Davison, Gerald C.

I was born of second-generation Jewish parents, Aaron and Celia Davison, in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1939, the second of three children. My family and social environments were warm and supportive and placed great emphasis on academic achievement. Like many boys of my background, I attended Boston Latin School for grades 7 through 12. For generations, this school was the way out of several of the Boston ghettos for the children of parents and grandparents who had immigrated from Europe and who saw a rigorous education as the most reliable way for the kids to make it into the mainstream of American society.

Like many of my Boston Latin classmates, I went on to Harvard, where I earned my BA degree in 1961. I did some research with Richard Alpert (years later known as Baba Ram Dass) and wrote my senior honors thesis on perceptual bias under the supervision of Jerome Bruner, a noted cognitive psychologist. Uncertain as to whether to attend law school or to pursue a PhD in psychology, I applied for in my senior year and was awarded a Fulbright Foreign Study Grant to the University of Freiburg, West Germany, going there just one month after East Germany constructed the wall between East and West Berlin. My German Wanderjahr afforded me a total immersion in a culture I wanted to understand. Coursework included projective tests, handwriting analysis, dream analysis, and psychoanalysis. I also sang in Freiburg's well-known Russian Chorus. The academic high point of my year abroad was making a presentation (Referat) on B. F. Skinner to a class on psychoanalysis.

My remarks were greeted with polite skepticism, and the professor in charge of the course commented wryly—or so it seemed to me—that it had been “interesting” to have me in class that semester.

Upon returning from Germany, I set out for Stanford in the summer of 1962, where I had decided to pursue graduate study in psychology. I did not know which area of psychology I wanted to specialize in, except that I knew it would not be clinical. The reason was that the only clinical psychology I had been exposed to at Harvard and in Freiburg was one or another variant of psychoanalysis, and I just couldn't buy into the epistemology. So I explored social psychology as well as physiological psychology and fell into clinical accidentally when I heard some of the clinical students talking about something called “behavior therapy” and about two members of the faculty in particular, Albert Bandura and Walter Mischel. The proposition that experimental psychology could be relevant to clinical assessment and intervention intrigued me. The decision to switch into clinical became firm when Arnold Lazarus visited for a year from South Africa. I earned my PhD in 1965 with a dissertation on systematic desensitization as a counterconditioning process, did an internship postdoctorally at the Palo Alto VA Hospital, and then went to SUNY at Stony Brook, where an avowedly behavioral clinical program was just starting under the leadership of Leonard Krasner and Harry Kalish.

...