The Autobiography of a Marginal Psychologist: As Much as I Like Bob
In my youth I decided to become a scholar so &hellip; I studied Language and it made me realize it was not communication.
I studied History and it made me realize how few people actually remembered it.
I studied Law and it made me distrust language.
I studied Politics and it made me angry at the irresponsibility of its leaders.
I studied The Media and it helped me understand the insidious power of misinformation.
I observed people Dying and it helped me understand the importance of purposeful living.
I studied Ethics and it helped me understand how important it was to let right be done.
So then I studied and became a Psychologist only to find out how difficult it was to understand myself.
Call me Max.
I know that that's an unusual way of introducing myself since I have not changed my name. I was born Robert Rieber and as Robert Rieber I will die. But we can have other names, too, that we adopt because of the personal meaning that inheres in them. In my case the name comes from a famous short story by Somerset Maugham entitled Mr. Know-It-All. The story takes place on an ocean liner making its way from San Francisco to Yokohama (through Eaden on the gulf coast) in the 1920s. Because of shortage of accommodations, the unnamed narrator of the story is obliged to share a cabin with a man named Max Kelada, the Mr. Know-It-All of the title. The narrator makes no secret of his disdain for his roommate who, we learn, is "dark-skinned, with a fleshy hooked nose." Max seems to know about everything under the sun.
The narrator and Max are seated together at mealtimes, sharing the same table with an American diplomat named Ramsay and his pretty wife. The couple, we learn, is rarely together; she stays in New York, while he carries out his diplomatic responsibilities in Kobe, Japan. The subject of cultured pearls comes up one evening over dinner. Max is an expert; he buys and sells cultured pearls for a living. To test him, Ramsey asks Max to judge the value of his wife's pearl necklace. With his practiced eye Max declares that it is worth at least GBP30,000, maybe more. Ramsay scoffs; Max, he says, is mistaken because he knows for a fact that his wife bought the necklace for GBP18 at a New York department store. They make a wager of GBP100. Ramsay removes the necklace for closer inspection. But Max has no doubt; the pearls are quite genuine, and the necklace is worth a small fortune. "He was about to speak," the narrator recounts, referring to Max. "Suddenly he caught sight of Mrs. Ramsay's face. It was so white that she looked as though she were about to faint. She was staring at him with wide and terrified eyes. They held a desperate appeal; it was so clear that I wondered why her husband did not see it."
Max intuits that the pearls were a gift from a lover and that to reveal the truth would wreak havoc in their marriage. So he lies and admits that he has lost the bet; the necklace could not possibly be worth more than GBP18, he says, handing Ramsay GBP100. Everyone on board hears about the incident and thinks that Max has gotten his comeuppance. But the narrator knows the truth. Grudgingly, he has to acknowledge to him that Max is not quite as bad as he had originally thought. In doing so, he says to him, "Mr. Kelada, you are an honorable man," and Kelada responds, "Call me Max."
The Evolution of an Outsider
I grew up in Philadelphia in the thirties and forties, the youngest son of hardworking Jewish immigrants who came from what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Like most new immigrants, my parents were looking for a piece of the American dream. After much hardship, they started a hairdressing salon, which proved a fortuitous choice. The business flourished even during the depths of the Depression. Because my parents, as well as my parents' family, did not trust banks and steered clear of the stock market, they did not lose their savings in the crash as so many others did. They were even able to maintain a large house over the store and to hire a maid who acted, more or less, in the capacity of a nanny.
Because my siblings -- one brother (who died in a veteran's hospital after World War II) and two sisters -- were all considerably older, I was raised almost as if I were an only child. My older sister, Francis, was extremely important in helping in my early development, particularly toward my intellectual career. She not only gave me my first book and was a kind of role model for my future career (she was a history teacher), but she also was extremely important in assisting my mother in bringing me up when my father died after I turned twelve. One of my grade school teachers, who was quite fond of me, Miss Titus, told my mother that I was "rotten." Mother apologized to her, saying she knew she spoiled her little boy, but Miss Titus responded, "Nonsense, Mrs. Rieber, he's not spoiled at all, and he's just plain rotten." Subsequently, my mother found this so amusing that she repeated the line at every opportunity, especially to her family when they criticized her for spoiling me.
The Three Faces of the Scholar
I have always held that a scholar has three faces: one is what he writes, one is what he says publicly, and one is what he says in private. In many instances -- certainly when the person is dead -- we only have one or at the most two faces. Generally speaking, there is no way of knowing what William James meant, for instance, except through his writing. We are not privy to what he said to his friends or to what he thought, so we have to extrapolate from the words he left behind on the page.
