Larry Hartmann

Interviewee: Larry Hartmann (New York & Merton 1958) [hereafter ‘RES’]    

Moderator: Anya Chuykov [hereafter ‘INT’]    

Date of interview: 27 October 2025  

[00:00:23] 

INT: Today I am joined by Larry Hartmann, New York and Merton, 1958. Larry is a psychiatrist, educator and activist who served as President of the American Psychiatric Association, the APA, between 1991 and ’92. He is especially noted for his pivotal role in APA’s landmark decision in 1973 to remove homosexuality as a mental illness from its diagnostic manual. This change has had a far-reaching impact on LGBTQ civil rights and human rights more broadly. It’s really a privilege that Larry has made time for us today, so thank you so much for taking part in the oral history project. We’re delighted to see you today.  

RES: Thank you. Okay.  

INT: A few quick questions firstly just procedural. Could you say your full name for the recording?  

RES: Lawrence Hartmann, Lawrence with a ‘w’, usually called Larry.  

INT: Amazing. Thank you. And do I have your permission to record this interview?  

RES: Yes please do.  

INT: Amazing. Always good to check once we start recording. And I mean really it’d be great to start right from the beginning and could you tell us where you were born and what life was like growing up?  

RES: I was born in Vienna. My parents were rather prominent in Vienna. My father was of a  well known social democratic family that had professors and diplomats and revolutionaries and lawyers and a pianist and a sculptress.. My mother became a paediatrician and a mountain climber. . When the Nazis came into power in Austria, my parents, who detested the Nazis,  moved  to Paris, when I was one.  I spoke French as my first language. My father was a psychoanalyst. He was able to practise immediately in Paris because he was well-known, he was a pupil and analysand of Freud and he knew French and English and German and Latin and Greek and was a remarkably educated person. So he became an analyst in France briefly. Then in Switzerland. Then my parents and my brother and I moved to New York in January ’41, when I was three. My mother was a paediatrician and she would have needed a licence to work as a pediatrician in France and Switzerland and America. So whereas he could go right ahead and work as a psychoanalyst, she in New York, after getting mixed advice from friends and colleagues, decided to become a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, rather than going on being a paediatrician. So in my early childhood she was going through training and then both my parents were psychoanalysts . I and in New York in 1940s and ‘50s, psychoanalysis was fairly important and respected and complicated and challenging ---and even oddly fashionable.. And so I grew up in a household that, even though I had to change my language and my brother had to change his language twice,  was in many ways a very stimulating place to grow up in. And I was lucky to have educated parents who could land on their feet after changing countries a few times. 

INT: I mean they sound like incredible people. From an early age did you have a sense that you were very inspired by them and would perhaps like to follow in their footsteps? Or you know what was your sense of that?  

RES: I don’t think inspired would have occurred to me as a word when I was a child but I was lucky to have parents who most of the time I liked and respected. They were fun, they were lively, they were educated, they were interested. They were interested in me. My father was a bit distant, he was something of an Edwardian gentleman. My mother was very involved. She was very good with children. She was enthusiastic about her two sons and ran a career and two households and was a mother and was very lively. And my father when I got to be a teenager I think decided that after all my brother and I were pretty interesting and he sort of got on board and spent more time. But as a young child I think I was very lucky to have a mother who was terribly involved and to be sent to good schools. Manhattan was a lively place and there were some good public schools and some good private schools. I was sent to  two very good private schools, one of them run by Columbia as a sort of a lab school for its teachers college which was called Lincoln and it existed in the thirties and forties. And then lost funding and stopped, but they announced that in advance so you could plan where would you go. And I was then sent to a secondary school, a very good co-ed day school in New York called Fieldston. So I went to Lincoln for six years, Fieldston for six years, had some very good teachers. And was aware at the time that it was fun having stimulating teachers and having stimulating friends and students. I went to a school where it was not considered a bad thing to learn and to be bright. Well that isn’t a universal quality.  

INT: No. Oh it’s amazing to be in a place where there is a love for learning and that’s celebrated rather than looked down upon.  

RES: Yes. I mean they liked soccer and swimming and community service but they also had a lot of value placed on the combination of listening to the student and the pupil and encouraging free play and independence while and teaching you lot of dates and numbers and strictness. And there were- It was a good era for experimenting in combining progressive school with high standards. And luckily I was sent to schools with some good teachers and some good fellow pupils. And I’m grateful.  

INT: You sound- Your life in New York sounds deeply enriching. What sort of subjects and extra-curricular activities were you drawn to at a young age?  

RES: Well in childhood I did sports. That was, everybody did sports including girls by the way. And I did some singing and I did some theatre. And I was in a Gilbert and Sullivan play. And I took part in some community helping some settlement houses for the poor and what not. I was sent away in summer which was fortunate and luxurious but a lot of New York’s middle class sent its children out of town in summer. New York gets rather hot and humid in summer. And I didn’t spend a summer in New York until by choice in medical school, I decided to do some research at Columbia, so I came down from Cambridge where I lived and went to Columbia for a summer. But most of my childhood I went to places like Cape Cod and Maine in the summer. And once or twice Europe. And I was brought back to Europe in 1949 when I was 12.  T, the war was over , and my parents started going back to Europe, for international psychoanalytic meetings, every second summer.  My brother and I were taken along in 1949, and we went to Paris and Switzerland and Venice. That was marvellous and it gave me a sort of foothold and added interest in Europe. After all my family had recently been European, and that was in some ways fun. And twice more before the end of college I went to Europe in summer and toured around and saw friends and saw family. And combined some of the traditional going to Paris and going to London with also going to some high Swiss mountain valleys, where my parents had been as young people and where my mother had climbed one or two mountains that no woman had climbed before.  

INT: Gosh, I mean what a brilliant childhood. And those, those are just the most beautiful places in the world. I love Switzerland. Do you continue to- Have you continued to travel to Europe throughout your life and has, you know, speaking languages been a part of your life at all?  

RES: I speak fewer languages than my parents did. I grew up in America where there is a general thought that children, if they learn more than one language they’re precocious nonsense. But I learnt- I forgot French. When I moved to America I quickly learned English and my brother who was slightly older held onto his Viennese accent. I didn’t. But he wanted to hold on to Europe. He had been a school child. He had spoken German and French then English. He was very annoyed and angry at my parents to keep moving around. I was young enough so that it where my family was the world and I learned English. I then as a teenager relearned French, learned some Latin, learned some German, learned some Spanish. But I did not learn languages the way I might have had I gone on living in a small country in Europe. But I spoke enough French so that I could get by in France. However, in the 1950s I was quite aware that in Paris if you didn’t speak perfect Parisienne French you were considered somehow mysteriously not fully educated. That has changed over the years. Anglophile and even English pronunciations and American ones have become somewhat fashionable. But in the 1950s the French were very aware that they were losing their place as the international language and they didn’t like it. So they weren’t entirely pleased with anybody who didn’t speak perfect Parisienne French. I am tall, you can’t tell in the Zoom, but I used to be 6’ 4”.  

INT: Wow.  

[00:10:12] 

RES: I’m still tall and I had fair hair and so I didn’t look very French but I spoke reasonably good French and read it for pleasure and enjoyed it. But that was many decades ago. I haven’t used it much since even though, yes I’ve gone on going to Europe for vacations. I lived in Oxford for two years as a Rhodes Scholar. I went to visit my parents, they went for summers often to Switzerland and I went as an adult, I had some other relatives there, I had some friends, I had some Rhodes friends and former friends who would meet me in various places in Europe. So yes I spent occasional summers in Europe. I still do but I’m now in my late eighties and travelling is much harder for me than it used to. I don’t do much anymore. I get very tired whatever I do. But for 70 or 80 years I enjoyed the fact that luckily with jet airplanes and luckily with the exchange rate such as it was, it was slightly cheaper to exist in Western European than in America, sometimes prices in Switzerland and Paris rose to American levels. But most, and this has changed, but mostly in the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, being on a scholarship in Europe or having parents who said, try to get by on a dollar or two or three a day, worked in Europe. And I went to various places where- I went to Russia as a tourist for instance. And you had to pay as an American student $35 a day ahead of time before you did anything else in Russia in the 1950s. But luckily I was a student in England at the time and the Russians wanted to cultivate the British. So they charged the British students $1 a day ahead of time. So that was fortunate.  

INT: Oh you got very lucky with being in the right places at just the right time.  

