Meetings with Remarkable Beings

Leaving México, and an academic system infected by mediocrity and corruption, to do graduate work in Toronto, was something I had worked on for years. At that point I had offers to do graduate work in psychology or in theater and I tried to persuade a university to allow me to do both simultaneously, without success (although a few years later I would do that at the University of California, Davis). Brimming with enthusiasm, I arrived at the Department of Psychology at York University, but my expectations deflated faster than the Hindenburg zeppelin when I found out that the course on consciousness scheduled, and the reason I had chosen York University, had been cancelled, that the "we look forward to meet you" in the department letter was a polite phrase rather than a real feeling, and that the "welcome" from the experts of human relations (psychologists) was not a reunion or a party, but an obligatory stats exam to determine what course we should take. And in an initial course, co-taught by an experimentalist and a clinician, it became evident that the first found the second crushingly boring, whereas the second was not especially interested in his students.

Crushed, I made an appointment to meet with David Bakan, the most famous department faculty and someone whom I knew from a book translated into Spanish, but whom. He was short, broad, with a big beard, and limped (he had polio in his youth). Almost as soon as I sat down, he asked me whether I was disappointed because in the program I was not learning about "what makes people tick," the mind, or anything like it. He had gotten to the crux of my malady as I was only hearing about statistical variance and so on in my courses. We talked a few times more and he even invited me to his home, shared with his wife, the philosopher Mildred. As I took a course by him and read various of his papers and books, I encountered someone that seemed to know everything about everything and could very clearly understand me. I heard about the Bayes theorem, effect sizes, and so on decades before the topics became acknowledged in academia. He also wrote essays on the history of psychology, with some detours to physics, as well as personality psychology, psychoanalysis, child abuse and many other topics. Despite his eminence, he offered me his friendship and I maintained some personal and professional connection with him throughout the years. I was not surprised to hear that he had moved to a care center with his wife when she required constant care. Strikingly, I learned about his death from a dream I had, which led me to find out whether he had passed away (he mentioned parapsychology research in his course and wrote a book on Biblica prophesy).

At one point, I knew personally most important hypnosis researchers and theoreticians in the world. Some were intellectually outstanding and surmounted the bias against a somewhat marginal area, but one stood out for me also for her personality and generosity, Erika Fromm. It would have been understandable if Erika had arrived at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis vested in the sorrow of the recent, devastating, loss of her daughter, to which an accident had added restricted neck mobility. But that was not who she was. Her elegant navy-blue attire went her strong presence and made the rest of us look conventional in contrast. She suffered no fools, but I was fortunate that she did not place me in that group and was very supportive and warm once we met. She even told me that she would teach me basic Dutch in an afternoon, as she knew the language and I was trying to learn it. Alas, as a language student I did not live up to those expectations, but I was astonished and grateful that she called me a "rising star" of hypnosis.

Erika had endured the death of her mother shortly after birth and had escaped the Nazi holocaust leaving Germany after getting her Ph. D. in Frankfurt in 1933, and then the Netherlands in 1938. Her work was unique, challenging the then-unquestionable work of Freud, co-founding behavioral medicine, integrating hypnosis into psychoanalytic treatment, becoming the foremost authority on self-hypnosis, and spearheading the two most formidable compendia of hypnosis research and theory. I can now speak some Dutch but am sorry that I cannot chat with her in our acquired language.

After my frustrating search for a violin teacher as a 13-old (I was admitted to Mexico's Conservatorio de Música but since my violin lesson was scheduled about an hour after the end of the teacher's lunch time, he did not show up to give me a lesson for weeks until I gave up...). My mother had been taking piano lessons with a very affable and impeccable piano teacher, José Sobrino y Arjona so I switched to piano while I waited for a good violin teacher. The first piece he taught me was Borodin's In the Convent, not the typical fare for a child, and he continued to show up every Saturday morning to give me my class. I became somewhat proficient. Even though I was far from a committed student, he never showed any sign of annoyance and continued arriving well-dressed to do his best with a so-so student, until I became more interested in theater, which has remained my main artistic expression.

With the passage of time, I have come to appreciate more the exemplary decency of a piano teacher and composer who probably had to struggle to make ends meet, was not fully appreciated as a teacher or composer, yet gave his students his full attention and talent, without any complaints. I am sorry that I could not value his rare mettle more while I studied piano, but which I could at least tell him in an email years later.

