|
Dean and Scientific Director
Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology
and Psychopathology
Retired Professor, Harvard Medical School (Psychiatry) and
University of Miami (Psychology)
email: theodore.millon@millon.net
(this biographical essay was part of the invited essays series,
reprinted from the Journal of Personality Assessment, 79(2),
171-194); To be published in Pioneers of Personality Science
(2006). Strack, S. and KInder, W. (Eds.). Springer Publication.
A Blessed and Charmed Personal Odyssey
Theodore Millon
Abstract
Sandwiched between hyperbolic concerns about our society and
mankind’s future, I have sought to depict the personal exploits of
a not untypical psychologist through the mostly joyous times of
America in the mid and late 20th century. I subscribe to the view
that you, my reader, has shared a discipline that is and may
become even more the noblest of all sciences. Having achieved the
honored status of Professor Emeritus, I have no plans to curtail
my efforts to advance our science and its worthy purposes. In
almost 50 years of wandering in clinical academia, I have found
only a small measure of ill will, mostly warmth, deep friendships,
intellectual challenges, and a life of fulfillment, one in which I
have had the satisfaction of seeing several of my scholarly
missions achieve a measure of professional recognition before I
become just a memory.
A Blessed and Charmed Personal Odyssey
The invitation to write this autobiography came a few days
after the horrific events of 9/11/01. I put pen to paper soon
thereafter (my usual first draft style), a difficult task owing to
growing feelings of sadness, if not despair, and the gnawing fear
that the tragedy may have brought an end to a unique and wondrous
period in mankind’s history – the open and free humanistic
democracy of 20th century America – a time when persons of all
backgrounds could retain not only their sense of invulnerability,
but the freedom to become whatever they may have aspired to, that
is, “ to actualize their potentials” as my old mentor, Kurt
Goldstein, may have put it.
Once more we must brace ourselves to live life as my
forefathers had for centuries past, to survive in the face of
unrelenting hostility and degradation. Our vision of
impregnability has forever been blinded by an adversary so
pernicious that nothing, not even the extraordinary goodwill and
opportunities of the past several decades, could prepare us
sufficiently to withstand, that is, to keep us from recognizing
that nothing will ever be the same. Both a tangible and a
psychological barrier have been irrevocably breached; our
continental shores have been penetrated and our psychic structures
destabilized. Our sturdy bastions of physical safety and secure
futures have been forever pierced. Our sense of material and
psychological inviolability has naively been taken for granted,
and our innocence has protected us from having to deal with an
unblemished future that might come to an end. The assumption that
all things will continue to be well has been revealed as a
fantasy. We have not only been felled by an attack from beyond our
shores, but our inner sense of optimism has been undermined from
within. Worse yet, the World Trade Towers and Pentagon bombings
may merely have been a dry run for something far more devastating,
a monstrous assault on mankind and civilized history we can only
begin to imagine by bin Laden and Saddam Hussein’s acolytes.
I am not by nature a Cassandra whose prophecies should best be
disregarded. As a person in his eighth decade, I can let myself be
less troubled about our future than most. But the events of this
past September have assuredly and will forever alter the lives of
our children and grandchildren. Thus, on a personal note, three of
my four good-natured and thoughtful children, Diane, Andy, and
Adrie, (I consider all thousand or so of my past psychology
students also to be children of mine), as well as six of my seven
lovely and affectionate grandchildren, Lissy, Katie, Elizabeth,
Matt, Annie, and William, reside in the metropolitan New York
area; daughter Carrie and her children, Molly and Livia, reside
near us in Florida. None has been harmed physically by the
catastrophe, but all have been shaken psychologically.
Sympathetic as we all are to the economically wretched and
inescapably anomic world of the perpetrators, their cruel and
malicious effort to find scapegoats for perennial resentments and
confused ambitions are especially frightening to me for they are
reminiscent of similar barbarities that sought out and identified
my Jewish ancestors as ostensibly justified objects for plunder
and vilification. Those who trace their origins to the victims of
anti-Semitic pogroms and Nazi annihilation know all too well the
history of Jews as readily employed emblems of cosmic evil,
contrivances of religious calumny and economic malevolence from
the demonizing days of the ancient crusaders to the paranoid
displacements of modern Arab dictatorships.
In no small part the awesome horror of 9/11 has led me to redouble
my desire to reconnect with my ancestral heritage in this essay;
it is reason also to acquaint my children and grandchildren to
more than their father and grandfather’s professional history, but
also its ancient and valued family roots.
[top]
Family
What little I learned about my family’s ancestry was told to me
by my paternal grandfather, who resided in his 70s with my parents
from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s, when I was six until I was
14. A rabbi (R.) by training, Zayde, as I called him, was the
youngest of nine sons of a Talmudic scholar and Yeshiva teacher,
all of whose male children were educated and became rabbis at the
Volozhyn (Lithuania) Yeshiva. Zayde’s father, my great-grandfather
(GGF) R. Elizier Isaac Millon (1812-1881) served in his early
adulthood as a Rabbi in Bryansk, Russia, until he received an
invitation to join in teaching at the Volozhyn Yeshiva in 1844;
there he remained for almost 40 years through its periodic
travails until his death. GGF was the son of Rachel Zalman
(1780-1833) and R. Avrum Millon (Milan?) (1775-1827), the latter a
rabbi for most of his life in the city of Pinsk, Russia; R. Avrum
traced his family of origin to R. Judah ben Eliezer, who headed
Yeshivas in both Padua and Milan, Italy in the 15th century.
Rachel, a dutiful wife, was the daughter of R. Arieh Leib Zalman
(1752-1810), who was the first son of R. Elijah ben Judah Solomon
Zalman (1720-1797), a distinguished Talmudic scholar known
throughout the Pale of Russia as the Vilna Gaon.
Following his formal education, Zayde, R. Jacob Millon
Bernstein (1864-1955) was assigned in 1886 to a synagogue as an
assistant rabbi in Bialystok, Poland, where he married and had his
first son, during whose birth his mother died. Shortly thereafter
in 1889, Zayde was transferred to oversee a modest synagogue in
the shtetl (small Jewish village) of Sokoly, Poland, where he
settled and married his second wife, Temma (after whom I was named
Tevya). Repeated pogroms and Russian edicts in the early 1890s
that forced Jews out of St Petersburg and Moscow led Zayde to
contemplate leaving the Russian Pale of Jewish settlement to more
hospitable environs. Hence, in 1895 he left for London, England
where his eldest brother R. Judah Millon, had emigrated to take
advantage of the receptivity of that city’s mayor favoring
educated Jewish emigrants. After a two year London period and a
visit back to Poland with his family, Zayde left for the United
States, returning every other year to Sokoly to again visit his
growing family, inevitably followed shortly thereafter by a
pregnancy and another child. Unable to establish a position at a
temple in the United States, Zayde wandered from Boston to New
York to Chicago as an itinerant leather merchant, returning to
Poland in 1910 and again in 1912 to bring his then-eldest child
back with him to the States. When his third son, my father’s turn
was scheduled in 1914, the First World War suddenly erupted,
leaving my father, his mother and three younger sibs behind in
Europe, until the mid-1920s.
