Dean8
[Note: This is the second post in a web-only series of interviews for St. Louis Magazine called "Online Conversations."]
Dean Rosen was a nice Jewish boy from a nice Jewish family that cared about appearances. Then came the '60s: the brazen candor, the push for authenticity. And even though Rosen's behavioral-psych professors taught him the mind didn’t matter, his own experiences taught him otherwise. You had to climb inside people’s heads, study their relationships, watch their thought patterns, if you wanted to change their outer behavior.
Rosen’s had his own challenges along the way. When his 16-year-old son, Adam, confided that he was gay, Rosen became an activist for P-Flag (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays). And when Adam, intensely and quirkily creative, decided he had Asperger’s Syndrome, they collaborated to write a musical about it.
This is a man who learns from experience -- his own, and everybody else's. -- Jeannette Cooperman, staff writer
You're back to a beard after years without -- why'd you shave it off in the first place?
My first job was at Malcolm Bliss Mental Health Center, and I was sitting around a table with 12 psychologists with beards, and I thought, "Oh my God, I'm such a stereotype."
Now you don't care?
Nah. I'm an iconoclast in so many other ways.
What prompted you to study psychology?
What I really wanted to do would now be called motivational advertising. In high school I'd read Vance Packard’s book The Hidden Persuaders. He was appalled by such deceptive practices, but I thought it was really neat -- shallow guy that I was at 17. I guess I wanted to know secret truths.
So by all rights you should be a marketing guru now?
Yeah, except when I was a sophomore in college, a good friend of mine had some severe emotional problems and turned to me for support, and I realized I could give it.
What did you do for her?
Just listened. That’s about all you can do. And not judge. And not get hysterical.
So what was left to learn as a psych major?
I went to the University of Iowa, which was a really hardline experimental psych program. The message was that almost anybody can hold hands as a clinical psychologist; a brilliant person was supposed to do research. Then I went to grad school at the University of Illinois, and it was black-box behaviorism. They were uninterested in anything going on between the ears.
Were you appalled?
No, it was sort of appealing. There's a part of me even today that wants to think that the whole Modernist movement, which emphasized the individual and his consciousness, is overstated. Maybe the individual’s inner experience isn’t that important. The external behavior, that’s the person the rest of us have to deal with, and that public self is just as real as the inner self. But people don’t feel that way; they don’t value their public persona. It’s as if it’s pretend or fake.
What do you mean?
Very often I'm dealing with sexual addicts: people that have done secret things that are very bad or have lustful deviant thoughts, yet their public behavior and reputation is very good. Or people who have a lot of self-doubt, but publicly everything they do is admired. They tend not to value that, as if they've been fooling everyone by hiding their insecurities. And on the flip side, you have people in prison who have done horrible things, yet they’re convinced that deep-down they’re good people. I really work on getting people to own their public self as being just as real as their private self.
That sounds a bit counterintuitive.
Obvious stuff doesn't interest me. Just like when I do marriage counseling. People come to me because they want their partner to change, to please them. I don’t do that. I work with getting people to accept their partner -- because they really don't, and they don’t want to.
Why is marriage so tricky?
Because two people are not one. They will not think alike and act alike and be on the same wavelength at all times, and they will not meet all of each other's emotional needs. I cringe at the word "soulmate," because it sets up the individual for so much disappointment. Who can live up to that?
Anything your patients do to sabotage their marriages?
I hate to say this, but many women confuse listening with agreeing. "If you don’t agree with me on this issue, you did not listen to me, because everything I think and say is so right that if you just listened to me, you would see it my way." The corollary is to complain; "We never settle anything after arguing or discussing it." Of course not. The trick to a successful marriage is to allow disagreement. You can choose to be happy or to be right; you usually can’t have both.
Back to that grad-school behaviorism -- what disenchanted you?
I got drafted. And in the Army, I worked as a psychology technician and got to talk to people grappling with life’s challenges. I realized then that behaviorism was useless. In grad school, we were taught that the most important tool for psychologists was systematic desensitization: teaching people to relax while they faced their phobias in guided imagery. In the Army, I saw that their problems were never that simple, and neither was the solution.
So what did help?
