Overton, Willis F.

Because the roots of the developmental sciences often run differently than do those of psychology more generally, students of the discipline must, if they are to take the proper measure of their fields, come to a deep appreciation of these differences. For four decades, the profession has relied on and largely deferred to Willis F. Overton to make all of this as plain as it gets. In doing so, he has instructed not only his colleagues but also wave after wave of developmental students (almost everyone's students) in how to best locate their subject matter in the long, trailing web of psychology's intellectual history. As a result, his efforts have regularly transformed, often in radical ways, our collective self-understanding—the fundamental ways in which we see our own efforts and our discipline. In short, there is the “before having read Overton” and the “after having read Overton” way of conceptualizing the developmental sciences, and those who fail to make this transition are widely viewed as simply undereducated. This is not surmise. His readership insists upon it, railing against their own once-uninitiated views and marking as [Page 769]maladroit those who continue to misapprehend the place of their work in the larger arena of intellectual life. This is seismic, and few—very few—can claim so much. Of course, Overton didn't accomplish all of this, plus a distinguished career as a research scientist, a theoretician, a teacher, and an editor, single-handedly. Rather, over the years, he has studied with, collaborated with, and helped train many whose association would lengthen anyone's shadow. Still, if what one is looking for is the efficient cause of that signature mode of self-understanding that most regularly sets developmentalists apart from their nondevelopmental colleagues, then responsibility for an appreciation of this identity-conferring difference can, more often than not, be traced back to some earlier exposure to a career's worth of writing by Willis (“Bill”) Overton. This, like any efficient causal explanation, is, of course, only a partial explanation and, as Overton would be the first to remind us, needs to be supplemented with a detailing of the material causes, or surrounding circumstances, in operation. Here are some of those contextual cues about Bill Overton.

Following several years of service in the U.S. Marine Corps, Overton began his postsecondary education at Boston University, where he graduated (magna cum laude) in 1960. These years, it seems in retrospect (and even as they were happening), were especially propitious years, pregnant with new meanings for scientific and intellectual, as well as ordinary, life. To point out only a few such watershed events, these same surrounding years saw the publication of Thomas Kuhn's immensely influential book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions; the appearance of the first English-language texts about Jean Piaget's theory; the rout of behaviorism; the dawning of the so-called cognitive revolution; and, with the drafting of the “Boulder Agreement,” a broadly accepted interuniversity framework that enshrined the scientist-practitioner model of clinical psychology training. Not to mention, of course, these were the 1960s, when no one needed reminding that there were alternative worldviews to be had.

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