RES: Yes. There were some things that were very lucky. Also being at Oxford in the late fifties, the reputation of Americans, it was post Marshall Plan and pre Vietnam War. So that on the whole the British assumed that an American who came to England to study was probably reasonably bright, reasonably competent, reasonably loyal to England and interested in British things. And the Marshall Plan was a reasonable bonding thing. And the Vietnam War changed that. The style when America decided to wage war on Vietnam undermined its reputation in Western Europe and in England somewhat. But when I was in England one of the things that was fun was as an American I didn’t have the same class barriers that everyone of my British friends had. I was friends with two or three high aristocrats one of whom I played tennis with, and many people from middle or lower or unclear class backgrounds  mostly lively and, bright young people who had come from somewhere and were at Oxford without much thought about labelling me because I was American and therefore probably OK and an outsider. Not too far outside, and there was something pleasant about being a not totally identifiable visitor.  

INT: That’s really interesting yeah.  

RES: There was something else that was fun that existed in the fifties. The women of the great country house families of England had invented something in the Second World War, I’ve forgotten precisely what the organisation was called, but it was run by a woman called Miss MacDonald of Sleat who was a grand Scottish aristocrat. And she organised with country house wives whose husbands were away fighting the war or running things in London, to welcome American officers for a vacation for a week or two to give them something to do in English country houses. They liked that and so did the wives. And so after the Second World War they continued for 20 years or so with this organisation, which provided country house vacations during downtime for Rhodes Scholars if we wanted them. So you could write a note to Miss MacDonald of Sleat and say, “Could I spend a week in Western Scotland preferably with fishing?” “Could I spend a week in Cornwall?” where I had never been. And I did that once and went to Cornwall, had a very good time. And the idea of being a welcome guest in a country house in Cornwall just because I was an American scholarship student was sort of fun.  

INT: Oh my goodness, I mean you just don’t get these opportunities anymore. That’s truly incredible. Just to kind of go back to your studies for a moment. Am I right in understanding that you studied Liberal Arts at Harvard?  

RES: Yes.  

INT: Can you tell us a little bit about your time as an undergraduate at Harvard and did you enjoy college life?  

RES: I enjoyed college, very stimulating place, full of very bright students. One of the things that doesn’t get reported enough about good colleges is that they are full of bright interesting challenging ambitious students trying themselves out. Very stimulating for others even others in different fields. So I had a good friend who was a classicist and I had to think differently because of that. I had good friends who were interested in things that I didn’t know much about that helped me take a few courses I didn’t know. I majored in history and literature. I enjoyed it. I studied with some famous people. Harvard has famous professors from time to time. I took a course with Archibald MacLeish. I took a course in- And I audited things. One of the things that’s nice about Harvard is that a lot of their courses are lectures and small study groups. And the lectures if you’re a student you can walk into. And so I audited a course in intellectual American history with Arthur Schlesinger Jr. It was a brilliant course. I didn’t have to do all the homework. I did some of it. But I audited a course with Paul Tillich who was a theologian and interested in- 

INT: Yes! 

RES: Reviving Protestantism in various ways. I took a course with a literature professor who was, which was rare, going to move away from a Harvard professorship to California because he wanted to live in California. It was Stanford which was a great university. But he left Harvard and I was told he was brilliant at something, so I audited his course. I was interested in a lot of things beyond my individual field. I made friendships. I played tennis . I took some part in theatre. I became the drama editor of the Harvard Crimson which is a daily newspaper and not a bad one. And it has fights with the Harvard administration from time to time. And it reports in very responsible ways, and I don’t think I’d ever been criticised as fiercely as I was in the Daybook. If you published something in the Crimson, the next day one of the apprentices, a freshman or a sophomore, publishes it in a book with your article with blank space around it. And anybody else who works for the Crimson is welcome to write whatever they’d like. And I have never been as severely criticised as I was by other undergraduates. But one accepts that that’s part of being an undergraduate. So I did various things, I enjoyed that. I went to Europe a bit in summer. I had family in New York where I could go to see my parents and go to theatre and concerts. Boston and Cambridge are very pleasant places to live in a lot of ways. And I was lucky and academically gifted and did quite well and decided I wanted to prolong my undergraduate years somewhat so that even though I thought I would go to medical school in order to become a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, I would also like to prolong my general education and not just be a specialist. So I applied to several- Harvard has its own travelling scholarships two or three of them which are hard to get and you apply and you go through interviews and you write an essay. And then there are things like Fulbrights which the American Government does. And then there are things like Marshall Scholarships which I think the English Government may do, I’m not sure. And there are Rhodes things which a very wealthy man as you know set up. And he was not an entirely nice man, or entirely liberal. . He thought he would set up a secret society for rich Britons. And his friends persuaded him to turn that into a scholarship for people from the English Commonwealth nations and English speaking countries. And it’s been a very nice internationalising force and the way that young people could cross boundaries and study somewhere else and learn different things, at the time as you probably remember there were no women Rhodes Scholars, that happened about 15 or 20 years after me. And I think it’s a very good thing. But at the time it was, it tended to be old-fashioned, mostly male, totally male, mostly white. And the fact that it has changed means that when I now get a notification of this year’s Rhodes Scholars, they are less than half white males at this point.  

INT: Yes it’s changed a lot since. 

RES: Yeah. And that’s a, it’s okay. I don’t think there’s a perfect ratio and I do think it’s sort of amusing for those of us who are old to look at what this year’s crop and last year’s crop of Rhodes Scholars are intending to major in because nowadays they tend to major in all kinds of very useful world functioning things like the environment. And we did it much less in our day. We much more used it as a stepping stone to being educated but also getting on with a career. And I don’t think we felt that our choice of major was as decisive in getting a Rhodes Scholarship as people seem to now. I mean I majored in English at Oxford, that wasn’t particularly fashionable or clearly useful for the world.  

[00:20:36] 

INT: No it’s so- I mean speaking to some of the new scholars, what they’re specialising in is fascinating. I was talking to one that does digital anthropology and I mean incredible to see what subjects are coming up. As you say you majored in English. Can you tell us a little bit more about how you found the studies at Oxford, the seminar kind of system, the tutorial system I should say? How was that?  

RES: Well I loved Oxford, it was very beautiful. It was strange. I expected it to be very much a continuation of Harvard because they are both world famous universities with very distinguished faculty and students. And the fact that there were any differences at all in the students was of course part of what my education was about. That suddenly you go to another great university and it’s not all the same. For instance of my friends at Harvard in the late 1950s, probably very few if any would have said that they believed in God. Most of my Oxford friends, intellectual and educated as they were, seemed to think that they believed in God. And that was sort of an interesting thought.  

INT: Very.  

RES: Another difference- Yeah, another interesting was in America if there was a clash between its traditional and its reasonable, which is a frequent clash, in America its reasonable won, absolutely, solidly. In England very often not so. Very often its traditional won and you would try to figure out why. Anyway it was fun, it was different. I had the luck to have letters of introduction to two friends of friends of my family. And I could hardly have asked for more distinguished and interesting letters of introduction. One was to somebody who was the Oxford Professor of Poetry in those years, which was W. H. Auden. And he was extraordinarily educated, very interesting provocative person. And the other was Sir Isaiah Berlin, who was a philosopher and a historian of philosophy. He spoke in rapid paragraphs and was sharp and critical of everything. I brought him along two recordings that a friend of mine who was a conductor, and also a friend of his, had made, in America. One was of a selection of Wagner orchestral pieces. Sir Isaiah Berlin said, “Eric should know I don’t like Wagner.”  Sir Isaiah walked me around All Souls, and we talked about various things and we talked about translation. And I quoted to him something that Robert Frost the poet had said, which was, “Poetry is what gets lost in the translation.” Quite a useful concept, I think. And Isaiah Berlin said, “I am going to take you to Sir so and so who is the head of All Souls at this point. He would love that.”  

INT: Gosh, I mean even just getting access to All Souls. Rarely do people get that.  