His education effectively terminated, my father (Tata, as I
called him in my childhood, Pop in later years) Abraham Millon
(1900-1970), now the eldest male, assumed full responsibility to
provide for his family. This he undertook as a tailor’s assistant
in my future maternal grandfather’s modest, but successful
clothing factory in Sokoly. Here, he met my mother who, among her
other daughterly roles, surreptitiously provided my father of the
factory workers’ “lunch leftovers” to feed what would otherwise
have been my father’s rather impoverished family. Both of my
parents emigrated to the States in the mid-1920s, marrying shortly
thereafter in New York City, where they resided for the next 40+
years. I was born on 8/18/28; the number eight was considered in
the mysticism and numerical acrobatics of the Gematria, a
component of the medieval Jewish Cabbalah, as a lucky number;
hence, I was seen to be a triply blessed child with a charmed
future.
My father, sans a formal education, became the co-owner in the
depression of a small clothing manufacturing business. However,
owing to his intrinsic language and mathematical skills, he wrote
“replies” to weekly Bintel Brief letters regularly published in
the Jewish Daily Forward, a major Yiddish newspaper in America; he
also served for a year or so as a civilian cryptographer during
the Second World War, a “classified” activity I did not learn of
until some years thereafter. The most significant memory of my
youth (apart from the periodic loneliness of being an only child)
was my father’s all-consuming affection for me (the roots of my
secure narcissism, I am sure), most charmingly illustrated by the
fact that he brought home a gift for me (toy, game, book) every
working day from the time I was two until I turned 13. A warm,
reflectively intelligent, and socially-concerned idealist, he was
regarded highly as a supportive friend to the underprivileged, as
well as an outspoken union activist, despite remaining a factory
“boss” throughout his life.
My mother (Mama early, mom later), Molly Gorkowitz Millon
(1902-1982) had a family background and temperament substantially
different from my father’s. Hasidic in religious orientation,
emotionally intense and expressive, musically gifted, physically
zestful and courageous, she was sporadically sick from numerous
ill-defined ailments, distinctly hypochondriacal, and would be
“diagnosed” today as affectively bipolar. My lifelong relation
with her was composed of a mixture of warmth and deep attachment,
but also fraught with her erratic and unpredictable moods.
Notably, she was among the first in the late 1930s to undergo both
electroconvulsive and insulin coma “therapies” by the earliest
promulgators of these techniques in the States.
[top]
Early School Years (1934-1945)
An early talker and late walker, my parents never failed to
inform new visitors in my childhood that from nine to eighteen
months, I would sit in my highchair “telling them” not only what
they could do for me, but also how they should do it. All my talk
for the next several years was in Yiddish, my only language until
first grade when I entered a special class for Yiddish-speaking
youngsters who were to be taught English, a language we all became
quite adept with in a matter of weeks, albeit most with an
“accent” such as mine that did not fade for more than a decade or
two. Notable in this first grade year was my Zayde’s effort to
teach me mathematics, not just basic arithmetic, but both algebra
and geometry, subjects that appeared to intrigue me greatly and
served me well through my entire academic career.
In third grade I was invited to attend elementary school in a
“gifted program” at Hunter College, a school located on the upper
east side of Manhattan in New York City. Although I could “hold my
own” quite well in mathematics and the “physical sciences”, I was
clearly outclassed by my program peers in almost all the
humanities and “social sciences”; it was not an especially
gratifying period for a youngster who otherwise felt quite
special. Moreover, the daily trip to and from Hunter from our home
in Brooklyn proved both tiring and expensive for my
economically-straitened father, who would not let his eight year
old son travel to the “city” on his own, having therefore to
arrange taxicab rides to and from the Manhattan subway station he
had to use himself to travel to work.
Somewhat advanced in my education, I returned to the fifth
grade in Brooklyn, spending the better part of the year “buddying”
with a fellow youngster by the name of Maurice Sendak; together we
would draw on large charts and posters placed on the back
blackboards of all the classrooms of the school. Here I proved
second best again; talented as I was artistically, Maurice
achieved the representations we sought (e.g., Washington crossing
the Delaware, civil war battles such as in Gettysburg) more
effectively than I. Nonetheless, fifth grade proved to be a great
joy with a wonderfully sensitive homeroom teacher, Mr. Greenspan.
Also notable that year were close friendships with Wally Robinson,
the only African-American youngster in our neighborhood, nephew of
the “super” of our apartment building, and Marvin Immelman, a
quiet and intelligent boy who suffered a rather severe speech and
hearing impairment. Both were persona non grata kids, poked fun at
or completely shunned by both local peers and adults. It was not
any humanistic impulse or deviance on my part that drew me to
them; I simply found both interesting and thoughtful peers with
whom I and Maurice shared wild and Harry Potter-like stories on
the front steps of our homes, mystical tales of ancient and future
fantasies. Much to my joy, both Tata and Zayde not only tolerated
these friendships with Wally and Marvin, but went out of their way
to encourage them. I then began an almost meteoric growth spurt in
my tenth year; in sixth grade I grew from 5’3” to 6’2”, a
progression that stirred my mother to take me to numerous
“hormone” specialists. As usual, there was no reason to worry; I
simply stopped my height advance the next year or two, remaining
about 6’4” from twelve on. I towered over all other males at my
Bar Mitzvah, much to the approval of my Tata and Zayde, both only
6 feet tall.
Junior high was another buoyant experience. In New York City’s
RA (rapid advance) program, I thoroughly exulted in the company of
fellow students of high motivation and ability, especially “Izzy”
Mandelbaum, a life-long neighborhood friend who always was tops in
our shared classes, from early Heder (Hebrew school) days to being
ranked first in his graduating medical school class. Izzy was my
very closest and dearest friend through early schooling years, a
superego “nudge”, however, who spent many an afternoon seeking to
dissuade me from my inclination to forgo serious study and drift
instead into adolescent sports, art “doodles”, or music and song,
not that he himself was ill-equipped to star in these pursuits as
well. But Izzy was committed from his earliest years “to be a
doctor”, which he became, ultimately as professor and chief of
cardiovascular surgery at Indiana University’s School of Medicine
by his late-thirties (more of Izzy later).
Not unexpectedly, high school proved to be a period of identity
diffusion, if not confusion, one lasting well into my college
years. Two problematic matters stand out in this period. First,
and despite numerous self-generated distractions from study, I
remained a stellar math student, the only one in my high school
senior class of 1300 students to have attained 100s in all New
York State math Regents exams. Arrogantly, I assumed I would
receive the math medal at graduation, but learned to my
consternation that it was to be awarded elsewhere, to a fellow by
the name of Ed Murray, who I was to meet up with some 30 years
later when I joined the psychology faculty at the University of
Miami; much to my pleasure, Ed became my best and most highly
esteemed colleague during our twenty-plus years there together.