When I took a position as psychology and anthropology departments chair at the then-called University of Texas, Pan-American (UTPA), my common (but not universal) experience with theater directors had been very negative. I had met a few horrendous directors in México and the US whose commonality was an unrestrained hostility seemingly against anyone that crossed their paths (including me). My interpretation was that their role gave them the opportunity to abuse actors who desperately wanted a part and get away with it (the "me too" movement years later is consistent with this idea).

Marian Monta arrived to UTPA in 1971, after the first woman to gain a Ph. D. from Cornell University in her specialty and built the theater program and even a theater building for its productions. As much as she supported the department activities through grants, she gave even more through being both exacting and loving with her students and colleagues. One of them was a newly minted psychology and anthropology department chair who also had considerable training and experience in theater. When I approached her to ask for any possibility to direct plays she not only offered possibilities but even got me a titular position as Artist-in-Residence. At UTPA I directed some of the work I have been most proud of, including Georg Büchner's Woyzeck, Mary Zimmerman's Metamorphoses, and Nilo Cruz's Anna in the Tropics.

Photo by Roger Behrens

The photo of my Himalayan Blueberry shows how beautiful he was physically, but not how purely loving he was throughout his life. Even early on, when he needed some painful ministrations, he would automatically defend by starting to bite me to immediately release his jaw pressure so as not to hurt me. Other than when he was chasing chipmunks around the house, with me chasing him to avoid a chipmunkcide, he was a manifestation of love throughout his life. He was one of the many wonderful cats, each one as different from each other at least as a person differs from another.

An important aspect that my parents passed on to me was love for animals -even though I could never persuade them to become vegetarians- and I experienced often how they rescued street cats and dogs. From my earliest memory, I know I was identified as the "cat child," whereas dogs gravitated towards my mother, and my elder brother would get crocodiles, giant frogs, and such exotic fauna.

Two other extraordinary cats, among the many who have taken care of me throughout my life, at least as much as I took care of them, were El niño malo (The bad boy) and Himy. The first one, a very suave Siamese, was extraordinarily intelligent. One night of fireworks celebrations during which he felt and injured himself seriously, he proceeded to crawl to my parents' bedroom instead of coming to mine, as he did every night. We thought that he was aware that immediate help would come from my mother rather than from a child. Himy, another himalayan, reminded me of the strength of gentleness. I never saw him being aggressive even when a previous cat would hiss and threaten him, yet he would stand on his ground. And he always looked me directly in the eyes, which he did not do with other people.

If as Saint Paul (and many other ancient thinkers and contemporary neuroscientists) have it, we perceive reality "through a glass darkly," few glasses are covered with as many layers of patina as those surrounding our parents/main caretakers. I was fortunate to have had a great relationship with my mother, with whom I shared music, literature, and much more. I want to honor her here not so much for giving me an enduring basis of love, but for her achievements despite having the cards stacked against her for being a fatherless child in her early years and a woman throughout her life. Ignored by her estranged father, she and her brothers started working as teens to support my grandmother's household and thus did not have much formal education. She would have relished becoming an anthropologist or a writer, something very difficult with little previous formal education, four children to raise, and a patriarchal husband.

I am sure that under better circumstances she could have become a great adventurer, writer, or professional (she was even chosen in a competition to become a translator for the Nüremberg trials, but my father left his volunteer posttion as a physician helping displaced individuals in Germany before she could take the position). Nonetheless, she learned some 4-5 languages, played the piano very competently for an amateur, was very well-read, and could dress to dash as the occasion demanded. And whereas my psychoanalyst father was nominally the expert on human beings, she was the one with an extraordinary "don de gentes," a charm to relate to anyone, anywhere, no matter the circumstances. I have not forgotten the evening that we arrived at México's Palacio de Bellas Artes, the main arts venue then in Mexico City, when she realized that she had left the concert tickets home. Nonetheless, she convinced the clerks to let us get in, something that only very few people might have been able to do. She also drilled on me that I should "do things well," rather than being sloppy. Although I did not perform Rachmaninov's Third Piano Concerto at the Carnegie Hall or anywhere else as she would have liked me to, she let me know how proud she was of who I had become.