RES: Oh that was, that was- Right, that was sort of- It wasn’t that I spent most of my time at All Souls. I visited once in the company of a very distinguished man whose work I have respected and read and treasured. My tutor was a very strange but very gifted man. I had gone to Merton College because you are asked what colleges would you like to apply to. And Rhodes tries to spread you out among colleges so that there aren’t too many in one college. And Merton was as you probably know one of the three that has a claim to be the oldest college. It was the oldest physical establishment of a piece real estate. And it was good at English and cared about it. But its great English scholar actually had just moved on. I was sent there partly to study with Neville Coghill. Neville Coghill translated Chaucer and directed plays and had tutored W. H. Auden. He had just moved on to a university professorship and was now at a different college. So I had a man called Hugo Dyson, a very good and stimulating man; he sent us, a few times, to a few other tutors, for things that he didn’t specialize in, so, for instance, I had Dame. Helen Gardner for a few weeks. And I had a few other visiting professors. But Mr. Dyson was fun and he had some kind of an interesting eyepiece and a limp and he walked with a cane. And he was full of old English mannerisms which were once, a few years later, exploited by Hollywood. There was a film in the 1960s with Julie Christie called something like Darling in which she climbs her way up through three or four interesting, very different Englishmen and winds up stuck with some Italian boring old Count in some rich castle in Italy. But on her climb upward she flirts with a BBC TV interviewer, and they go to interview a grand old burbling man of English letters, and he was played by my tutor who wasn’t acting at all, he was playing himself.  

INT: Oh that’s so funny. I need to see this film.  

RES: [overtalking 00:26:12] I also had, as you had to in those days, you had to learn Old English and Middle English. And I wasn’t enthusiastic about that. I understand that you should learn the roots of the language, so I learned Old English and read Beowulf and the Seafarer and the Wanderer. And I read Chaucer in Middle English. But the man who taught us Old English and Middle English was contentedly of another century. He knew little about anything that had gone on in the twentieth century, and little about America. He didn’t seem to care much about that, and for instance assumed that his American tutees would know that a lychgate meant a gate to a cemetery through which the corpse was moved because the Anglo-Saxon word lych meant corpse.  Nobody I knew had ever heard of a lychgate.  

INT: Of course.  

RES: But that was- I didn’t much enjoy having to learn Old and Middle English although one of the amusing things was one of my two American classmates who were learning Old English and Middle English with me with the same tutor, one of those two turned out to be probably the most widely known Rhodes Scholar of my year, not because he was a famous politician, not because he was a famous academic, we had one or two of each, but because he turned into a musical star and a movie star. And so I had Kris Kristofferson as one of the people that I spent some time with learning Old English and Middle English. And that was sort of fun. It was odd but- 

INT: Oh that’s, wow, I was about to ask, you know, did you interact much with Rhodes House or fellow Rhodes Scholars but it sounds like the US cohort was fairly close.  

RES: Yes. One of the very good things which I think is still going on was that the Rhodes people invited us to travel to Oxford on the same ocean liner. In those days you usually took an ocean liner. It was the easier way to cross the ocean. Airplanes were just beginning to be as cheap. But most of us crossed the ocean eastbound on the Queen Elizabeth and about two thirds of the class, or three quarters, plus one or two of the other scholarship people on other scholarships came. So we had five or six days together. I made some of my friends which still last to this day I made not in England but on the Queen Elizabeth going to England. And it was the year of a World’s Fair, there was a World’s Fair in Brussels in 1958. So the Rhodes people asked us would we like to organise a trip for several days so that we would go on bonding and we would go to the World’s Fair. So one of my classmates who was a very nice and interesting guy but not very skilful at organising things like a bus from Le Havre or Cherbourg to Brussels, organised it. We took a tiny bus. The rooms were bad. The bus was bad. Going to the World’s Fair was fun and we made friends and some of those friendships have remained. One of them was with a non-Rhodes Scholar American from Yale who went to Cambridge. But he learned that his American classmates were going, so nice chance to meet people. And then once in Oxford it was a fairly expectable thing that you would go on as some of your friendships with some of your American classmates in other colleges at Oxford, so that I had immediate entrée to, I knew somebody in Christ Church, I knew somebody in Balliol, I knew somebody in New College etc.  

INT: Did you partake in any of the sort of traditional Oxford sports perhaps like rowing or were there any kind of British traditions you took part in?  

[00:30:02] 

RES: Yes but I was not- I was- Harvard has a rowing team and it’s distinguished at Harvard to be good at an oarsman. But I knew that I was- I’m the right shape to row in a crew but I am not a terribly strong oarsman. I twice rowed for my house at Harvard because they needed a substitute but I was not good enough to be a great oarsman. I played tennis for my college at Oxford and I took part in some soccer i.e. football in British terms. But I was not- It was not a major part of my life. I did very much enjoy grass tennis courts. Some in England may take them for granted but for me they were a luxury.  In America there are nearly no grass tennis courts largely because our climate doesn’t have enough rain to sustain grass courts. If you try to do grass here there are patches of dry immediately so that as you know the great tennis competitions with grass courts are in England.  At Oxford playing for Merton I could play on grass courts. And I had a friend whose aunt I knew who was getting married when I was a second year student at Merton. The aunt was a tennis partner of mine in America. She was a family friend. She visited Oxford for the wedding, and as part of Merton’s tennis team I could invite her to play on grass, which was fun.  

INT: Oh how wonderful.  

RES: I did go punting a few times and I took some American friends punting. And of course I wasn’t good at it but I was adequate.  

INT: I mean it has to be done. And for once Britain being rainy helped out because you got to experience a grass court, it’s good to hear. Have you been back to Oxford since your time as a Rhodes student?  

RES: I have been back and one of the things that saddens but I understand it is when I was an undergraduate nothing was locked. Now not only is it locked but you have to have a reason if you come as I did in July or August when I was in Europe for the summer with a friend to show him Merton College and other colleges, the Deer Park at Magdalen etc., you had to knock and show that you were, had some reason for being there. Granted it also allowed something nice to happen. I knocked on the wonderfully old mediaeval door of Merton College and a scout there for the summer to take care of it let me in, and I said I’m so and so and I was at Merton from ’58 to ’60. And I would so much like to show my friend around the garden, I lived in Fellows Court etc. And he squinted at me, he was about 60 or 70, peered at me and said, “Certainly sir. You’re a member of the College. It’s George Hartmann in the fifties or sixties.” And I said, “Well you got the last name right.”  

INT: So close.  

RES: It was very nice. He did sort of recognise me which was very nice. But the fact that it’s locked saddened me and I understand- Harvard is locked. The Harvard houses have become locked too. But I was very glad that Oxford remained a very beautiful mediaeval architecturally interesting, from the point of view of gardens interesting, from a point of view of using its relationship to the past and the countryside. For instance I was interested in theatre, I went to various plays that were done outdoors. Tamburlaine the Great is a play by Marlowe in two parts. Nobody has ever seen Tamburlaine the Great. You probably haven’t. Nobody I know in America has ever seen it. It’s rare, it’s not his most famous play, there are two or three. It was done outdoors in the gardens at St John’s by a director who had done some other things and he staged one scene in a large tree. There was an emperor hung in a cage in a tree. Another scene emperors, and this was Marlowe’s idea, the conqueror at Tamburlaine is towed onto the stage by a carriage pulled by several emperors of countries he had conquered. Well it’s sort of grandiose and the man directing it, Oxford undergraduate, said to the Fellows of St John’s, “I want to do it in this quad with this in the background and this lighting. And I’d like an elephant.” And he pretended to have a sort of a working class accent which he didn’t really have. And he told the Fellows of St John’s, “I want to have an elephant.” And they said, “You can’t have an elephant on the lawns of St John’s.” And I think they prevailed. But it was still one of the most wonderfully interesting uses of Oxford tradition and skill and architecture and garden.  

INT: Absolutely. No Oxford does that really, really well, making the most of the beautiful city. As your time at Oxford was coming to an end, did you have a sense of what you wanted to go and do next? You’d mentioned psychiatry is ultimately what you wanted to do. What happened?  

