Seymour Sarason, Community Psychology Founder and School Reformer, Dies at 91

The following a letter written by Prof. Rhona Weinstein of UC Berkley to the Community Psychology community does more justice to the life of this visionary than anything I could write:

Psychologists and educators across the world mourn the death of a visionary giant in both fields and a beloved mentor, Seymour B. Sarason, professor emeritus of psychology at Yale University.  He died on Thursday, January 28, 2010 at age 91 in New Haven.

Called father of community psychology and dean of educational reform, Sarason joined the Yale faculty in 1945 and taught generations of students for five decades until his retirement in 1989. At that time, his work was celebrated in a special issue of the American Journal of Community Psychology (1990, volume 3). Enormously prolific, he published 45 books and 66 articles in diverse fields impacting human development (see http://seymoursarason.com). His last book "Centers for Endings: The Coming Crisis in the Care of Aged People" written about his experiences in residential care communities, will be published this year

In "Psychology in Community Settings" (1966) co-authored with Levine, Goldenberg, Cherlin, and Bennett, Professor Sarason defined the field of community psychology. Written about the Yale Psycho-Educational Clinic, which he founded and directed from 1961-1970, this work ushered in a paradigm shift for clinical psychology, engendering much controversy.

Earlier an expert in mental retardation and atypical development ("Psychological Problems in Mental Deficiency" now in its fourth edition, 1969), test anxiety ("Anxiety in Elementary School Children" 1960), and projective tests ("The Clinical Interaction" 1954), Sarason turned away from commonly held assumptions.  He urged psychology to partner with education, instead of medicine and the medical model ("Psychology Misdirected" 1981; "American Psychology & Schools" 2001).  He shifted thinking from deficit analysis to nurturing potential, from treatment to prevention, from seeing problems in individuals to the role of social settings, from expert to collaborative partner, and from individual change to social change.

With remarkably vivid examples, Professor Sarason gave us a conceptual frame and language for understanding the qualities of social settings that hinder human development and the challenges that confront social and institutional change, sensitive to historical context ("The Culture of the School and the Problem of Change" printed in 1971, 1982, and 1996). Sarason opened new lines of study, such in "The Creation of Settings and Future Societies" in 1972, "The Psychological Sense of Community: Prospects for a Community Psychology" in 1974, and "Human Services and Resource Networks" in 1977.  And he called us to social action in schools, in communities, and in society at large.

An incisive critic of educational reform, Sarason's contributions remain seminal.  School culture, productive learning, teacher preparation, political governance, parent involvement, and charter schools are among the issues he addressed with clarity and wisdom in too many books to name here.  He spoke his mind freely, issuing "Letters to a Serious Education President" twice in 1993 and 2006. His most recent collaboration was with physicist Stanislaw Glazek in a book called "Productive Learning: Science, Art, and Einstein's Relativity in Educational Reform" published in 2007.

His books were classics and read like novels, as he was a keen social critic who wrote fully in his own voice. He published his autobiography in 1988 ("The Making of an American Psychologist") and a novel "St. James and Goldstein at Yale" in 2005.

Beyond the remarkable legacy left in his written work is the impact he had on his students, his colleagues, a community of individuals who sought his counsel until his dying days, and a legion of schools and programs that benefited from his analysis — across the country and worldwide. With his door always open, his stance ever welcoming, Sarason created that context for productive learning about which he wrote.  And all who came into contact with him learned beyond their imagination, put into action programs that developed human potential, and fell in love with his kind and caring ways.

Sarason earned his undergraduate degree from Rutgers (then the University of Newark) in 1939. His Ph.D. in clinical psychology was awarded from Clark University in 1942. Among many honors, Professor Sarason was the recipient of three honorary degrees and six distinguished contributions awards, including Distinguished Contributions to Community Psychology (SCRA) and the Lifetime Contribution to the Public Interest Gold Medal from the American Psychological Foundation.  The Seymour B. Sarason Award for Community Research and Action was established in 1993 by SCRA and the American Psychological Association to recognize individuals working in the conceptually demanding, creative, and groundbreaking tradition of Sarason.

His wife of 50 years, Esther Kroop Sarason predeceased him in 1993. He leaves a daughter Julie Sarason, her husband Paul Feuerstein, a grandson Nathaniel, a brother Irwin Sarason and sister-in-law Barbara,  a brother-in-law Dr. Irving Kroop and wife Eugenia, and companion Irma Janoff Miller.

