He smiled at me. “You’re going to be fifty anyhow,” he said.
In the next six years, I discovered that my principal and my Jungian
therapist were both right. ere was no reason to limit myself, to let
my age restrict my choices. I listened to what my life was asking of me,
and in 1974 I earned an MA in educational psychology from the
University of Texas–El Paso, and in 1978 a PhD in clinical psychology
from Saybrook University.
* * *My academic journey introduced me to the work of Martin Seligman
and Albert Ellis, and brought me inspiring teachers and mentors in
Carl Rogers and Richard Farson, all of whom helped me to understand
parts of myself and my own experience. Martin Seligman, who later
founded a new branch of our ĕeld called Positive Psychology, did
some research in the late 1960s that answered a question that had
nagged at me since liberation day at Gunskirchen in May 1945: Why
did so many inmates wander out of the gates of the camp only to
return to the muddy, festering barracks? Frankl had noted the same
phenomenon at Auschwitz. Psychologically, what was at work to make
a liberated prisoner reject freedom?
Seligman’s experiments—which were done with dogs and
unfortunately preceded current protections against cruelty to animals
—taught him about the concept he called “learned helplessness.”
When dogs who were given painful shocks were able to stop the
shocks by pressing a lever, they learned quickly to stop the pain. And
they were able, in subsequent experiments, to ĕgure out how to escape
painful shocks administered in a kennel cage by leaping over a small
barrier. Dogs who hadn’t been given a means to stop the pain,
however, had learned the lesson that they were helpless against it.
When they were put in a kennel cage and administered shocks, they
ignored the route to escape and just lay down in the kennel and