RES: I thought before I went to Oxford that I would probably go to medical school and be a psychiatrist and be a psychoanalyst. It combined art and science and human beings. I knew it from my family. I knew many of their friends. It was intellectually stimulating. And when I went I thought well this is something I can study whatever I want and I will do something adventurous to me and make me more educated. And then I will go on and be trained in a field that I respect. And after a year of studying English I thought PPE interests me. I like the idea of philosophy, politics and economics. Maybe I should study some of that. And I went to talk to the then Warden of Rhodes House, a very intelligent man called Williams, E. T. Williams, who had helped the British Government by mediating one of the colonial wars and disputes in Africa. Williams was the Chief British negotiator, he was a good negotiator, he had a sense of humour, he was very bright. And I said, “I think English is good for me in some ways but I think maybe I would do better in PPE and be more educated.” And he said, “I agree. I think it might be very interesting for you. But I think I would like and I think the Rhodes Scholarship would like it if you would stay a third year and get a degree in PPE. And so if you want to switch, okay but stay two years in PPE and get a degree.” And I thought about that and thought, well I’m going on to medical school and residency anyway. I’m not sure I can ask my parents to go on paying for my education forever in America. And this is sort of an addition to my education. So I stayed in English and Warden Williams understood that and I understood that. But I thought of that as an aside education in that I told Harvard Medical School when I applied originally, I’m also applying for some scholarships in Europe. They said fine. When I got a Rhodes I went to the medical school and said I’d been admitted for the next year’s class. I’d now been admitted to study at Oxford with this distinguished scholarship. Will you agree to admit me when I emerge from Oxford? Will I admit without having to apply again to Harvard Medical School? And they said certainly, they liked the idea of having a Rhodes Scholar or two here or there. So I didn’t have to apply again and I knew leaving Oxford that I would return and go to Harvard Medical School which I then did for four years. And then was a paediatric intern in California. And then was a psychiatric resident at Harvard’s Massachusetts Mental Health Center which was a major Harvard teaching programme. And during all those times by the way I always did well at school and one of the things that happens in America is if you do well and you go to an expensive private school, they give you an honorary scholarship. So I had an honorary scholarship as a child, as a teenager, as a medical student. But the Rhodes people actually paid me, that was very welcome, it was a very nice thing.  

INT: Yes! 

RES: For two years I was being paid for my room, my board, my tuition at Oxford and also I could travel around Europe a bit. And so I went back to the ordinary world of being at a good school and paying quite a lot for it. So I did that, went to medical school, became an intern in paediatrics, became a resident in psychiatry and then stayed on at Harvard Medical School as a faculty member at Mass. Mental and at Cambridge Hospital, where I then taught off and on, for about 50 years as  a minor clinical professor.  

INT: Incredible. I have to- Over 50 years is incredible. I have to ask what is it that you loved about teaching and enjoyed about your time there that kept you going?  

RES: Well I’m sure there are things that early on in life for reasons we don’t understand become part of our expectation and quality of life of oneself. I always wanted to do and to teach. And I’m perfectly aware of Bernard Shaw’s brilliant comment that those who can do, those who can’t teach. Well I always thought one should do both. And I was back somewhat as a trainee at Harvard, you were asked as a resident in psychiatry to teach medical students. And I thought that was absolutely right and I enjoyed that. And I went on doing that and I liked some of my friends and colleagues.  

[00:40:14] 

And so at the place where I was trained I then became a very junior faculty member and tried out teaching, tried out different kinds of teaching. I ran a clinic for children and adolescents psychiatry for years. I did some invention of techniques of play therapy. One of the things that you may never have thought about but if you see children in psychiatry, do you simply sit there and look wise and calm and kind and silent? Doesn’t get you far with children. The first child ever seen at Mass Mental Health Center (I looked this up and read the transcript) was seen around 1910. The head of the(adult) Southard Clinic at MMHC, and four or five other famous clinicians, sat around in armchairs with a poor and frightened little child, sat there looking formal and wise and kind. They tried to talk and listen, and they learned nearly nothing about the child.  

INT: Yes.  

RES: And I, reading the transcript 50 years later, learned nearly nothing about the child. I learnt a lot about the clinicians and what they were interested in about the child. So one of the things as a young faculty member I did was to become reasonably good at and inventive at play therapy, which is playing and drawing and doing things with a child while also listening. And there are games involved, for instance Squiggles invented by the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott in which you tell the child, there’s a game I like to play with children, and we both have to do something and I make a squiggle, kind of drawing, and you finish it and make it into a drawing and tell me about it. And then you make a squiggle and I finish it and make it into a drawing and tell you about it. Well one of the things about that is it’s fun, children liked it. Another is it puts you on the same level as the child in various ways. So I did that as part of my learning to be with children, learning from children and teach others how to be with children.  

INT: Such an important skill, removing that sense of hierarchy and creating an open line of communication, that’s amazing. Just to kind of go back a little bit to 1966, in one of the articles you shared I loved reading about a protest you did around pay. Could you share a little bit more about that for those listening?  

RES: Well most of my life was learning and doing ordinary psychiatry and seeing patients of all ages, including children. Most of my colleagues just see adults. I enjoyed learning how to see children and adolescents. Most of my work life was seeing patients, administering a clinic, and teaching. But occasionally, and I began this in psychiatric residency, I tried myself out as a public figure. And it turned out I was reasonably good at doing public things and not getting paid for it, that’s one of the principles I hope some of the people listening to this will learn is that you can do interesting things in parts of your life that you are not getting paid for. I learned that some things were terrific where I was a resident in psychiatry and very interesting. Some weren’t fair. I was in a large class of 25 first year residents in psychiatry, we weren’t getting paid very well, I knew that. But it was a distinguished hospital and we liked being there and we were getting good credentials. But I also learned something that none of us knew until I asked, of the 25 first year residents, 21 were being paid $4,500 a year, 4 were being paid $3,600 a year. Those four were the women. That was outrageous. And the training director didn’t seem to think it was outrageous. So I got all 25 of us to sign a letter to the training director saying please equalise our pay. He was a wonderful teacher but somewhat conservative and he grumphed and humphed and said, “Well I suppose I could, I don’t see why, the women are all married or they should be.” But he humphed and grumphed and said, “Okay.” So equalised the pay. If you follow that that means my male colleagues were getting paid a little less and my female colleagues were all getting paid significantly more. And I went to the head of the hospital and said, “I’ve done this and the male colleagues are getting paid a little less. I would like you to institute a raise in pay for all of us.” He was very smart, creative, interested man. Smart and he said, “Well it’s a state hospital, go talk to the Commissioner of Mental Health for the State of Massachusetts.” So I happened to know the Commissioner a little bit, that I did, I went to talk to him. He said, reasonably, “Find out what residents are being paid, residents in psychiatry are being paid in all 50 states of the United States.” Nobody knew that. It wasn’t the computer age. Nobody knew what all 50- And mental health was something in which the state was the key player for paying for mental health training. So I and two friends made phone calls and wrote letters. And we learned that Massachusetts’ residents in psychiatry, fortunately for our cause, were being paid 50th out of the 50 states. And I told the Commissioner and he said, “That’s very useful.” And within six months our pay was increased by 50% or so. Very gratifying, it helps one to- 

INT: Yes.  

RES: Sometimes with proper timing and good luck, something works. So I used that several years later when I began changing some things in national psychiatry, that sometimes if you are reasonably motivated and have good timing and have some friendships and make some alliances, something can work. So I fortunately was part of something in my residency which then helped me think, maybe I could do something just after residency.  

INT: That’s a brilliant story. Would you describe yourself as quite a natural leader and organiser of people? Or was that something you learnt throughout your career?  

RES: I wouldn’t because it’s immodest but I turned out to have some talent and I’m glad that I combined some talent with some learning about issues that might be timely to be changed and listening to others and figuring out how one could help people change things. Well it turned out also they had decided people in prisons in Massachusetts were getting no psychiatric help and should. And so I visited prisons, worked in a prison and got the Psychiatric Society to volunteer labour, if you were in prison and wanted a psychiatric consultation, you could then ask them for a psychiatric and we would send somebody to help the prison and the prisoner learn something about themselves and what not. And that was not extraordinary but it turned out I was reasonably good at persuading people this needed to be done and so we did some of that. And it was fun and it didn’t last forever. The Governor at the time of Massachusetts was very supportive. The next Governor was less supportive. One has to learn that too.  

INT: Yes. I’m really curious to know what were the attitudes towards mental health at that time? I mean often we say, you know, back in the day there was people, people didn’t talk about mental health, that’s something that gets thrown out around a lot in my generation. But I’m curious what you were up against when talking about these issues?  

RES: Well I don’t know everything but there was a certain amount denigration of mental health and stigmatising. If you had a mental illness you were somehow wrong and bad and untrustworthy etc. And one of the things that I like many people in my generation worked at was to help people think therapeutically and in an unprejudiced way about mental illness and help people who were mentally ill not to feel self-stigmatising too much. And to learn about what is known and what can be done. And we were learning a lot about what could be done to help people both psychotherapy and medication. And to learn and to help educate the public not automatically to denigrate those crazy, I don’t mind the word crazy, but it’s a denigrating word, and one shouldn’t flick it about too easily. I do think by the way and this, people seeing this interview may not realise that the person who is currently President of the United States is a difficult personality. I am theoretically because I am a psychiatrist not supposed to comment on that. But I am cheerfully taking this opportunity to say there are many major mental illness labels one could and should throw at the President of the United States, in addition to common-sense words like liar, which should disqualify somebody from being President. Anyway one has to think about not just throwing around mental health words but learning about mental illness, learning about what can be done to diagnose it and help it and overcome it, and find alliances with people to overcome it. And in my field of child and adolescent psychiatry, this usually means helping both parents and child not simply to stigmatizse mental illness.  

