you wouldn't know it from most of the writing in the psychological journals, which is so unnecessarily technical and rigidly stylized that it makes even this most fascinating of subjects deadly boring. An exception to this is the writing of Yale's Robert Sternberg, one of the most productive of modern psychologists and one who, unlike many of his colleagues, can write lucid and accessible prose. Speaking on "Applying First World Psychology to Third World Problems," Sternberg said that there's more to intelligence than psychologists sometimes think, especially when they're looking at third world people. He has a "triarchic" theory of intelligence, which he sees as consisting of practical, analytic, and creative processes. What we in the first world usually call intelligence is mostly the analytic type, so we fail to recognize the abilities that others have for coping practically and creatively with the necessities and realities of their lives. Sternberg described a study of children in Kenya, as an example of this. Children who spoke their native language did relatively poorly in school, which was taught in English, but knew a great deal about the properties of local plants, which had medicinal and other uses. Other Kenyan children, who spoke English at home and did better in school, hardly knew anything about plants. So which children are more intelligent? It isn't that one kind of intelligence is better than the other--both academic learning and knowledge of plants have their uses. The point is that when we define "intelligence" in too limited a way, we miss a great deal of the real intelligence that people have, and need to be able to use, in different situations.

Ever since I first read about Sternberg's concept of "practical intelligence," I'd wanted to ask him a question, so I was glad of the opportunity when he took questions after his talk. In my work with adults with learning disabilities, I said, I'd noticed that some people who had had great difficulty in school may go on to be quite successful in life, in business for instance, using abilities that don't show up on standardized tests. Was this an example of what he referred to as "practical intelligence?" "Exactly," he said, "Our results are the same as yours."

Next I was privileged to hear the University of Chicago's distinguished brain scientist, Jerre Levy, a student of Nobel prize winner Roger Sperry, and a pioneer in the research that demonstrated the specialization of the two "halves of the brain," as they are called; the left and right cerebral hemispheres. Levy took us through a guided tour of the history of brain science, from Hippocrates--who understood that the brain was the seat of intelligence--through the next 2000 years or so, in which the brain was completely forgotten, until the discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries that produced the modern explosion of information about brain function. She detailed current information about how the two hemispheres work together in their separate ways to construct our experience of reality. Levy was optimistic about the possibilities of humanity's learning to behave more lovingly, courageously, helpfully: "If you behave long enough, you become what you behave."

After a late lunch at an outdoor table at a sandwich shop on Michigan, I walked up to the Fairmont to hear the University of Miami's Annette M. La Greca, president of the Society of Pediatric Psychology, discuss "Research in Pediatric Psychology." Under the subtitle, "What's Hot and What's Not," she presented a set of recommendations to her colleagues about what kinds of studies would help to develop the field, and which kinds to avoid.

Next it was over to the Hyatt Regency and down three flights into the subterranean exhibit area, where books and tests galore, and some biofeedback equipment and computer software, were on display and for sale. I ordered a copy of the brand new edition of the Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale, the national standard in individually administered intelligence tests and absolutely necessary for any psychologist who does testing, never mind that it uses the word "intelligence" in a more limited way than we now understand it. Then I looked at some biofeedback equipment, and purchased a most interesting book by the Vanderbilt Emerita professor and international cross-cultural communications consultant von Raffler-Engel on The Perception of the Unborn Across the Cultures of the World. I was immediately drawn to her lucid and thoughtful writing, and as far as I could tell at first glance she has no ax to grind, but was taking a close look at a vital subject that we don't usually think about. Another psychology lesson: the important things are often both obvious and invisible.

On Saturday morning I saw clients, and so didn't get to the conference until noon, missing "Sexual Harassment in the Military--the 1995 Department of Defense Study," "Applying Vocational Psychology to the School-to-Work Transition," and "Internet and Equity in Education," among dozens of other choices. I arrived just on time for "Reflections on the History of Division 6 (Behavioral Neuroscience and Comparative Psychology)", and was rewarded by a fascinating account of the formation of the division, many years ago, amongst heated political infighting and bitter personal and professional mud-slinging. Now this is what we like in Chicago: gloves off, cut through the professional veneer, and tell us what really happened! Well, it was juicy. Here's one of the great names of academic and organized psychology (which I won't give, but the presenter did), standing on the balcony at an APA Council meeting, railing at the psychologists studying brain function who wanted to form a new Division because their research was consistently refused publication in the Experimental Division journal of the time. When the leader of the brain researchers pointed out that the Great Man's own former graduate students, now teachers and researchers in their own right, had signed the petition for the new Division, he said something to the effect that "You can teach them but you can't help it if they can't think." The Great Man's attack was so personal and vitriolic that, paradoxically, it supported the claims of the brain scientists that their work couldn't get a fair hearing within the Experimental Division, and their petition for a division of their own within APA was approved. Today, much of our understanding about the structure and function of the brain is due to the work of these scientists and their colleagues.

End of Part 1