Robert Coles

How do you get to know a man? You can ask him questions face-to-face in an interview, or listen to him lecture before three hundred people. You can walk with him on the street, and share jokes with him, and talk to his friends. You can read his articles, or books by men he admires. You can play with his ideas, and even listen to music you think he might enjoy. In the end you have a lot of things to describe, but the description has its limits. Can you recognize the man, and how do you act on what you have seen?

I do not pretend to 'know' Dr. Robert Coles. I can not deliver him for breakfast-table enjoyment in a neat package decorated with quotable metaphors. But I like him a great deal, and know that what he does, and writes, and thinks about, is highly connected with what most of us are becoming concerned with in our own work and in our own lives.

Robert Coles was trained as a child psychiatrist, and is now engaged in research with a base at the University Health Services. He also teaches a section of Professor Erik Erikson's undergraduate course, "The Human Life Cycle." His office is in the basement of a nondescript Harvard building. It is filled with books from the social sciences, poetry, and fiction, and the walls are covered with pictures of Southern school children and migrant workers. He writes more articles, of consistently high quality, than any man I know.

As a psychiatrist, Coles' original interest was in pathology in situations of abnormal stress, and his first work was on families where children had been stricken with polio. During an Air Force tour of duty in Mississippi, Coles' range of concern widened. Struck by the dramatic collapse of a social and psychological way of life, he turned to study white and Negro children, along with their parents and teachers, under the heavy strains of school desegregation. He wanted to see how people managed the exertion of exchanging old ways of life for new ones. He refused to polarize his compassion, seeing the plight of white men deserted by their institutions as well as the struggle of Negroes for new ones.

While studying the tense situations of Southern school desegregation, bussing in Boston, and the downtrodden lives of migrant workers, Coles found men and women of high stamina and courage who had grown up without education and surrounded by mental and physical disease. As a doctor he had looked at sections of American life which are by many standards pathological and abnormal. In these unlikely places and among these people he saw morality, human dignity, and a stubborn, indefinable kind of hope. These paradoxical discoveries at first surprised him; they did not fit the accepted conceptual scheme. Then he accepted what he saw and turned the investigation around. What started out as a study of the sick "subjects" became in part an investigation of the scientists, of "the sane people's" conceptions of childhood, education, and health, and of the psychiatric enterprise itself.

The ideas which Coles has developed in these studies are not easily summarized, because he shuns theories and abstract jargon, and presents his findings in concrete, personal cases. His goal in writing is to deal directly with the "worries, fears, and loves of individual people." Like Conrad, Agee, and Orwell, he wants to bring the crushed people to life -- a significant pun, because Coles means it both as a writer and as a doctor: to make them "come alive" for the reader, and to make them live. His approach to psvchiatric chiatric problems ties in with his literary style. He shies away from the contemporary eagerness for 'explanation' by categories, and attempts to enter what he calls "the clumsy, undefined, paradoxical flow of life and its events."

The product of his methods is at least double. Coles seeks to learn from Negroes, migrant workers, and Southerners generally, how men -- often "ordinary" men -- confront oppression and change. Their struggle for opportunities and for education in turn implies cures for the unjust, exploitative situation from which their troubles spring.

The analysis then turns back on the scientist, sharply. For if the struggle of the sick reveals new goals for society in general, it also demands an unorthodox type of psychiatry. In a 1961 Atlantic article, "A Young Psychiatrist Looks at His Profession," Coles protested against tendencies toward narrow definition of psychiatry, rigid technical training, abstract jargon, and deadening theoretical debates. He called for a concern for general human activity, and a recognition of the psychiatrist's own "disorders and sorrows" as essential elements of the profession. To develop a sense of the limitations of the discipline, a sense of humor, and "to offer ourselves freely," -- free from rigidity and pretention -- "this would be no small happening."

To finish up a profile of Robert Coles with a neat "tag" is like trying to compress his concerns into a bon mot: you can not do it, because as a man and as a psychiatrist he avoids above all things the isolated category and the final answer. It all hangs together: the desire to report faithfully, to understand, to see the good or bad never on one side only, and to cure. Like Agee, he wants to make his eyes and voice "honest and a little clear." So watch him, and men like him; watch them, listen to them, think about what they do and say. It is about as close to real education as we come.