INT: Absolutely. No really important to understand that. I, again another really interesting event in your career is that in 1970 you established the Committee for Concerned Psychiatrists. I wondered if you could share what kind of led you to create this committee and what was the goal?  

[00:50:15] 

RES: Right. That was an unusual provocative thing. I was a lively, young, fairly bright, good credentials teaching at a major university at a time when something publicly upsetting happened. In May of 1970 the American Government invaded a country with which we were at peace, Cambodia and lied about it to the American people. And many people were protesting the Vietnam War and were furious at our own government and furious that it would lie to us. And the lies were soon exposed. This happened a week before the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychoanalytic Association. The American Psychoanalytic, much smaller group but very reluctant to say anything about anything public, actually made a quiet modest statement, more or less it’s not very good for mental health to lie, or to invade a country you’re at peace and lie to your own citizens. The American Psychiatric Association, much larger and more powerful, didn’t want to hear from its own members. The board of trustees meeting ruled it out of order to talk about the government. They were afraid they would lose funding. There was a forum at the annual meeting to which usually half a dozen members came and the President and trustees and assembly came. And somebody complained about the APA’s stance on women and somebody complained about the APA’s stance on abortion or assisted suicide or something. And a few people came and you talked to members. 800 people showed up at that 1970 forum to protest that the American Psychiatric was saying nothing to the government. And the government, and the APA President ruled the 800 APA members out of order. Didn’t want to hear from us. Said this is not psychiatric and we don’t want to hear from our own members. Another board of trust meeting, again the new President ruled us all out of order. Some of us young outsiders (remember this is the APA members but not official members of committees, councils, board, assembly) , protesting on the stage after the official meeting, met one another. On stage I met my brother who I knew was in San Francisco but hadn’t seen for a while. We were both liberal politically and we were both on stage protesting.  On that stage I also met a man who was a family friend and who was if anybody was, the Dean of American psychiatry in 1970. A man called Karl Menninger from Kansas. And he and I were glad to see that we were supporting the same thing. People met on stage and some of the young people who met said we’re going to do something about this. And about four or five of us made an unofficial committee, all of us members of this American Psychiatric but not officially appointed to anything, in which we decided we were going to try to change the leadership of the American Psychiatric. Rather ambitious, a group of 38,000 psychiatrists, we were four or five outsiders. But we cared and we were angry. And we read the bylaws and decided by petition we will put up candidates for President, Vice-President, Secretary, Treasurer, Trustee. And we will try to change the bylaws of this more and more conservative organisation so that we have some input from the members. And I read the bylaws, that in itself is a very dull proposal and most people don’t do it, but it put me in a strong position. I knew that the bylaws allowed various procedures for changing the bylaw. So we nominated, we began nominating liberal educated mostly big city and big university people to join the board and become officers. And we changed the bylaws. And our first, the CFCPs first candidate for President of the APA, usually there was just one proposed candidate, no choice and the membership rubber stamped it. We had two candidates, ours got 40% of the vote and well you may say that’s only 40%. But our second, the second year our candidate won by two votes. By the third year our candidate won, in our fourth year our candidate, our fifth year our candidate. We changed the composition of the board of trustees enormously away from being an AMA-like organisation which cared most of all for the income of the profession and the safety of the profession, into an organisation that was much more attuned to mental health, mental illness, prevention, teaching, treatment. A mental health organization rather than a guild-oriented organizsation. And we changed bylaws, so for instance there have to be two candidates for President. Big change. And how do you nominate people changed. What sort of nominating committee? It used to be appointed by the President who was a 63 year old white male and he appointed five of us 63 year old white male friends to be the nominating committee. There now had to be a nominating committee that geographically represented America and what not. All this was passed by the members of the APA by repeated referenda which we set up and with five or six of us and then seven or eight or nine of us, put things on ballots for referenda. And clearly there was a lot of support because our proposals for changing referenda all succeeded. And our candidates for President and Vice-President succeeded very rapidly so that the board changed and the rules changed very rapidly. The CFCP did that for five or six years and again we had good luck, we had good timing and we had a lot of anger about the Vietnam War, women’s issues, black issues. But we also had the timing and the good luck to figure out how to push and change [unclear 00:56:41] in the organisation. It changed and the APA was changed very much for the better. And it happened that in those years there was also a big issue that I care about that was ripe for change which was the APA had labelled gayness, homosexuality as an illness. And several of us decided one of the things we should change was psychiatry’s influential labelling of homosexuality as a mental illness. We soon found much support for our position because there were now some more liberal, more socially active people on the board to make some changes. And that was something that couldn’t have happened without a new and more socially thoughtful board of trustees. And it happened in 1973. Biopsychosocial rethinking. And it turned out to be a very big and powerful change. We had some luck and some good timing.  The 1973 Board had not been chosen specifically to address gayness, but it turned out that in changing the board for three or four years one of the things one could then change was a large social-psychiatric issue. And some conservatives and some others thought that all gay people were sick. Many psychiatrists, including many liberals, did not and we were increasingly able to document and to argue that the APA’s official position was wrong, and far more harmful than helpful.That took some work and it took some writing of papers and it took some working with the Assembly and the committee system and the Board. And over a few years we were able to get the APA to end having gayness be a diagnosis, among quite a few other social issues changes for the American Psychiatric.  

INT: It feels like such a timely moment to be speaking to you and thinking about how your attention to the structure, the constitution, the laws, you know, the details, I mean that’s what made that possible.  

RES: Yes.  

INT: And it’s that attention to detail that kind of makes that big change happen which I think a lot of people don’t spend enough time on those details nowadays.  

RES: Yes it took work and there were some colourful parts of that and picturesque things which matter too. I’m all for colourful picturesque things but it also takes some quiet work. And there were several of us who were willing to do that.  

INT: Absolutely. I mean as you say it’s not [audio distorted 00:58:54] as one might like to think. But it’s, it happened. That must have been quite a- That 1973 decision must have been quite a remarkable moment in your career. As you say it’s a decision you cared about quite deeply and I’m curious how that shaped your career and the direction of your career and what did that momentum do for you?  

RES: Well it did but it also came up against at the time a major problem. There were no gay psychiatrists. You were not allowed to be gay and a psychiatrist. You were not allowed to be gay and openly so and on the faculty of [s/l Harvard 00:59:25] medical school you were, people were referring you patients which I lived on those patient fees mostly and some academic work, wouldn’t refer you patients of all kinds. Very different from now. My psychoanalyst when I was being psychoanalysed raised her eyebrows considerably that I was seeing clinically two people who were gay as patients of mine. And that was considered widely impossible, immoral and wrong because it was clear that I suffered from the same illness that these two patients suffered from, so who was I to treat them for something that I hadn’t treated in myself.  

