A (Sort of) Memoir of Robert Leonard Powers

I was asked by the editors of this journal to offer a reminiscence of my late husband and partner, Bob Powers, clinical psychologist and Episcopal priest. I’ve chosen to lace together excerpts from his letters and other prose, so his voice can be heard again. After Bob and I married in 1979, I studied Adlerian Psychology, and though I was never formally his student, he was always my mentor. Later we were colleagues—at the Adler School, in our independent teaching efforts, in our private practice, and as coauthors. Below, I’ve interspersed miscellaneous remarks he made over the years with seven of his longer pieces; my introductory comments are italicized.

On Therapy

• • Individual Psychology is an educational psychology. Therapy works because we believe that opinion governs lives, and that clients can reconsider and change their opinions.

• • The therapeutic task is, first, to make it clear to the client what the client’s mind is, to be able to state this clearly (“This is how you see it . . .”), and to gain the client’s acknowledgement of the truth of your statement. Until clients understand how they see present reality, they are unable to change it. Only when clients understand how they see things, are we able to assist in altering their perceptual field.

• • In therapy people can complete the business of growing up.

• • Our goal must be to end therapy. Like parents with their children, we must move our clients toward independence.

On Depression

In February, 2005, a colleague brought to Bob’s attention a lecture, “The Brain Chemistry of Depression.” While Bob acknowledged the lecturer’s apparent caring, compassion, and ability as a teacher, he disagreed with the premise of the lecture.

It is an unhappy duty to respond by saying that the good doctor’s approach to understanding depression is a misunderstanding, that all his research is misplaced, and that his data cannot be made to support his thesis. This is because he is in search of a cause or causes for behaviors and arrangements (both interpersonal and biochemical) that can only be understood in a context in which they are examined for the purposes they serve, and the consequences they bring into being, both positive (from loving others) and negative (in exempting the depressed person from the obligations of common decency).

Adlerian psychology rests on the radical assumption that anti-social behavior extends into negative, even painful and self-destructive arrangements of the social field and of the individual and his or her body parts and functions. This seems to some to be harsh, because it locates responsibility in the persons who claim to be most in pain, but who, by practiced and persistent patterns of reproach and accusation secretly (sometimes openly in fits and rages) bring pain into the lives of all those who intersect with them, especially those who are seduced into affectionate concern for them and who undertake to make it up to them for what they suffer and have suffered.

The lecturer, by citations of research and by reference to brain size and function and so on, validates the claims of depressed persons, and plays into their hands with the notion that they are deserving of special care and treatment by others—beyond the decent and compassionate concern to correct their errors as to the meaning of their suffering and the persistence of their obligations to others.

We look for the target; he is looking for the source of the arrow that strikes it. It is helpful, even essential to examine the source, but only if one wishes to see how someone learned to shoot and formed an opinion about the value of shooting.

More on Therapy

• • Psychotherapy is a strange experience: We’re asking our clients to think about the way they think.

• • In therapy our goal is to move the person away from rehearsed thinking and behavior toward more useful adaptations. To do this, we have to enter the head of the person and screw it up. Clients can be disoriented by this. After expostulating with a client about what I referred to as his “oppositional...