Returning to high school days, Dr. Freilich, chair of the math
department, told me with acerbity, and in no uncertain terms that
I had wasted my “questionable” talents, and in no way did I
deserve the medal owing to being “both irresponsible and immature”
because of my frivolous involvements with girls and
extra-curricular activities, the latter stemming from my
“preoccupation” with acting and singing in school plays and shows.
In this second problematic aspect of my high school career I had
joined my more light-hearted friends in a variety of high-spirited
merriment, particularly the art of imitating the voice and style
of the famous singers of the day; my forte was that of
impersonating Bing Crosby, Perry Como and Danny Kaye. Another mime
at the time was a chap named Vito Farinola, later known and
somewhat famous as the singer Vic Damone, who was quite apt at
imitating Frank Sinatra; here, again, I proved second best.
I was tempted in high school, albeit briefly, to consider a
theatrical or singing career, but was told firmly by parents (and
Izzy) that efforts such as these invariably failed; more
importantly, that these vocations were not befitting “a nice
Jewish boy”. Other career fantasies of the time were likewise
derided; to seek a future as a “serious artist” was quickly
dismissed by parents, as well as by relatives whose similar
aspirations proved to be sorrowful decisions. Similarly, the more
respectable thought of becoming a mathematics teacher was
discounted as a vocation with limited financial possibilities.
However, along similar lines, and owing to the growing successes
of the Lasser brothers (J.K. and S.J.), distant family relatives
who served then as my father’s accountants, they were put forward
as career models well-worth emulating.
[top]
College And Graduate School Years
And so I entered the City College of New York (CCNY) in the
spring of 1945 as an accounting major, a career to which I took an
instant dislike in the first weeks of the first course. Dropping
that vocational goal was followed by a carnival of miscellaneous
majors, each proving ephemeral. Drawn into the socialistic but
anti-communist ideals then rampant in cafeteria talk at CCNY, I
was intrigued and enticed to explore the field of economics,
majoring seriously but briefly in what was called “mathematical
financial management”, a precursor to what is referred today as
econometrics. I then wandered into both philosophy and physics
majors. By chance and curiosity, I scored impressively on exams in
my introductory psychology course. The instructor, Dr. Max Smith,
sought then to seduce me into pursuing this subject further by
enticing me to hear a series of lectures by a professor Gardner
Murphy. The lectures proved quite compelling and the seduction
into psychology was successful, at least for a few years.
My CCNY period was an increasingly joyous and exhilarating one
personally, socially and intellectually. I met my lovely wife
Renee when she entered CCNY as a freshman in 1948; we have been
together for almost 54 years as of this writing. Friendships were
established with Phil Teitelbaum, Shel Taylor, Bob Lifton, Elliot
Valenstein, Zanwil Sperber, Wally Mandell, and Herb Spohn, as we
competed for the few As given in courses by stellar teachers such
as Murphy, Joe Barmack, John Peatman, Dan Lehrman, Herb Birch, and
Kenneth Clark. At the same time, I was able to serve as art editor
of the college newspaper, associate editor of its yearbook, and
vice-president of the student council, reveling in the awesome
academic schedule I sought to maintain while transported into a
bevy of weekend activities of serious social import in New York’s
young person’s intelligentsia.
Toward graduation I accepted a research assistantship with I.
E. Farber in the graduate clinical psych program at the State
University of Iowa. However, I found it too difficult to tear
myself from my many involvements in greater New York, deciding to
forgo the questionable lures of the Midwest and to stay on at CCNY
in its Masters psychology program. Fortunately, I was offered an
unusual assistantship arranged in both the psychology and
sociology/anthropology departments, serving as a part-time
experimental lab assistant for Dan Lehrman, a chauffeur and
“bodyguard” for Professor Kurt Goldstein, and a grader and
occasional lecturer in sociology/anthropology for Dr. Stan
Chapman. Among the many highlights of my master’s year was time
spent with Gardner Murphy and Larry K. Frank, then a leader in New
York’s Ethical Culture Society, perhaps best known for having
coined the term “projective methods”. For several months I joined
both Murphy and Frank in Sunday morning gatherings at Margaret
Mead’s home in the Village. Notable also was my experience over
several months as an analysand in Professor Ernst Kris’
“creatively gifted” research study. Likewise I learned more in our
drive following class to Professor Goldstein’s home on the upper
east side of New York, where I was introduced and had several
evening talks with another New York “idol” of mine, Goldstein’s
good friend and neighbor, Professor Meyer Schapiro, an eminent art
historian.
In the spring before completing my masters I received an
acceptance to attend Harvard’s then relatively new Social
Relations program, no doubt owing to my unusual mix of psych/soc/anthro
coursework. The Viking Fund Fellowship I was then awarded meant I
would work as an assistant to Gordon Allport, a good friend of my
mentor Gardner Murphy. I was taken aback, however, by the
fellowship requirement that I engage in research for the better
part of several summers in Africa, a prospect I did not relish at
all. After a few weeks of reflection, as well as a disabling and
extended bout of mononucleosis, I decided to withdraw from the
fellowship offer and stay on in New York, perhaps to explore
courses at the New School and to give my moribund artistic
aspirations an opportunity to be stirred and flourish or, at
least, to be tested in reality while living in Greenwich Village.
Reality took another course, however. In late June 1950 the
United States entered into a war with North Korea. I soon learned
that men in 1-A draft status would be called into service unless
they were bona fide full-time students. I was disposed to “take my
chances”, but my parents and bride-to-be implored me to regain my
graduate school standing. But where? City College did not have a
doctoral program at that time. I called Allport in Cambridge a
week or so after Independence Day. Kind as he was, the fellowship
had been awarded elsewhere, but he would do his best if I would
reapply for admission -- the following year. I contacted both
Murphy and Joe Barmack, who served as acting chair of psychology
at CCNY summer sessions, and “pleaded” for their assistance.
Several frantic weeks passed following applications and letters in
late July and early August to a number of psychology and
philosophy programs at northeastern universities. Only the
University of Connecticut (UConn) program in personality/social
was fully responsive, offering both acceptance and a much-needed
assistantship, given that I would have to live away from my New
York home. Whether it was Murphy’s good word or my first cousin,
Sylvia (Tookie) Bernstein, then an assistant to the dean of the
UConn graduate school, that was instrumental in gaining this late
support, I never was able to determine. My family, however,
breathed a sigh of relief as I went on to UConn that early
September.