[01:00:07] 

It was a very different climate. The climate was very hostile to being open about being gay and I was not open about being gay as fast as my long term partner would have liked, as fast as some young people today would have liked. But I would have had no standing and I couldn’t have been a psychiatrist or a faculty member and be openly gay. It was a gradual process of coming out and it was very much a process of fighting for issues but not being too noisy about only fighting for that one issue. I was very quickly known as somebody who was interested in women’s issues, children’s issues, black issues, Hispanic issues, etc., and gay issues. So it took a sense of timing as to how open you could be, how fast. And I gradually became more and more open but I was not openly gay in 1973. I was very aggressively part of changing the organisation but I went on gradually becoming open about gayness for 20 years. And as one of those reminders of the climate, in 1972 while I was working to make the APA more liberal, there were a few (non-psychiatrist) gay activists who protested at APA annual meetings and gave APA a hard time about being down on gayness. And at a meeting in 1972 there were two prominent gay activists, not psychiatrists, on a panel and a prominent psychoanalyst Judd Marmor who had written well and non-judgementally about gayness. And the first person on the panel wore a huge Halloween fright wig and a microphone that distorted his voice and a suit that was frumpy and much too big and he staggered onto the stage and was on stage with two articulate gay activists, plus Dr Marmor, The masked panelist, Dr Anonymous, said after the others had spoken something that became one of the picturesque points in this change of status of gayness. He said in his distorted voice, “I’m a psychiatrist and I am homosexual.” That was in some ways revolutionary, but to remind you about the climate of that era, it took 20 years after that before John Fryer could say openly and publicly, “I was that psychiatrist.” It was 20 years after he said those provocative words before he could attach his name to those words. He lost two jobs because of gayness early in his life and was wary of joining that panel, but he still usefully took part in that very theatrical event. His remarks were recorded and they are still available on tape in an archive. But think about the fact that it took 20 years for him then to be able to say, “and my name is John Fryer.” I knew John somewhat, it was fun, it was interesting but just to remind you of the climate around gayness, it took a lot of work, it took a lot of work after the 1973 decision. I went on gradually becoming more open about myself in the 1970s and 80s. In ’73, 4, 5, 6, 7 I became part of the American Psychiatric Assembly partly because the conservatives after the ’73 vote said, terrible, the board of trustees is now wild flaming communists, we have to put the power for the APA and the Assembly, which is much more conservative. Well the assembly was mostly district branches, representatives of district branches, most of which were state psychiatric societies. But Wyoming was a psychiatric society of 14 members and had an Assembly rep and deputy rep. Manhattan was a district branch of 1700 members and had one Assembly rep and one deputy rep. The assembly vastly over-represented the conservatives. And the assembly said we want to take back power in the APA, I realised that I had much more standing for saying no you shouldn’t, you are not more democratic or more representative, or more affective than the board. I had myself made, elected assembly rep for Massachusetts. I first ran the first year for deputy rep and I lost, a well-known friend of mine ran and won. But the second year I ran for representative, became representative of Massachusetts in the APA, served as representative of Massachusetts partly so that I could write a position paper which I did and publicise it. And persuade the assembly that it should not have ultimate power in the APA. And the idea of the Assembly’s getting ultimate power in the APA lost. It went to a membership referendum, and the APA membership voted that the Assembly should not have ultimate power. The assembly perhaps to its credit, perhaps not, promptly after four years of this argument, decided that I had argued that case well enough so that the assembly nominated me as one of the three nominees for leader of the assembly the next year, for assembly speaker. And I was elected. There were three candidates, I had more than 50% of the three way vote, so I became speaker of the assembly. I was speaker at a very young age. It was fun, it was lively and I then liked what I was in for it, I liked the public work. I got myself elected area trustee for New England and Eastern Canada and I did that for six years. I was then Vice-President and I was then elected President of the APA in 1990. And there I will tell you one personal story which was fun. I was very liberal, I was very active on social psychiatry and social issues. And I had of course some of my acquaintances were not very liberal. And there was a wonderful old curmudgeon who weighed about 300 pounds and brought fishing equipment to the annual APA meeting because he liked to go fishing. He was against me on every issue and he opposed everything on the assembly and was opposed to what I was doing [unclear 01:06:47] But he wrote me a four page letter in the late 1980s when I was running for Vice-President and President giving me advice as to what I ought to do. About page three in his letter he said, “By the way I hear a rumour that you may have been gay. I don’t know what the truth of that is but I certainly hope it won’t impede you in your race to be President and Vice-President of the APA because you are just the kind of person who ought to be Vice-President and President of the APA.”  

INT: Wow.  

RES: I found that very moving and I became Vice-President of the APA.  

INT: Incredible. That’s a very touching story. And I think, but I also think a reminder that, you know, this change happened in ’73 but it didn’t lead to an immediate kind of, oh things are great now. There was still an uphill battle. You still had to run, you still had to fight, you still had to look at those constitutional changes in the APA, very important to remember. Just before we move on to your presidency, I just wanted to ask, you were doing all of this alongside teaching and seeing patients as well. How did you navigate all of that?  

RES: Most of my time was spent at a major medical school teaching half time and running their child and adolescent psychiatry clinic and walk-in clinic and seeing patients half time, or more than half time and in my patients I wanted to include always some children, some adolescents, some adults. My youngest patients were two or three. I had some, a bunch of children who were more ordinary child age. I had some teenagers. Had some adults. Had the pleasure several times of having a patient as a child who then decided to come back to see me as a teenager or as an adult. In the time when Eastern Europe was falling apart and coming back together again, I had a young woman telephone me from Prague in Czechoslovakia because I had seen her as a child in Boston and I had again seen her when she was a law student in America. And now she was no longer a law student but she was a young lawyer helping people set up corporations in Prague. And she thought she ought to have a psychiatrist for a while and did I know any good psychiatrists who spoke good English in Prague. Well I happened to know a few psychiatrists in Prague but I also knew her because we had worked together. And I said, “Tell me why you think you need a psychiatrist at this point. Maybe we could do this by phone a few times.” And she had free phone connection to her law firm in Washington D.C. so she only had to pay long distance phone calls from Washington D.C. to Boston. And she said, “That’s a good idea. Let’s try doing it by phone.” So I had the pleasure of sometimes seeing a patient and going on seeing her or him over public time. But you are quite right, most of my public, most of my psychiatric career has been spent doing the fascinating work of listening to and trying to help patients; also some research and writing , e.g. about psychotherapy, play, dirty words, ethics, torture, apartheid, biopsychosocial integration ; and helping young medical students, psychiatrists, psychological trainees, and social work trainees become better at listening to and understanding human beings and mental illness.  

[01:10:06] 

And when I say listening you asked in one of your questions to me on paper, were there people who had influenced me. I had a very important teacher who was the training director Mass Mental Health Centre, and he said, he was not always perfect but he was a very good teacher, and he said, “The job of a first year resident in psychiatry is to learn to listen.” And I took that very seriously as a challenge to me. So yes I spent most of my work life seeing patients and teaching but I spent a quite unusual amount of my work life also doing public psychiatry, changing the view of homosexuality, changing a lot of human rights issues in the Soviet Union and South Africa and places like that. I decided I liked those issues but I wanted to work on them even though I wasn’t getting paid for that. So I was good at using psychiatric organisations to give me a standing for 20 or 30 years to do public psychiatry work in other countries of the world in addition to doing it in the United States where we also, as you can imagine, had a lot of peculiar public psychiatric arrangements, including arrangements involving women and blacks, prisoners, Hispanics, American Indians etc.  

INT: It really resonated with me during the kind of class reunion call we had where you said you spent most of your career listening. And I thought that was such a beautiful reflection, right, and it grounds what you did. You listened to people and you talked to them and you negotiated those relationships so beautifully. Just to spend a little bit of time- 

RES: By the way many of my friends and my spouse don’t think that I’m an great listener socially, put that into account too.  

INT: But that’s always the way, it’s always your loved ones that go, really, you’re so professional. During your time as President of the APA, so that was between ’91 to ’92, you did a lot of travelling. And you mentioned you did a lot of work in other countries, Chile, South Africa, the former Soviet Union. Can you tell us a little bit more about your time as President? What that involved. Some highlights.  