But a scholar's writings do not always reveal the truth about what was really going through his mind. Here is a wonderful example of what I am referring to: in the 1980s, I attended a conference of the International Society for Cross-Cultural Psychology in Istanbul. One of the issues that came up at the conference (and has been resurfacing ever since without any resolution) is the question of whether there is such a thing as an indigenous psychology. That is to ask, is there a psychology peculiar to a culture or is there a pan-cultural psychology that is the standard for all places and all cultures? Having worked on a book with several colleagues about this subject in relation to Asian psychology, I was particularly interested in a lecture that was to be given by a Nigerian psychologist on that particular topic. Since many of those in attendance were inclined to favor the pan-cultural approach, I was sure that an African would embrace a position in favor of an indigenous psychology. To my surprise, though, the professor gave such a passionate presentation supporting pan-psychology that it shocked me and many others in the audience as well.
Although I did not have a chance to discuss his position with him after the talk, I assumed that he must have been heavily influenced by a British psychologist and that was why he had taken the stance that he had. Fifteen years later, though, I discovered that I was mistaken. I was attending another conference of The International Society for Cross-Cultural Psychology, this time in Warsaw, when I was approached by a Nigerian student who had heard I was from New York and wanted to find out how to obtain financial support so he could study there. I was especially interested in learning whether the same senior professor was working in Nigeria.
Manufacturing Social Distress
Ever since I had read Eric Fromm's The Sane Society I had been preoccupied by the way in which society can become sick and how the symptoms of the disease actually manifest themselves; and I decided to write a book that would focus on "the psychology of malefaction." I was convinced that the problems that Fromm had identified in his book paled in comparison to those that were bedeviling society four decades later. The problems had changed a great deal in the interim and I believed that a different approach was required to address them. One of the phenomena I was anxious to explore was the prominent role that the psychopath played in society and how psychopaths were depicted, even glorified in pop culture. Could a person actually be evil? I recall meeting Harry Murray while I was exploring the phenomenon of the psychopath. He had an interest in the subject himself and told me that if I wanted to find out more about psychopaths I should read Whittaker Chambers' Witness. He said it was the best book on psychopathy. Harry should know since he had served as an expert witness in the Alger Hiss case in which Chambers was the most prominent witness for the prosecution. The jury did not pay any attention to Harry's testimony, though. At first I could not quite understand why Harry wanted me to read Chambers' book. When Murray had said he read Witness by Chambers, I did not realize why. Then I understood: Whittaker Chambers was not just writing about psychopaths; he was a psychopath and if I wanted to gain a good understanding of what goes on in the mind of one there were few better examples. I also realized that the reason that Harry wanted me to consider the Chambers book was because he was the expert witness for Alger Hiss and as we all know Harry lost the case and Chambers won. My book, which was the study of social psychopathology in world culture, Manufacturing Social Distress, appeared in 1997. I later wrote another book, which was based on the original Manufacturing Social Distress, entitled Psychopaths in Everyday Life (Rieber, 2004). In the conclusion, I wrote, "Normalized psychopathology in high places, in my view, is largely the result of social distress as it has become institutionalized in the emerging world culture. Put simply, the psychopathology of everyday life will continue to prevail until we cease to be proud of those things of which we should be ashamed."
Rieber's Gang
Rieber's "gang" is a phrase that Jerry Bruner branded us with back in the 1980s when I started an informal gathering of a group of old friends and colleagues to meet for dinner at Columbia University club to discuss our mutual interest. From time to time we would ask a guest to join us, Jerry was one of our first guests, and after the meeting ended he referred to us affectionately as Rieber's "gang." I suppose unconsciously, I had in mind a group that had existed in the late nineteenth century (Menand, 2001). This group referred to itself ironically and half-defiantly, as the metaphysical club. Among the members were Oliver Wendel Holmes Jr., John Fisk, Charles S. Peirce, Chauncy Wright, and William James. A similar group also existed in England approximately at the same time. These groups tend to last for about ten years and then gradually fade away; our group had the same fate. But during its active and fruitful lifetime, it provided a most stimulating and rewarding floor for all of us. The regular members were myself, Herbert Spiegel, Joe Jaffe, Tom Langner, Zvi Lothane, Jason Brown, Maurice Green, and William Stewart. We had many more irregulars who tended to show up much less frequently. Our meetings averaged once a month and for the most part consisted of enjoying a wonderful buffet dinner at which time we exchanged lot of information about ourselves, our work as well as the current rumors that were going around about the politics of professional and personal lives.