My reception and history at UConn was a mixed blessing. A
number of new and able graduate students in the personality/social
program had been told that assistantships were unavailable to
them. I came upon the scene the week before classes with the prize
they all had aspired to. I did not receive a cheerful welcome,
especially from one student who very much sought to gain admission
to Harvard’s Social Relations program and learned that I had
“stupidly” turned down such an offer. Problematic matters were
further intensified when they learned that I carried a less than
full load so I could audit courses in philosophy at Yale
(Professors Carl “Pete” Hempel and Henry Margenau seminars) where
I had also been accepted, but without financial support. The
special arrangements that the UConn faculty permitted me only
added to my troubled relationship with my personality/social/and
clinical peers, although I did become a member of a comfortable
network of experimental and developmental students. Fortunately,
in the following two years, my good CCNY friend, Shel Taylor,
entered UConn’s personality/social program, Renee and I got
married, and I turned my full academic effort to a dissertation on
the “authoritarian personality”, a subject with which I had been
deeply intrigued owing to my immersion in issues of social
morality, especially the role of national character in the origins
of the Nazi holocaust. My New York years with Larry Frank
discussing “society as the patient” became the undergirding theme
of my doctoral research.
Completing the dissertation in October ’53, I prepared myself
to enter the Army later that fall, a non-appealing prospect as far
as I, an ambivalent pacifist, was concerned. The Korean War had
been brought to an end, however. Rather shockingly, when the day
came for me to be inducted, I was “rejected” at the final health
examination, assigned a 4-F status owing to a physical problem
that previously had been an insufficient cause for non-acceptance
to the service. Disoriented momentarily, but frankly elated, I
walked out the door of the induction center, feeling charmed
again, to see Renee waiting to bid me goodbye near the bus that
was to leave for Fort Dix; not speaking a word, lest I suddenly be
called back, we took the subway, saying nary a word, to my
parent’s home, where the night before we had held a “celebratory”
farewell party.
Unhesitatingly, I sought to start life anew that fall;
realistic in my expectations, I nevertheless was able to find a
few part-time opportunities that New York friends brought to my
attention. Without flattering my credentials, I began what I knew
would be the arduous task of searching for any academic position.
The most memorable event of this six-month search was a telegram
from Professor M.O. Wilson, psychology chair at the University of
Oklahoma; he asked if my wife and I, native New Yorkers, would
consider accepting a position at Oklahoma. Would I? Of course!
Wilson’s telegram was the very first job offer to come my way. I
wrote back immediately with an enthusiastic letter indicating not
only my willingness to accept his offer, but my joy at the
prospect of collaborating with Professor Muzafer Sherif of
Oklahoma’s faculty, whose autokinetic work I had drawn on
extensively in my dissertation. Renee and I then waited for a
reply; a week or two passed, we waited, and waited, and waited,
finally giving up as other opportunities began to appear. Some
seven or eight years later my then three children came running up
the stairs from the basement of our home with a request to tear
off the unmarked stamp on a letter they found. And there it was,
embarrassing and somewhat chagrined, an unmailed letter addressed
to Professor M. O. Wilson. Somehow, Renee and I both overlooked
sending the missive to Oklahoma. How different the turn of life’s
events would have been had we not forgot (unconsciously desired?)
to post the letter properly.
[top] Pennsylvania Years (1954-1970)
Opportunities arose in April ’54 to consider similar positions
at both Swarthmore and Lehigh. The salaries, however, for these
assistant professorial jobs differed substantially; my penchant
was to accept Swarthmore, but I had no realistic choice but to
select Lehigh at the then princely sum of $4200, some $900 more
than Swarthmore offered for the academic year. It turned out that
the position at Lehigh was one for which I was especially well
suited. The department had lost two members that spring, a
retiring social psychologist and a suddenly resigned
clinical/personality psychologist. Given my not inconsiderable
background in both subjects, I seemed to fit their teaching needs
quite well, although I had a devil of a time preparing six new
courses in my first academic year.
Teaching became my professional raison d’être, one which I
loved from the start and one I continue to cherish to this waning
day of my academic career. Owing to my enthusiasm for the teaching
role, a benign power to provoke and enlighten, I explored numerous
course options over the years; most notable was an opportunity
that came my way to instruct a course entitled “Creative
Concepts”, one open only to students in the top 2% of the
university’s junior and senior classes, and taught by only four
professors for a year or two. I was able, as stated by the Arts
and Science Dean, to “teach anything”, and so I did, wandering
through themes such as cosmogony, evolution, consciousness, the
future of mankind, etc., subjects that were both challenging and
exhilarating to me owing in no small measure to the gifted
academic students I taught from diverse fields such as engineering
physics, econometrics, molecular biology, and so on.
Despite internecine departmental politics, particularly the
then intense schism between clinicians and experimentalists, as
well as my outspoken “radical” anti-Vietnam polemics, I managed to
survive at Lehigh owing to a respectable publishing record, a
not-to-be-dismissed position on campus as a teacher of note, and
an unusual stature as a mental health leader in both the community
and the state. Let me turn to this latter role in public health.
In many regards my Pennsylvania years were characterized most
significantly by activities that would appear secondary to my
position as a university professor. It was in my first year at
Lehigh that I was required to teach abnormal psychology, a course
that entailed bringing students to the local Allentown State
Hospital (ASH), enabling them thereby to observe “live” case
presentations. It was early in October ’54 that we made our first
visit to ASH; it consisted of a hospital tour, a not untypical
initial segment of such courses. The experience proved appalling,
disheartening, terrifying, unnerving. Of my thirty-plus students
in the class, half withdrew from the tour after walking through
the first or second building; three or four more were revolted and
nauseated following a brief stay at the hospital cafeteria. I,
myself, despite considerable prior acquaintance with a number of
state hospitals, was sickened at the conclusion of the visit.
Coincidentally, an electoral campaign was in progress that
fall. The Democratic candidate, a young man by the name of George
Leader, had commented to the press about the failure of previous
Republican administrations to care adequately for Pennsylvania’s
citizens, especially the mentally ill. Little did he know! I took
it upon myself following our wrenching experience at ASH to write
him a five page single spaced letter beseeching him to visit the
revolting ASH, to see for himself tangibly how horrifying and
cruel the conditions were at this institution. To my surprise and
pleasure, his campaign manager, a former state senator by the name
of Harry Shapiro, phoned me the week following my letter to invite
me to come to the hospital in a few days to meet Mr. Leader and,
at his side, to join him on a tour of the institution. And so, at
the appointed time and day, along with more than a hundred
reporters and photographers from throughout the state, I met Mr.
Leader, and we walked through the harrowing dungeons of ASH, a
place many would term “a snake pit” and a “cuckoo’s nest”. The
public uproar was overwhelming. Leader was elected, the first
Democratic governor in over thirty years. Shortly after his
inauguration in January, I was invited by Shapiro to become a
member of the ASH newly appointed Board of Trustees. The fact that
I was the only member of the new board with a mental health
credential (most were physicians, ministers, rabbis, liberal
businessmen), I was chosen president of the board (age 26), a post
I retained for more than a decade. During this period the
hospital, which housed 2,100 patients in 1955, had been rated as
22nd of the 22 state hospitals in Pennsylvania on a series of
health service criteria; at the same time, Pennsylvania had been
ranked 47th of the 48 states in the US on these same criteria
(second from the bottom only to Mississippi). In the ensuing
decade, ASH progressed to rank first in the state, while
Pennsylvania advanced to third in the nation. During the fifteen
years of my involvement with the hospital, given its vastly
enhanced staff and improved facilities, we built superb clinical
services and genuine research programs, designed, for example, to
evaluate experimental pharmacological agents, as well as to
establish then-novel outreach community mental health centers.