RES: Being President of the APA is fun. It’s a lot of work. It takes a lot of time and energy. It takes a lot of communication with other people and you have to be able to be genuinely able to communicate with other people including people that you’re rivalrous with and who oppose you on certain values. And for instance the President of the American Psychological, a peculiar relationship because you are of course major allies on major issues. You are also major rivals on major issues. The American Psychiatric, American Psychological have disagreed for easily 40, 50 years as to whether psychologists ought to prescribe medicine. I don’t think they ought to but I respect the fact that they know a huge amount about psychology and ought to and know a huge amount about patients and healthy people and ought to. So you have to be complicatedly allied with people. I began travelling for the APA well before I was President when I was a trustee and then a Vice-President. At the time, the APA had a medical director who was himself very interested in international issues. And we looked around for other international issues that involved mental health, mental illness and patients a lot. So a certain amount of my travelling began happening for the APA in the 1980s before I was President, when I was interested in for instance a dictatorship that co-existed with a first world country and a third world country in the same place. A very peculiar organisation. But South Africa under apartheid was a first world country sitting on top of a third world country. Those who were first world were mostly white skin and those who were third world mostly black skin. Was that any of our business? And you might legitimately say how is it your business? Was it mental illness? Was it mental health? Some of my friends who were dark skinned American psychiatrists said not only is it none of our business. You shouldn’t ever set foot in South Africa and you shouldn’t ever send them a journal and you shouldn’t ever talk to any of them. We should boycott them totally. And that was an understandable and fairly widely held point of view. I didn’t agree with it. I don’t think we are best off boycotting people totally if we disagree with them. We disagreed with apartheid severely and it was very bad for the mental health and mental illness qualities of the South Africans. The American Medical Association in the 1980s sent a delegation to South Africa. They were a very conservative group the American Medical Association. They came back to America, gave a press conference and said more or less, “Well it’s true that the Baragwanath hospital in Johannesburg, the biggest hospital in South Africa, “has patients sleeping on the floor. But you know the Cook County Hospital in Chicago occasionally has patients sleeping on the floor” because the hospital got over extended and what not. But the major thrust of the American Medical Association was they’re just like us and leave them alone. Several prestigious American scientific and medical organizations, including the Institute of Medicine, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Public Health Association thought that that was a very bad comment on us and on South Africa ---that we would as a country approve, in a pseudo- egalitarian way, of everything the South Africans were doing. The IOM, the AAASP, the APA, and the APHA all decided it would be useful and timely  to learn about and comment on the public health of South Africa during apartheid. We established several lines of communication and a fact-finding trip. And the first trip that we planned had about eight of 10 of us from these four organizations, scheduled to go to South Africa. And the first time we were scheduled to go, it took a year or two to set up, we were going to meet all the medical schools, we were going to meet the labour unions, we were going to meet some of the politicians on the white side, on the black side. A month or so before it was scheduled to happen the South African Government banned the 10 of us by name, I was individually banned by name from coming to South Africa. That was rather flattering if you think about it. Interesting- 

INT: Important enough I guess.  

RES: We didn’t give up. We kept making connections with the South African medical students and the medical schools and labour unions etc. And the next year, the South African Government changed its mind and allowed us to come and visit. So we went and visited for about two weeks, saw all the medical schools some of which by the way are in Afrikaans, some of which are in English. One of which is by blacks for blacks. And we had a very interesting time and came up with a 40 or  50 page health paper based not just on mental health but on health. And the way the apartheid regime had been very bad for the health not just of the black people but of coloured people and of white people. And it was published by the Journal of the American Medical Association both as an article and as a monograph. So we went to South Africa during apartheid.  

               With representatives of APA and other medical groups, I also went to a country that was having a new and very nasty dictatorship: the Chileans were run by a man called Pinochet who had murdered their previous leader and had become a military dictator. And Chile has an interesting history. Many of us assumed that Chile was sort of like a middle American banana republic . It wasn’t at all. It was very much Western European country in South America and it had drifted and become more and more right wing. And it was being run in a very nasty way with very nasty consequences for health and mental health. And the government was very punitive to labour unions, to people who objected, to people who didn’t like the dictatorship. The  government abolished their parliament and did other interesting things at that time. And I went as an APA member of a group,  coordinated by the American Committee for Human Rights, to learn, make friends , to find out what they were doing, to describe what they were doing, to make suggestions for what they were doing. And they were doing things from a human rights point of view and from a mental health point of view that were pretty awful. And I went to help document that and I gave a press conference and I helped write a few papers about that.  

[01:20:00] 

So there was South Africa, and there was Chile. Then there was the Soviet Union . I don’t know if you remember this, but it was well-known in the West at the time that the Soviet Union and perhaps Cuba were, as part of punishing their political dissidents, selectively giving their political dissidents psychiatric diagnoses and putting them against their will in mental hospitals and medicating them with psychiatric medication. You may say that’s better than murdering them and I accept that from many points of view that’s better than murdering them. But It’s not good for them, it’s not ethical, and it’s not good for mental health or for psychiatry. So how do you change that? One of the ways you changed that I took part in was the British Psychiatric and the American Psychiatric discovered that the World Psychiatric Association, of which the Soviets were part, didn’t have an ethics committee and didn’t have ethics standards. And if you have a World Psychiatric one of the few things you probably ought to have is some international agreement as to ethics and ethics standards. So we got the World Psychiatric to create ethics standards and an ethics committee. And at that point the Soviets resigned rather than be thrown out. After they resigned, they changed their laws. They gave mental patients some rights and changed their laws about giving mental illness diagnoses to political dissidents. They then applied for readmission to the World Psychiatric. And they were allowed to rejoin after a few years.  Some of that happened the year that I became President of the APA.  After that the St.Petersburg/Leningrad group asked me to come look at what they had done and see that they had mental illness laws posted on the walls of their hospitals and what not. The Moscow group was less prompt than the St Petersburg group. And the Moscow group had invented the term sluggish schizophrenia which was what they gave to political dissidents. So the St Petersburg group was partly being rivalrous with the Moscow group to invite me as a representative of the West to see what they were doing and what not. But that happened during my presidential year that I went to St Petersburg, was shown around psychiatric hospitals, was shown that they had changed some of what they were doing. And if I may digress a bit (this has nothing to do with changing of mental illness law, it has to do with Rhodes Scholars and learning something), I learned something interesting, nothing to do with the trip and mental illness and political dissidents. But I was driven around St Petersburg by three mental illness clinicians and deputy directors of hospitals and one deputy director of the Hermitage Museum because I had made it clear that if I came I would like to spend half of the day in the Hermitage Museum, which they said, certainly you can do that.  

INT: Essential, essential yes.  

RES: So they were driving me around St Petersburg. It’s quite a beautiful city, quite an eighteenth century city. A lot of canals, a lot of great buildings, a lot of palaces. And we passed a building that had a lot of antennas and air antennas and tall towers with antennas and clearly something to do with electronics and television. And I said, “Forgive me but is that a television station?” “Yes it’s a television station.” I was somewhat pushy and I said, “Well forgive me I know that Soviet television has often been considered somewhat uninteresting by thoughtful people because of its repetitiveness and its tendency to say the state point of view on everything. Is there anything that the four of you watch by choice on television and how much of the week do you do that?” And they said, “Yes it’s been changing and there’s an hour or two a week where there is more than just cartoons and changes.” And I said, “Well forgive me I’m an American and as you probably know we have on our television mostly something called commercials. And the commercials are often done with as much skill as the programmes. Do you on Soviet television have commercials?” And they all three laughed, or all four laughed. So I had put my foot in something and I said, “Oh?” And they said, and this what I learned that had nothing to do with what I expected, they said, “But you have to realise something, if you’ve lived in the Soviet Union for 10 or 20 or 30 or 40 years, you know that if you have to advertise something it can’t be any good.”  

INT: That’s a great story.  

RES: Sometimnes we learn unexpected things. 

        We also, in 1992, did something else which was fun and international. The Polish, the Czechoslovakian and the Hungarian Societies of Medicine and Psychiatry around the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, 1991, knew that they were way behind in psychiatry. They hadn’t been allowed to learn what the Western world was doing. So what do you do? One of the things they did was to make a few outreaches to Western doctors and organizations and say, “Can we come to your meetings? Can you come to our meetings? Can you send us some people?” And we evolved the idea of sending them, after the Iron Curtain fell, a travelling department of psychiatry which was coming to fruition the year I was President of the APA. And since I was interested in international issues it was logical to involve me in planning that and going there. So in the spring of ’91 we had a three-week travelling APA department of psychiatry, with some of the greatest American psychiatrists and psychoanalysts as teachers. It spent three or four days teaching in Poland and then three or four days looking at Poland, three or four days teaching in Prague and Bratislava and and again 3 or 4 days looking around, and then three or four days teaching in Hungary and then 3 or 4 days of looking around. And it was a very interesting trip . There were about 14 to 15 of us. Plus several spouses. It was funded by a major drug company . I have actually forgotten which drug company. And the drug representatives were so discreet that I who had tended to be rather hostile to them began realizing that they were actually quietly being quite helpful. They had, during the planning process, said , for instance : “Can we suggest some topics for you to teach in Eastern Europe?” And I said, no. And they accepted that\. They then had said “Can we suggest some specific faculty members for you to bring along?” And I said no. And they said, OK. And they paid for the trip despite those two refusals. And they were quiet and they sat in the back of the bus and I who am rather wary of commercial sponsorship of science voluntarily without their saying anything about it, introduced the 2 men during a welcoming session.  

INT: I like that. They won you over a little bit. Oh gosh I have loved hearing about your travels and particularly the story in St Petersburg. My grandparents are from there so it was interesting getting a window into that trip. So when you came to the end of your time as President of the APA you went on to do a few other interesting things as seems to be a theme in your career. One of those was starting the Boston Psychiatric Group on Lesbian Gay Bisexual and Transgender issues. This is really interesting, can you tell us more about that?  