Contributions in memory of Sarason can be made to the Sarason Award Fund. SCRA: Sarason Fund
c/o Professor Fabricio Balcazar
Department of Disability and Human Development
University of Illinois at Chicago
1640 W. Roosevelt Road, Suite 436 IIDD.MC 626
Chicago, IL 60608

Blaming the Victim: The "Catch-22" of Trauma

The U.S. military surrendered today, accepting for the first time the claims of thousands of combat veterans that they are finally, if you will, "crazy enough" for the army to care about. This seems like the right time to dust off an old, overused metaphor, if only out of solidarity for our young, overworked troops. 


Joseph Heller's eponymous "Catch-22" is an exasperating legal clause that keeps his protagonist, Yossarian, stuck in a war zone in which the ever-increasing mission requirements keep any soldier from being sent home. To escape the risk of being killed on the battlefield, after watching a friend die in his arms, Yossarian tries to get discharged by convincing the army that he is insane. The "Catch" is that it's the army that gets to decide if he is sane or not—the same army that is trapping him indefinitely to fight its gruesome war—and to them, if he is sane enough to claim insanity to avoid the line of fire, then he is too sane for discharge. 


For the last six years, our own, "real life," military has been pushing traumatized soldiers into an illogical double-bind of its own in which traumatized soldiers were considered too disabled to be useful to the army but not disabled enough to deserve being helped with benefits pay after their discharge. A  "Catch-22" for the 2010's: soldiers terrorized by the war on terror are left to suffer on their own homeland by a cynical military that cuts them and runs.
   
Until now. Over the next few days, under pressure from a court order in a class action law suit, the army will be notifying 4,300 veterans that they might be able to adjust their benefits, in some cases by hundreds of dollars each month. 


This reversal of policy is worth cheering on its own, but it's also important to us because of the way it so vividly brings into focus the illogical cruelty of an organization or community that turns its back on its trauma victims. When we withhold our assistance from victims—whether because of some policy or some fear—and place the burden of healing squarely on the victims, we tell them not only that we don't care, but also that if they don't magically "make it through" then they have only themselves to blame. 


This is a cruel way for anyone to treat a person in distress. The more so when those pointing the finger have a share in the responsibility for that person's pain. Like the army—on whose missions the soldiers became traumatized to begin with—our communities themselves have helped to develop some of the traumas our members face. The single component of a trauma experience that has the greatest impact on the victim's ultimate level of traumatic stress and prognosis for emotional recovery is that person's experience NOT with the event itself, but with the first reporting of it. A child who reports an abuse event to a teacher only to be rebuffed and isolated will likely become traumatized far more profoundly than would the same child under the same circumstances who is taken seriously and supported when he or she reports.


That makes communities that are unsupportive of trauma victims no better than the army that sends its troops out into the line of trauma and dumps them when they get hit. In fact, it makes us worse. For, unlike the military, when we share in the traumatization of our children it's not because there is a war being waged that someone needs to fight. No, when community leaders turn their backs on our children it is simply because they choose not to deal with them. 


Until our community gets truly serious about developing policies for handling abuse claims in a responsible and humane manner, we will be perpetuating our own "Catch-22," waiting to ensnare anyone with the courage to come forward with a claim. The choice that we offer: either stay quiet and continue to be traumatized as you have until now, or come forward and become traumatized by a whole new set of perpetrators that you thought were on your side.


Now that's crazy.

There Will Be Blood: Corporal Punishment in Yeshivos and Chadorim

We have a lot to be proud of. The advocates, professionals, and other caring souls in and around the Chareidi communities have managed to keep the talk of sexual abuse going long enough that the painfully slow wheels of change might finally be starting to turn. And yet, that vice has an advantage over the other pieces of our collective dirty laundry: the disgusting factor. People can pretend that sexual abuse does not exist in our communities, or that if it does we shouldn't talk about it. But no one in their right mind would actually justify it. No one would say that molesting a child serves some higher purpose, or any purpose at all for that matter, other than the selfish perversions of the perpetrator.  

That is not the case, however, for the other abuse that our children continue to face. To this day yeshivos and chadorim (religious boys' schools) routinely employ corporal punishment as regular, first-line means of discipline, leaving scores of helpless children traumatized and turned off to the very Yiddishkeit (Judaism) that the rebbeim (rabbis) and menahalim (administrators) are so pathetically trying to beat into them. These "educators" make no excuses about their "hands-on" methods: "This is just the way that we teach our boys." It is the only system they know: the one to which they were subjected when they were helpless children themselves. They blindly regurgitate the same simplistic readings of rabbinic sources that their own abusers relied on and the shailos (rabbinic opinions) that they have asked to help allay their guilt. All the while, the very real trauma that they inflict on their charges is somehow ignored.

The scars of sexual abuse run as deep as any. However, even when children are molested in a school, they are the exceptions, certainly not the rule. (As an aside, the majority of sexual abusers are not teachers, but family members or "friends.") The most egregious part of rebbeim's beating up on their students is that the abuse is institutionalized, the maltreatment systemic and universally divvied. This is an offense perpetrated by the community as a whole: institutions, leaders, parents, and culture alike. 