In my personal efforts to explore the lives of patients more
insightfully and compassionately than was otherwise available to
me, I frequently ventured incognito through the hospital, at times
clothed in typical hospital garb overnight or for entire weekend
periods, conversing at length with patients housed in a variety of
acute and chronic wards. Let me digress for a moment and recount a
brief episode of what proved to be my final overnight stay at the
hospital. Early that Sunday morning I bolted up in my cot, one of
over 30 lined up in the ward. I broke out in a cold sweat, and
began to obsess over whether I was, in reality, a psych professor
and a hospital board member. Was I not just another deranged
patient, a paranoid who cleverly deluded others and himself? Had I
fashioned a self-entrapping disguise akin to those about me who
asserted they were Christ or the Pope, but were no more “mad as a
hatter” as was I? Unable to shake the confusion and fear that
overtook me, I got to a phone quickly, called my staff
co-conspirator, Dr. Shettel, who came to my rescue in what seemed
like an interminable 10 minutes, and quieted down my sudden and
inexplicable delusional thought.
I learned much in these hospital wanderings; they served me
well as I began to contemplate writing about the shortcomings of
our mental health profession, its diagnostic concepts, its
scientific base, its therapeutic approaches. These visits became,
in effect, the motivation and substantive foundation of my first
major book, a work entitled Modern Psychopathology (MP), an
advanced text that initiated my serious career as a so-called
“thinker” in the field, a career that ultimately lead to the
development of new diagnostic tools (e.g., MCMI), theoretical
models (e.g., evolutionary psychology), and therapeutic approaches
(e.g., psychosynergy). But I am getting ahead of my story here.
I wrote in the preface of MP (Millon, 1969) that, the book
began, quite simply, as an exercise in self-education, an attempt
on my part to gather and to render the disparate facts and
theories of psychopathology into a coherent and orderly framework;
such a venture, it was hoped, would enable me to pursue my future
research, teaching and clinical responsibilities more effectively.
Little did I know that the tasks of authorship would force me to
think more presumptuously that I cared – even worse, to feel a
measure of pride and vanity in these presumptions. Faced
repeatedly with the obscurities, contradictions and confusions
that beset the field, I found myself formulating novel
“clarifications” and “solutions” to old and perplexing problems.
In short, an act of modest self-education became an act of
intellectual audacity. I stated further, and most presumptuously,
that the time has come for the development of a new and coherent
theoretical framework, one that interwove both psychological and
biological factors, and from which the principal clinical
syndromes could be derived and coordinated. Instead of rephrasing
traditional psychiatric categories in the language of modern
theories, as several able psychopathologists had done, I sought to
devise a new classification schema, one constructed from its
inception by coalescing what I considered to be the basic
principles of personality development and functioning. MP set
forth what I then termed a “biosocial theory of maladaptive
learning and functioning”.
A word should be said about a wonderful group of affectionate
and enduring friends from our Pennsylvania days, many of whom are
still with us, now well into their seventies and eighties, and
whom we still strive to visit or be visited by at least once a
year, namely: Flo and Jack G., Norma and Herb F., Addi and Howard
A., Rose and Tommy W., Viv and Len R., Edie and Josh E., Myra and
Jerry F., Dorothy and Ferdi L., Naomi and Sam G., Renee and Eli
S., Shirley and Mike L., Sylvia and Joe D., Ruth and Victor V.,
Carol and Marshall A., Bunny and Dick D., and Thelma and Adi G.
However, despite the warmth and our attachment to these cherished
friends, no sooner had the MP text appeared than I found myself
approached by several universities to consider leaving Lehigh and
joining their faculties.
[top]
Chicago Years (1969-1977)
The opportunity that attracted me most was a chief
psychologist’s position at the Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) of
the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago. The head of
psychiatry, Melvin Sabshin, struck me as a genuine “mensch”;
though only three or four years my senior, he felt like a good
“father-figure”, a kindly, socially liberal, and highly
intelligent person of genuine equalitarian spirits, one in whom
the MD/PhD distinction would be of no significance. Happily, my
initial impressions proved correct; Mel and his chosen staff –
psychiatrists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists,
anthropologists, neurophysiologists, statisticians – composed a
highly congenial team of mental health clinicians, scholars and
researchers. My tenure at NPI, while Mel “ran the shop”, was a
joy, a highly productive and collaborative period. Unfortunately,
when Mel left to head the American Psychiatric Association in
Washington in late 1974, life at NPI became tense and divisive;
the new chair set forth the preeminent “rights” of biological
psychiatry, one that was to rule over all other professional
disciplines and activities. To counter the hegemony of biological
psychiatry, I pressed forward a proposal that Mel and I had begun
to develop for a novel Doctorate in Mental Health degree to be
implemented in a separate School of Mental Health Sciences at the
University’s vast Medical Center campus. Achieving only modest
support for this innovative venture, I then vigorously sought,
with the initial approval of the University’s executive dean, to
sever psychology’s subservient tie to psychiatry at NPI. This
latter venture ultimately also failed, and rather miserably,
leaving me no alternative but to explore other academic options.
Relationships in the sophisticated psychological environment of
Chicago were nonetheless exceptionally rewarding, notably
opportunities to share (and disagree) over analytic ideas with
Heinz Kohut, Mert Gill, and George Pollack at the Chicago
Institute of Psychoanalysis, wonderful substantive discussions
with Len Eron and I.E. Farber of the Circle Campus faculty of the
University of Illinois (UI), as well as seminars taught with
doctoral clinical students at both UI and the University of
Chicago. Memorable also was reuniting with my old childhood
schoolmate, Izzy Mandelbaum. He visited from Indiana two or three
times in each of 1971, 1972, and 1973; we would get together at
what was popularly known in Chicago as Greek Town, having lunch or
dinner in one of its superb ethnic restaurants. When I did not
hear from him for several months after our last visit, I became
concerned, called his University Surgery division in Indianapolis,
only to learn to my terrible shock and grief that Izzy failed to
survive a sudden and massive coronary while performing an
operation some months previously.
Two accomplishments of note distinguished my professional
activities in the early and mid-periods of my tenure at NPI:
first, the central role that Mel and I played in establishing a
“forward-seeking”, contextually-oriented and empirically-grounded
DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association, 1980) and, second, the
opportunity I had to develop with younger colleagues a series of
“modern” psychodiagnostic tools. I’d like to comment on each of
these in turn.