RES: Well psychiatry changed its official position in America in 1973. The psychologists and the social workers in America very quickly followed suit. The psychoanalysts more slowly, the psychoanalysts were a very important part of psychiatry in the fifties, sixties, seventies, became somewhat less so as psychiatry became more biological. But the analysts also had taken a more conservative position on gayness. Freud less so but the analysts who followed him more so. So it took a while to change the analytic community around. And in the eighties or nineties the American Psychoanalytic finally came around to saying we should not have said that gayness was an illness and we apologise to the analysts and gay people who were harmed by that decision. But the Boston Psychoanalytic still hadn’t, it was a very large group and had not changed. And I met a friend of mine who was the president of the Boston Psychoanalytic at the time and he said, “Of course the Boston should do something.” We are at some kind of party together. And we met at another book signing party half a year later and he said, “I know we haven’t done anything. What should we do?” So I said, “We might start a workforce you and I, a work group and ask the analytic community what we should do and ask others what we should do.” So we did that and had a meeting in the Boston Psychoanalytic and had a meeting in the Boston Psychoanalytic in the library, a splendid old Back Bay building and a splendid old elegant library with about 10 analysts and 10 interested others like professors of psychology and sociology and anthropology who were interested as to what we should do.  

[01:30:03] 

And we went around the room asking each person what would they like to get out of this meeting and this movement. And people said different things. And one woman said, “I don’t particularly want to say anything.” And she was the president elect of the Boston Psychoanalytic. And when we were finished I came back to her and said, “You didn’t want to say anything but you are President-Elect of the Boston Psychoanalytic and I’d be very interested in your thoughts as to are there things you think analysis would gain from re-thinking homosexuality.” And she said something very interesting. She said, “Many of you in this room don’t know this but my husband and I,” her husband was a professor of sociology or anthropology, “have three daughters and they’re all gay.” Well that was remarkable. First of all three gay daughters in one family is extremely unusual, and one of the people in the room was one of the two or three world experts on sibling of gay people. So interesting for her to say that. And she said, “And it’s of interest that it’s difficult for analysts to acknowledge the possibility that gay people might be healthy, that their parents might be healthy .”  One of the other people said as a comment, a professor of psychology, commenting on what this woman had said, said, “You see it’s what I’ve always said about psychoanalysts and this room, nobody ever tells the truth.” That was one of the reasons to have the committee to talk about gayness and gender and sex and psychoanalysis. . And we went on being a committee of the Boston Psychoanalytic for about 20 years even though I was not for most of that time a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic. (The Boston Psychoanalytic made me honorary member in 2014—their only honorary member since Anna Freud).  ) I hadn’t applied in the 1960s and 70s partly because at the time they were pathologizing gayness and  had not knowingly had a gay member. And I thought they would have rejected me. My analyst wasn’t so sure. But it took a long time before they began having gay candidates and gay members which with the help of our committee they began to do. But things take time and change takes time. And one of the things that I said in- One of the things I wrote about this was that we have helped, and it’s not a finished project, but we have helped to change the general view of gayness from being a sin, to being criminal, to being an illness, to being a difference. And difference doesn’t to most human beings necessarily mean not worse or better. One of the things I would very much like to do and I suggest might be a suggestion to come out of this interview is that we teach children better  that different doesn’t mean better or worse.  

INT: That’s beautiful.  

RES: Anyway, I went on doing things with the APA. I went on, I did some things with some other psychiatric groups. I went on seeing patients. I went on teaching. And I am now retired, I have been retired from just about everything for nine years. And a year ago Yale University discovered I was still alive, emailed me, said more or less “Isn’t it nice that you are still alive. Will you give us a lecture on what happened 50 years ago in getting rid of gayness as a diagnosis?” So I said, “Yes I’ll do that if I can do it by Zoom. I haven’t done a lecture for years.” And I gave a lecture to Yale and got an award. And the New York Psychoanalytic and the head of their programme committee last year also said more or less, “Isn’t it nice that you’re still alive. Will you give us a lecture? Young psychoanalysts have no idea what the climate was like around gayness in the early, third quarter of the twentieth century.” So I did and I gave a lecture and it was published. So more or less speaking as an old  person, it’s nice that some people occasionally if you are still alive notice that you are still alive and ask you to go and try to do something useful.  

INT: No, this I mean- Yes sorry.  

RES: Some people don’t think that it was useful but it was one of many changes that happened and one of the changes I think allowed more people to be thoughtful about gayness than had been the case for many, many years before that. And I think more sensible things have been written about gayness in the last 50 years than for a long time before that.  

INT: Absolutely. But I mean truly it’s a moment that we should all remember and how much work it took to get there and how much work it took after. And to really not let that all crumble in these difficult times as we’ve kind of mentioned. So retirement, I’m curious to know what is it that you enjoy doing these days? What do you and your partner like doing? What does life look like?  

RES: I would like to have more of a positive answer to give you. I have something called chronic fatigue, it gets in the way of absolutely everything. And I know that I’m old, a lot of my friends are dead, a lot of my friends are doing less than they used to. But some of my friends are still distinctly more energetic than I am. So I am saddened that one of the things that may happen is you go on living but you go on living with much less energy. I try to be helpful to other people. I recommend that that’s part of what makes life worth living. I think friendships are a very important part of life. I think families are an important part of life. I think work and play are important. And I don’t know if you, like a lot of non-psychiatrists and non-psychoanalysts , are aware that Freud , in one of his wise late-life comments, to an encyclopaedia, I think,  described the essential elements of mental health as the capacity to work and to love. (It may be that Freud said that, it may be that Erikson said that Freud said that. ) But work and love are  important. I would add friendship and play as important aspects of health . And I recommend curiosity. Somebody I admire greatly, a Nobel Prize winner who also had two of his students win Nobel Prizes, was asked in his eighties “To what do you attribute?” And he thought about it and said, “I really don’t know. One never knows really all of why things turned out well.” But I do think something may have helped. As a child he grew up in New York. As a child my mother would ask me when I came home from school, not “Do you want some more milk, do you want some more cookies?” But my mother asked me for years every day when I came home from school, “Did you ask any good questions today?”  

INT: Wow. Amazing. That probably had a much greater impact than you could have ever thought in the moment. Amazing. Wow.  

RES: Anyway, I’m old and I enjoyed being a Rhodes Scholar and I enjoyed it partly for teaching me things in areas I wouldn’t have learned otherwise, partly for making some good friendships, I still have some old friendships. I am part of a Zoom group that includes some people I met as a Rhodes Scholar. And that’s a good thing.  

INT: Wonderful. And very finally as we mentioned obviously the new 2025 cohort has joined Oxford just a few weeks ago. Do you have words of advice or perhaps wisdom to those new scholars starting their journey?  

RES: I think people my age are often asked for words of wisdom. I do not think I can offer words of wisdom. I can offer suggestions. Be kind.  Be loving. Work and play. Enjoy things that you value and work at things you value and probably it’s a good idea to earn a reasonable living but try not to have to earn more money than your best friend or your worst enemy. Try to do some work that interests you and try to value whatever it is that you care about and value. And work to help it be part of life. If you value some people, enjoy them and help them. If you value some issues, environment comes to my mind, what could and can we all about that? What could we do that is somewhat helpful? Can we contribute that as part of our time on earth? And I think I’ve enjoyed many things I have done and I notice preparing for this interview that some of the things I have enjoyed are things I got paid for and I’m glad of that. Some of the things are things I didn’t get paid for and I’m glad of that. Thank you for asking. 

INT: Brilliant. Thank you so much for those words and just for such a brilliant interview. This has been fascinating.  

RES: Thank you.  

INT: Is there anything, just as we come to the end and before I click stop record, that we haven’t mentioned that you’d like to say? Or anything else?  

RES: I think part of what Rhodes Scholarships stand for is education not just training. And I think that’s a very important distinction and a useful thing. I’m very grateful that I was given a good education that went on not just around the central focus on my work but in a wider way to help me understand some of what Shakespeare thought and Shaw thought and Chaucer thought has been very useful to me. And even thinking of some of what I quoted to patients, I think I have quoted Shakespeare to patients more than I have quoted Freud.  

INT: Your intellectual curiosity through our whole conversation has really struck me and I think it shapes so much of the interesting journeys you have been on. Thank you so much Larry. 

[Audio ends: 01:40:32]