People got better when they could just talk and bring their conflicts into awareness.
Here's a classic shrink question: What were your parents like?
Jewish businesspeople who cared a lot about appearance and fashion. My paternal grandfather was a classic American success story: He came by himself to this country at 13 from the Polish-German border, apprenticed as a garment worker, and eventually opened up a clothing factory. My other grandfather was a simpler man who was a barber. He performed magic tricks for us kids, and he was a passionate fisherman. However, his wife wanted to elevate herself and become a more respectable lady, working in a department store during the Depression. After the war, she opened a neighborhood dress shop, was quite successful, and was always up to the minute in fashion and appearance.
And your parents?
Neither of them was particularly intellectual. My father was bright and self-taught and worked in the family business. My mother was very attractive, very social, played cards, volunteered. She lived in the grown-up world; my two brothers and I lived in the world of children.
Meaning?
In the '50s, parents weren’t that important; they weren’t that involved in their children's lives. It seemed all they cared about was that you’d be home for dinner. The family myth is that I raised myself.
You're quite an activist; what was your first social cause?
I took a social work course, and we had to join a social movement organization, so I joined NORMAL, the National Organization to Reform Marijuana Laws. We have a lot of laughs about that at home. I had a more romanticized libertarian view back then and saw legalization as the solution. It was only years later that I saw people who had terrible problems from marijuana use.
For example…?
Chronic marijuana users lose motivation, so they give up and don't try for anything. And there are some failures of psychosocial development if you are using a drug like marijuana to deal with every challenge in your life: how to connect with other people, how to deal with boredom, frustration, anxiety, anger, rejection, and self-consciousness. You don't learn much if you’re high when you’re experiencing these things.
How did you feel when your son came out to you?
It was no surprise; it was something I had prepared myself for since he was 5. It did feel uneasy at first to have it out in the open, and I am embarrassed to say I had those stupid thoughts of what would the neighbors think and how to tell my family. Especially since my cousin Dick had just died of AIDS weeks before. However, at the funeral the rabbi talked about how my aunt and uncle had shared all of his life, and I felt a shiver up my spine at the importance of that truth. When life is over, what matters is having shared all of your child’s life.
What about your son's more recent identification with Asperger's Syndrome?
I must admit I wanted to deny it at first. It was Adam's own journey of self-discovery; he was trying to understand himself. To me, it seemed like one more burden to add to the way this boy was so different.
What did you do that helped you accept it?
He and I started working on a musical together about Aspergers! And in the process, I came to see the importance of accepting variations in neurology the same way I've learned to accept human variation in sexual orientation and gender identity. There are all these ways we humans differ from one another, and it's just more variation within a species, rather than a disease or developmental failure or deficit.
What have your patients taught you?
That you can be split into parts and at war with yourself—and you need to bring those parts of yourself together. I remember very clearly a client who was a flasher. Fun, outgoing, the life of the party -- but he had this secret behavior, which he abhorred and called The Monster. I saw a connection between the party guy, whom everyone loved, and his willingness to do something very reprehensible, showing himself to the world and flouting all convention. The Monster was what allowed him to shake off the chains of his father's overbearing parenting style. He needed to make friends with that part of himself, because The Monster was always there. The potential is always there. You live with it, and in the process learn to tame it.
What bothers you about your profession?
Its fads. Experimental psych's time has come and gone, along with its fascination with animal learning and shaping behavior with reinforcements. Now it's cognitive psychology, which the universities love because you can study it more easily than psychoanalysis or more humanistic psychotherapies. Cognitive psychologists focus on changing thoughts and/or behavior as a way to change disruptive emotions. For a long time academic psychologists and the graduates they produce have ignored emotion and feeling in therapy. But if you change people’s feelings, the negative thoughts will also change.
Why isn't there more balance?
You don’t make a reputation by integrating multiple points of view. You make a reputation by promoting a very narrow view.
Is it ever possible to escape your work?
Well, I live in this West County subdivision with a big portal, and psychologically I used to have this fantasy when I drive through the portal that I am leaving the chaos of in the lives of my patients and that everybody in my subdivision has a life as perfectly manicured as their yards. But then I wound up treating a few of my neighbors..