I wrote in a review of the DSM-III venture (Millon, 1983) that
the implicit charge to the American Psychiatric Association’s Task
Force on Nomenclature and Statistics in May 1974 was the
expectancy that it would revamp the DSM-II (American Psychiatric
Association, 1968) in a manner consonant with then current
empirical knowledge, theory, and practice. Also implicit was the
assumption that the product would be viewed by allied mental
health professions as having been cognizant of their diverse
interests and orientations.
The basic conceptual schema and the distinctive innovative
features of the DSM-III were set well in place by the end of the
first full year of deliberation, for example, the use of
“operational” criteria, the contextually-oriented multiaxial
format that also separated clinical (Axis I) from personality
(Axis II) disorders, the systematic and comprehensive description
of disorders, and the plan to implement extensive and formal field
trials. What proved especially gratifying, as well as fruitful in
achieving a strongly shared consensus, was the open and
equalitarian spirit that prevailed in the Task Force’s early
deliberations. Not that there was a paucity of vigorous
disagreement or that impassioned polemics were invariably
resolved, but these divergences and spirited controversies did not
result in group discord, traditional academic schisms, or
professional power struggles; for example, the psychologists on
the Task force not only had full voting rights – when votes were
necessary – but also provided more than their share of ideas,
disputations, and formal content drafts. Owing to my prior
writings, my primary assignment was to construct complete and
detailed texts for each of the personality disorders.
The Task Force agreed to take an explicitly nondoctrinaire
approach, evident not only by avoiding the introduction of
particular theoretical biases concerning the nature and etiology
of mental disorders but also by actively expunging them wherever
they were found in the DSM-II, actions which evoked the ire of
several deeply mortified professional organizations, such as the
American Psychoanalytic Association. The Task Force was equally
committed to the goal of syndromal inclusiveness. The intent here
was to embrace as many conditions as were commonly seen by
practicing clinicians, thereby maximizing the opportunity of
future investigators to evaluate the character of each condition
as a valid syndromic entity.
Lest the reader think otherwise, let me assure my psychology
colleagues that I was no apologist for the DSM-III’s (or the DSM-IV’s;
American Psychiatric Association, 1994) shortcomings; nor did I
have especially fond illusions about the altruistic or power and
economic interests of the psychiatric profession. I continue to
maintain a long agenda of unfinished work concerning how best to
advance future diagnostic enterprises (e.g., Millon, 1991b, 2002),
specifically to further promote the rigorous empiricism (e.g.,
diagnostic criteria) and contextual orientations (e.g., multiaxial
schema) that characterize modern psychological thought.
The second seminal activity of my Chicago years was the work I
undertook to strengthen both the theoretical and psychometric
grounding of psychological assessment (see Millon, 1997). As I
noted elsewhere, a year or two after the publication of MP, I
began with some regularity to receive letters and phone calls from
graduate students who had read the book and thought it provided
ideas that could aid them in formulating their dissertations. Most
inquired about the availability of an “operational” measure they
could use to assess or diagnose the pathologies of personality
that were generated by the text’s theoretical model. Regretfully,
no such tool was available. Nevertheless, they were encouraged to
pursue whatever lines of interest they may have had in the
subject. Some were sufficiently motivated to state that they would
attempt to develop their own “Millon” instrument as part of their
dissertation enterprise.
As the number of these potential “Millon” diagnostic progenies
grew into the teens, my concern grew proportionately regarding
both the diversity and the adequacy of these representations of
the theory. To establish a measure instrumental uniformity for
future investigators, as well as to assure at least a modicum of
psychometric quality among tools that ostensibly reflected the
theory’s constructs, I was prompted (perhaps “driven” is a more
accurate word) to consider undertaking the test construction task
myself. As that time, in early 1971, I was directing a research
supervision group composed of psychologists and
psychiatrists-in-training during their internship and residency
periods. All of them had read MP and found the proposal of working
together to develop instruments to identify and quantify the
text’s personality constructs to be both worthy and challenging.
The initial task was that of exploring alternate assessment
instruments for gathering relevant clinical and personologic data.
About 11 or 12 persons were involved in that early phase. Some
were asked to analyze the possibilities of identifying new indexes
from well-established projective tests, such as the Rorschach and
the Thematic Apperception Test; others were to investigate whether
we could compose relevant scales from existing objective
inventories, such as the Sixteen Personality Factor Questionnaire
(16PF) and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI).
Another group examined the potential inherent in developing a new
and original structured interview. After 4 or 5 months of weekly
discussions, the group concluded that an entirely new instrument
would be required if we were to represent the full scope of the
theory, especially its diverse and then-novel “pathological”
personality patterns (this work, it may be recalled, preceded by
several years that undertaken by me and others on the DSM-III Task
Force).
Naively, it was assumed that the construction task could be
completed in about 18 months, a time period that would allow
several members of the research group to participate on a
continuing basis. Despite the fact that we “postponed” developing
a possible Personality Interview Schedule after a brief initial
period, the “more limited” task of building an adult clinical
inventory took 7 years to complete.
We did see our way, however, also to construct an
adolescent-oriented inventory, the MAPI (and later its revision,
the MACI), as well as a medically-oriented tool, the MBHI (and
later its replacement, the MBMD). Especially gratifying in these
early years was working with a group of young clinical research
associates, most notably Robert B. Meagher, Jr., Catherine J.
Green, and my daughter Diane B. Millon. More recent test
development colleagues of similar talent and congeniality include
Roger D. Davis, Larry Weiss, Sarah E. Meagher, Seth D. Grossman
and, not to be overlooked, my daughter Carrie N. Millon.
Despite an extensive Chicago friendship network, and the
exceptional cultural qualities of Chicago (its stunning Art
Institute and superb Symphony Orchestra), both Renee and I had
serious illnesses in late ’76 (she, colon cancer, and I, one of
the first of the 5-vessel CABG surgeries), and decided that it
would be best to “stop making every second count”, and to seek a
physically warmer and psychologically more nurturant environment
for our later years. Several opportunities arose, especially one
beckoning us to join Stanford’s distinguished psychiatry and
psychology departments, but we chose simply to move straight south
to the Miami area of Florida, not the least owing to the presence
there of our equally beckoning elderly parents. The rapid-talking
and energetically ambitious atmospherics at Stanford were
intimidating, more than I felt I could comfortably deal with owing
in part to a post-surgical realization that I no longer could
cognitively process simple algebraic equations in my mind, as I
had been able to do since childhood. Certain abstract capacities
simply appeared to have evaporated, a fact later found to be a
rather common sequela of surgical procedures requiring extended
periods on the heart-lung machine.
[top]
Miami And Boston Years (1977- )
I thought initially of the post I accepted as Clinical Psych
Director at the University of Miami as a “retirement position”, a
place where I would slow my usual hectic pace of professional
activity. How wrong I was, but how vigorous and happy I became
over the following two or three years as my health and normal
optimistic outlook came once more to the fore.