That has several important ramifications. Obviously, that means the wealth is spread nice and widely; no child in a "beating cheider" is immune from the blows. It also means that there are likely to be few sympathetic adults to support traumatized victims. Like the rebbe who'll smack you a second time for crying, school personnel in these offending institutions are more likely to retraumatize the victims and deepen the wounds than they are to have anything sympathetic, let alone therapeutic, to say. Finally, it means that rooting out this vice will take much more than exposure. It will require a fundamental shift in the pedagogical culture. For starters, elementary school teaching positions will have to be filled by more than simply "those who can't." Rebbeim will need to begin to meet certain basic qualifications, such as (a) liking children, (b) wanting to teach, (c) being (somewhat) able to control a classroom, and (d) being (somewhat) able to control oneself. "The way we've always done it" will no longer suffice as justification for blindly continuing practices that ruin human beings' lives without being at all effective.


Rebbeim and menahalim would do well to listen to their talmidim's (students') perspective on all this. For, despite their cynical assumptions, these kids are far from stupid, and they see perfectly clearly what this is all about. As one 11-year-old client told me recently, "even when they hit us, unless it's really hard, we don't cry. We just laugh. We all know that the rebbi's just hitting 'cause he has no control at all. He just gets so angry, and he doesn't know what else to do. It's so pathetic it's kind of funny."


So for now, I submit, until we can change this pitiful practice, there are two things we caring souls can do with the battered boys of our community: laugh and cry. For the terrorized boy who swallows his tears, afraid to lower his head lest he attract another smack, we can cry with him. And for the boys who laugh at the poor rebbi whose dignity was lost along with his self-control, we most certainly can laugh with him, too.

-PsyJew 

Leil Tevilah (Ritual Immersion) Gets an Evolutionary Push

Those familiar with Jewish laws of family purity know that the Halachic intimacy calendar, in effect, supports fertility by keeping each partner in his or her own "corner" until around the time when the wife is ovulating and is, if you will, "ready to rumble." (Notwithstanding the unfortunate and Halachically challenging situation of a early-ovulating woman.) Scientists have now found that men's biological wiring supports such intimacy optimization, as well. A recent study published in the journal Psychological Science found that men who smelled t-shirts previously worn by women who were ovulating showed increased testosterone levels and were significantly more likely to rate the smells as pleasant than men who smelled shirts of non-ovulating women.


Now, if only there were some way to get mens' dirty t-shirts to smell "pleasant"... 

Is Psychology "Good for the Jews?"

Idealistic Jewish psychologists and social workers often like to talk about bringing mental health to the frum masses. "If only the (fill-in-the-blank) community would recognize the psychopathology among them and seek professional help," the thinking goes, "the healing can begin, and we'll all be on our way to communal sanity." To most of us, a mediocre psychologist is still better than a good "eitza lady," hands down.


Last week's dibuk debacle and horrific tragedy of a psychotic father in Israel brutally beating his infant daughter to death hours after ditching a long-overdue psychiatric evaluation painfully underscore the urgency of better identification and treatment of mental illness in our communities and of generally reevaluating our priorities.

Nevertheless, just because we know something is broken, that doesn't necessarily mean that we know how to fix it. An article in this week's New York Times Magazine raises some important questions about the value of exporting Western concepts of mental health and illness to non-Western cultures. It cites a study, for example, that showed how the frequency of Western-style anorexia cases in China skyrocketed after an eating disorder-induced death there lead to a flood of media coverage introducing that population to a way of expressing psychological distress that most Chinese had never even known about.  "When we undermine local conceptions of the self and modes of healing," the author concludes, "we may be speeding along the disorienting changes that are at the very heart of much of the world’s mental distress." 


For us, the question becomes are our insulated Charedi/Chassidishe  communities much different? Are we as professionals introducing our own New World diseases to the very, un-inoculated population that we have set out to save?  
-PsyJew 

Welcome to JewPsy!

Welcome to JewPsy (pr. Jew-sigh), the blog with the silent "p". This blog evolved over several months of thinking too much, ranting and raving, and posting too many links to Facebook that no one was likely too read. I am a rabbi and a psychologist working with Orthodox ("Modern Orthodox," Yeshivish, & Chassidish) children, adults, families, and teens in the New York area.

There are always new developments in my overlapping worlds of Judaism and mental health, and I am always learning new things and coming to understandings about the communities in which I work and live that excite, interest, or horrify me. As my colleagues and I know well, sometimes you just have to share with someone. These posts, then are my cathartic peiros (fruits).

-PsyJew