Abstract
Jerry Bruner’s, almost 100 year old, provides a look over the his personal and professional trajectory. The result is a very intense and warm conversation where some crucial topics in Psychology are discussed.
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Notes
- 1.
The interview has been slightly edited and some redundant sentences have been eliminated. The interview has been afterwards integrated by a dedicated correspondence with Jerry for complementing some points left outside from the interview (see the footnote 2).
- 2.
After the interview we continued our discussion by e-mail. In particular I sent to Jerry short questions about his time at Duke University. The Jerry’s responses in the following e-mail represent a nice complementation of our conversation:
“Dear Pina, I was at Duke, as an undergraduate, from 1933 to 1938. I loved and hated the place—and have written a little about it in the my autobiography, IN SEARCH OF MIND. Part of the reason for loving it, I suppose, is that I was adopted by that Psychology faculty, and even given my own laboratory for my research. It was not only Zener, Adams, Lundholm, et al., but also the great William McDougall. There I was, not yet twenty, adopted as the promising bright kid. And the graduate students in psychology, sociology, and anthropology formed a kind of brotherly/sisterly group and took me under their wing. And it was the lot of them that tempted me to go on to Harvard for my graduate study. What I hated about the place was its politically conservative administration. As you can imagine I was politically far to the Left (as were my friends there) and I was not quiet about it. I used to write politically inflammatory letters to the University newspaper—those were the early New Deal days of President Franklin Roosevelt, my first political hero.
II answer (same day): Oops, my computer sent off my email before I was done writing it! More later. I just want to add that it was right after Duke that I went off to Harvard. How I loved being a graduate student there!!!!”. More later—and much love. Jerry (J. Bruner, personal communication, 2nd February 2015).
“Hi Pina,
This is just a quickie about those years at Duke.
There were two “sides” to it. One had to do with my plunge into psychology—about which more in a moment. Its underlying motif had to do with the active, planful nature of human mental activity, The other (more related to the first than I realized then) had to do with my relationship with women—the two “girl-friends” there at Duke whom I treasured sexually but who were also my intellectual buddies. We never made love in the sense of sexual intercourse, but had SUCH a close and warm relationship. We shared not only the typical necking but also the discovery of writers like James Joyce and Henry James.
My first course in psychology (sophomore year) was an introductory one given by the great William McDougall, the text for which was his then new THE ENERGIES OF MAN. He called his course “Hormic Psychology”: It touched off something in me. So the next term I took a course from Donald Adams, “Comparative Psychology.” Adams was a young guy, just back from a scholarship in Berlin where he’d studies mostly with Wolfgang Koehler. Very Gestalt! Very thoughtful, Then a bunch of courses in biology mostly concerned with endocrinology. And then I took a “Reading and Research” course working on my own research project to show the way that when rats were not pressed to make quick choices they did a lot of exploring around before doing so—PTE or preliminary trial and error. I was on my way! My hero at that point was the California psychologist, Edward Chace Tolman. And the structure and function of anticipation had me in its grip! I also got involved with another of my teachers, Karl Zener, who was working on the cognitive elements in classical Pavlovian conditioning—studying dogs in the classical setting, measuring their salivation. It was clear that anticipation played a huge role in all this. Pavlov’s findings were not based on mechanical conditioning alone, but on anticipation as well—deeply cognitive. It was around then that the time had come for going off to graduate school, Harvard or Yale, the former far more cognitive in its psychological research than the latter. And all of my teachers agreed. And off I went—applied and was accepted.
[I must run off now! Is all this helping?)
All best. Jerry Bruner” (J. Bruner, personal communication, 7th April 2015).
- 3.
Sindaco is an Italian word. It means Major.
- 4.
Citizen of Pisa.
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Marsico, G. (2015). Interview with Jerome Bruner: The History of Psychology in the First Person. In: Marsico, G. (eds) Jerome S. Bruner beyond 100. Cultural Psychology of Education, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25536-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-25536-1_1
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