I mentioned earlier my delight with reuniting at UM with my
high school math competitor, Ed Murray, but satisfaction was also
found elsewhere at the university. Early in my tenure, Neil
Schneiderman, a physiological psychologist, joined me in
establishing a doctoral clinical health psychology program in the
department, one of the first two or three in the nation. Other
colleagues of note were Clyde Hendrick and Paul Blaney, both of
whom came to the UM faculty the same year as I did. Numerous
graduate and post doc students of extraordinary academic and
clinical talent became a pleasure to mentor; among those not
already mentioned in this essay are George Everly, Steve Strack,
Mike Antoni, Sally Kolitz-Russell, Neil Bockian and Robert
Tringone. Tempted as I was in the early 1980s to consider leaving
UM for chief of psychology appointments at Langley Porter
Institute of the UCSF and at the Connecticut CMHC of Yale
University, I concluded that it would be wisest to stay put at UM.
A part-time visiting professorship, however, was extended to me by
the Psychiatry Department of Massachusetts’s General Hospital of
Harvard Medical School, one I later transferred to its affiliated
McLean Hospital. Here I saw an opportunity again to play a part in
influencing the course of psychiatric thinking; I carried this
teaching role for more than a decade.
At Boston’s Mass General, I teamed up with Gerry Klerman, who
previously had overseen NIMH during the Carter presidency. He
returned to Harvard in ’81 for a few years before moving on to
Cornell Med, his alma mater, in New York City. Unknown to me
initially, it turned out that Gerry was a distant relative of
mine; our mothers were cousins, both bipolar and neurotic
depressives from nearby Poland shtetls (Lomza and Sokoly). After
Gerry and I completed a book in the mid-1980s (Millon and Klerman,
1986) I continued at Harvard’s McLean Hospital, lecturing and
advising psychiatric residents, as well as participating in later
years with John Gunderson’s DSM-IV-related New England Personality
Disorder group, a professional seminar setting as stimulating and
congenial as one could find composed of informed and innovative
participants from several of Harvard’s affiliated hospitals, as
well as from Tufts, Yale, and Brown universities.
Despite an initial measure of self-enforced isolation and
academic hesitation owing to what I saw as my brain’s
oxygen-depleted and lessened capacities, I was encouraged by
several colleagues and by Herb Reich, psychology editor at John
Wiley and Sons, to undertake a book that focused solely on the
personality disorders (Millon, 1981). In justifying the volume, I
wrote in its preface that the recently published DSM-III, on whose
Task Force I had been an active member, was far more comprehensive
descriptively than its predecessors, but was not designed to
provide detailed clinical presentations nor the competing theories
and etiologies of the syndromes it encompassed. The lack of such
materials was especially problematic to those seeking information
on the personality disorders. As I saw it, these syndromes had
suddenly “come of age”, transformed from a class of impairments
possessing only incidental relevance to the diagnostic enterprise
into one that was central, if not crucial, to the new DSM-III
multiaxial format. Although clinicians and researchers could find
a substantial literature on most syndromes in psychological and
psychiatric texts and journals, such was not the case, even to a
modest degree, for the personality disorders. And now that these
syndromes were advanced to the status of major clinical
conditions, the need to develop a literature to fill the void was
all the more acute. The book set out to bring together the sparse,
widely scattered, and highly doctrinaire clinical literature on
all of the personality disorders, seeking in a single sourcebook
to both coordinate and evaluate what had been written on the
subject. To maximize scholarly and practical utility, it contained
contrasting historical and theoretical viewpoints, serving thereby
as a reference guide of alternate conceptions of these disorders.
To enhance its value as a textbook, a full and separate chapter
was devoted to each condition. Of particular interest were
sections in each chapter that quoted the important historical
forerunners of contemporary ideas. In addition to providing
comprehensive reviews of each of the new personality syndromes –
avoidant, narcissistic, borderline, and schizotypal – many “mixed”
personality types were also extensively illustrated. Of special
utility to clinicians were detailed discussions of frequent Axis I
and Axis II comorbidities, that is, clinical and personality
syndromes that coexisted with great regularity. And to compensate
for the lack of etiologic hypotheses in the DSM-III, significant
portions of each chapter were devoted to describing the syndrome’s
most plausible developmental origins and dynamics.
The success of the first edition of Disorders was immediate and
substantial (21 printings); it lead another publisher, Seymour
Weingarten of Guilford Press, to ask if I would like to edit a
handbook of personality disorders. I demurred, saying that there
simply were not enough scholars around, nor were there sufficient
solid scientific data available to justify such a volume. Instead,
I proposed that he underwrite a new journal that might lead
ultimately to a body of literature to serve as a foundation for
the handbook. Seymour assented, and Gerry Klerman and I
recommended that he ask a young psychiatrist then at Cornell
Medical School, Allen Frances, to join with me to co-edit what we
then entitled The Journal of Personality Disorders, a clinically
and scientifically successful periodical with both an impressive
subscription list and an editorial board composed of most of the
major players in the field. Allen and I remained as co-editors for
over a full decade, turning responsibility for running the journal
over to John Livesley, then psychiatry head at the University of
British Columbia.
Throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s I characteristically refused to
conform to popular taste and to seek opportunities for “creative”
expression. Thus, I continued to write and develop both my
idiosyncratic theoretical model (Millon, 1990) and its correlated
assessment tools (Millon, 1997: Strack, 1999). Further, I worked
on the second edition of my Disorders book (Millon, with Davis,
1996), which proved to be a substantially expanded version of the
first, approximately twice its length. In its preface I wrote
that, given the many advances in conceptual and empirical research
of the previous two decades, the time had come for a far-reaching
theoretical model that would interweave not only psychological and
biological factors, but also coordinate that knowledge to more
fundamental and adjacent fields of scientific endeavor. Toward
that end I sought to devise a classification schema that coalesced
several principles drawn from evolutionary theory. Thus, in
addition to reviewing historically diverse conceptions of
classification, I set out to provide a rationale and logic for an
“evolutionary approach” to pathological styles of behavior. Not
only did the schema connect personality and clinical pathology to
other realms of scientific thinking, but it also sought to
demonstrate the developmental continuity of pathological
functioning throughout the life span, as well as the
interconnections that existed among ostensibly unrelated
syndromes. To make this developmental continuity explicit, an
organizational sequence was constructed to show that more severe
stages of disorder are problematic extensions of less serious
personality impairments (e.g., schizotypal viewed as a more severe
variant of basic schizoid and avoidant patterns).
My work had progressed through the years from what I originally
labeled a “biosocial framework” to an “evolutionary model”.
