From Paris it was off to London. The US leg of the journey began with my arrival in Boston. During a visit to Harvard University I enjoyed an interesting hour or so in the company of the prominent psychiatrist Robert Coles. I left his office with copies of his well known series Children of Crisis. I travelled to Connecticut by train and arrived in the visibly affluent town of Westport, where I spent a number of days observing the daily work of an American private psychiatric hospital. It was there that I first observed group-therapy sessions as a treatment modality within a private hospital setting. During my stay in Westport I undertook a day’s visit to Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry, in the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) at 34 Park Street in New Haven, where a series of meetings had been arranged. My discussions with several senior staff members revealed that professional staff in the Department of Psychiatry included men and women from psychiatry, psychology, social work and nursing, each of whom participated to varying degrees in the treatment of patients and in teaching and supervising pre-doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows.
Although I visited Yale in the early stages of my study tour, I was so taken by what I learnt about its postdoctoral programme that I made up my mind then that I would like to return to New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow as soon as was practicably possible. I promptly discussed the matter with Dr Jesse Geller, the responsible academic at the time. The discussion was not in vain because I was able to learn, before my return to Westport that day, that my prospects for admission were good. At that time I was unaware of the part played by the state of Connecticut and Clifford Beers in the development of psychology in the US, including the establishment of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (now known as the National Mental Health Association) in 1909.17
Following my visits to Harvard, Westport and Yale, there was much to experience and learn in New York City and the rest of the country. The experience I relished most in America’s world-renowned metropolis was my visit to the Harlem Counseling Center on 125th Street. It was a black-run facility that catered primarily for black and Hispanic residents of Harlem. During my visit I familiarised myself with an approach to mental health that was gaining ascendancy in the early 1970s – the practice of what was popularly known as community psychology, a tradition that had been introduced to me during my discussions at the CMHC. At the Harlem Counseling Center mental health professionals were developing community psychology treatment strategies that required professionals to work where people lived, in order to enable regular community members to act as agents for positive mental health change.
After my New York visit my itinerary included visits to psychology departments at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the smaller, predominantly black colleges in the southern city of Atlanta, Georgia, which are such a notable feature of the higher-education sector in that city. In California, upon arrival at Stanford University, my itinerary included a visit to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Studies, where I was pleased to meet Professor Monica Wilson of the University of Cape Town.
Although it was Christmas time, visits to the University of California in San Francisco and Los Angeles followed, as well as a day’s stay at the California Institute of Technology. It was that visit that resulted in a longish association between myself and Professor Ed Munger, who was instrumental in securing my participation in the regular meetings of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the years following my visit.
A snapshot of such a wide-ranging visit leaves out many experiences and interesting individuals from whom I learnt a great deal. The tour exposed me to a world of applied psychology that was varied, purposefully structured and, in some instances, community based. It was a far cry from the minimalist hit-and-miss experience I had had to create for myself at Baragwanath. By the time I left J F Kennedy Airport on my way back to Johannesburg I was determined to return to the US, and specifically to Yale. I wanted to take advantage of the opportunity for advanced training that my hosts and I had discussed. As I understood the situation at the time, there could have been no better remedy for the deficiencies of my race-based training at home than a postdoctoral fellowship at Yale.
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