Despite their changed terminology and conceptual base, these two
schemas were both consistent and consonant. The former derived its
constructs largely from learning theory and served to undergird
developmental ontogenesis, whereas the latter’s constructs derived
from evolutionary theory and served to explicate the phylogenesis
of human adaptive styles. Readers inclined to pursue these more
speculative, but perhaps scientifically more fruitful, ventures
were advised to read another of my books, Toward a New
Personology: An Evolutionary Model (1990), a treatise that
reviewers generally lauded, though one or two scoffed at my ideas
as “too sociobiologic”, or found them to be forbiddingly opaque.
To show that I was not speaking metaphorically, I drafted a series
of formal analyses for constructing classification systems in
fields such as normal personality (1991a, 1994) and
psychopathology (1991b, 1996).
The profession’s acceptance of my upgraded assessment tools,
especially the MCMI-III (Millon, Millon, & Davis, 1994), has been
exceptionally gratifying; it ranks now second only to the MMPI and
the Rorschach as the most frequently employed of the
psychodiagnostic tools in this country, mirroring the “objective”
psychometric features of the former, and interpreted in line with
the “projective” clinical richness of the latter. Similarly, the
MACI (Millon, Millon, & Davis, 1993) has become the most
frequently used adolescent inventory throughout the clinical
world. And the recently completed MBMD (Millon, Antoni, Millon,
Meagher, & Grossman, 2000) has already surpassed the earlier MBHI
(Millon, Green, & Meagher, 1982) as the comprehensive instrument
of choice for medical patients in whom psychological factors are
likely to be of clinical significance. Comparable levels of
acceptance have been extended to a normal personality inventory,
the MIPS (Millon, Weiss, Millon, & Davis, 1994), and a clinician’s
checklist of pathological attributes (Tringone, 1997). It was in
the mid-1990s that I began to hear references to “Millon”, not as
a person, but as a brand name, like Kleenex or Chevrolet. A
confused and preternatural feeling overtook me. My substantive
reality had been replaced (deposed?); I had become a dehumanized
(deified?) object; shades of “the Rorschach”.
Along with current colleagues and students, I have continued to
author or edit numerous articles, chapters and books that have
gained respectable, if not laudatory reviews, notably volumes such
as the graduate and professional tome, the Oxford Textbook of
Psychopathology (Millon, Blaney, and Davis, 1999), an advanced
undergraduate text, Personality Disorders in Modern Life (Millon,
Davis, Millon, Escovar, & Meagher, 2000), a collection of my
selected papers, entitled Personality and Psychopathology (Millon,
1996), and a comprehensive statement of my views concerning
treatment, called Personality-Guided Therapy (Millon, 1999). Under
the aegis of the APA, I have recently enjoyed and learned much
while authoring a wideranging history of the mental health field,
entitled Masters of the Mind (Millon, Grossman, & Meagher, 2002),
as well as editing a new APA series of 21 books to be authored by
different psychologists and psychiatrists, tentatively under the
general title, Personality-Guided Psychology.
As mentioned earlier, teaching has always been a joy for me,
occasions to improvise extemporaneously, to stir an audience’s
empathic sensibilities, if not to “melt their minds”, so to speak.
I have been asked and have been delighted to speak in any number
of settings beyond my university home base on diverse theoretical,
diagnostic, and therapeutic subjects, but always anchored to the
key role I have continued to see for personality and its
disorders. By now, I have given somewhat over 750 such addresses
at APA and at most state and regional psychological associations
through the years. A member of several “professional circuits” and
“speaker stables”, such as IRE, STS, and the Cape Cod Seminar
group, I have enjoyed many occasions to vacation travel with my
family, visiting friends across the nation. A recent innovation
has been National Computer Systems’ inspired “Millon Conferences”;
these comprise extended workshops by some 15 speakers each year on
a variety of “Millon” topics, held at annually changing cities
around the country.
Over a decade ago I had the pleasure with working with a Danish
group of psychologists and psychiatrists, particularly Niels
Strandbygaard and Erik Simonsen, to establish the International
Society for the Study of Personality Disorders, whose first
biennial conference was held in Copenhagen in 1988, a meeting
attended by over 400 participants from 22 nations. It has
subsequently met with equally numerous and enthusiastic
participants in cities such as Oslo, Cambridge, Milan, Vancouver,
and Geneva; its seventh conference was set for New York in early
October 2001, but was canceled owing to the tragedy of 9/11. My
1970s entrée into the European community owes much to Professor
Strandbygaard, whom I fondly refer to as a great Dane; he not only
translated my work for much of Scandinavia, but led the first
“Millon Study Group” for several years in the 1980s. I’ve cheered
from the sidelines as Niels’ European study group model expanded
to the United States, where more than 40 similar clinical
associations have been established, assembling for a one or two
year period in a number of States, such as Indiana, Minnesota, New
Jersey, California, Florida, and elsewhere, as well as in Canada.
Reception to my writings have brought me numerous international
invitations to settings where I have been impressed by mental
health clinicians and scholars of exceptional talents, notably in
diverse countries such as Norway, England, Japan, Germany, Canada,
Spain, the Netherlands, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Argentina,
Belgium, Israel, and beyond. There are more esteemed and cherished
colleagues around the world who have been generous and hospitable
than I can name in a brief essay such as this.
Recent years have enabled me to semi-retire to what is called
the Institute for Advanced Studies in Personology and
Psychopathology in Florida; here I have been able to reflect,
write, and carry out research together with local graduate
students and international post doc colleagues. The Institute’s
diverse activities are ably and comfortably managed by its
executive director, Donna Meagher. Here also I have been able to
tie together the threads of my professional work these past years.
Thus, my recent writings have stressed the need for mental health
disciplines to rise from their stasis of spirit, and begin to
coordinate (synergize is the term I like) their professional roles
and functions. As elaborated in recent talks and papers, such as
those published in this journal (Millon, 1999b, 2002), I assert
that heretofore unconnected components of our field’s classical
activities should be synthesized, specifically as follows: (1)
that our guiding principles be grounded in the universal laws of
nature, notably those of evolution; (2) that our personologic
theories and pathological concepts be formulated as one of
nature’s many expressions(e.g., physics, biology) of these
universal laws; (3) that our profession’s formal classification
system and nosology be derived logically from these personologic
theories; (4) that our assessment instruments be sufficiently
sensitive quantitatively to test these theories empirically, and
to serve clinically to identify/measure our personological
dimensions and diagnostic categories; and (5) that our therapies
be focused on target areas that are accurately and relevantly
appraised by coordinated assessment tools, and be themselves fully
integrated and composed of synergistically combined modalities.
In closing this brief, but inclusive memoir, I should like to
raise my Sabbath wine glass to all my children, both biological
and psychological, in the wish that their futures be as blessed
and charmed as mine has been, one free and untroubled, joyful and
productive, as it can be in a socially caring and humanistic
world.
(view Dr. Millon's vita)
[top] References
American Psychiatric Association. (1968). Diagnostic and
statistical manual of mental disorders (2nd ed.). Washington,
DC: Author.
American Psychiatric Association. (1980). Diagnostic and
statistical manual of mental disorders (3rd ed.). Washington,
DC: Author.
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