Hewett, Frank M.

Frank Hewett was born in Los Angeles on February 18, 1927, and attended public schools there. He served as an enlisted member in the U.S. Army band and was stationed in Italy during the occupation after World War II. After the Army, Hewett entered the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was active in UCLA student government and edited the UCLA humor magazine. He received his BA in theater arts in 1951, a background that was to serve him uniquely well in his later years as a professor, to which outstanding teaching evaluations from generations of UCLA undergraduates would attest.

Hewett also worked in church youth activities, where he came to the attention of James C. Coleman, a psychology professor at UCLA. Noting Hewett's interest in working with children, Coleman recruited him into the clinical psychology doctoral program. Coleman was also instrumental in securing a position for Hewett as teacher at the UCLA Fernald School, a demonstration school in learning disabilities for the UCLA Psychology Department, through which he could support himself through graduate school. During these years, Hewett was a coauthor on a high-interest, low-ability reading series authored by Coleman and other Fernald staff. He received his PhD in clinical psychology from UCLA in 1961. His dissertation focused on reading achievement and psychotherapy and was later published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, with James Coleman as coauthor.

Through Dr. Coleman's efforts, Hewett was selected as the first clinical psychology intern ever trained at the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. This hospital had just moved into its new quarters in a wing of the newly constructed UCLA Medical Center, with two units of approximately 15 acute psychiatric beds each for children and adolescents, respectively. Upon graduation from his Ph.D. program, Hewett was chosen to head the new psychiatric hospital school for these inpatients, not only on the strength of his performance as a clinical psychology intern but also on the basis of his prior experience at the UCLA Fernald School.

As with other contemporaries, such as Bill Cruickshank, Dick Whelan, and Bill Morse, Hewett was one of a generation of clinical psychologists to found the modern field of academic special education. Each of these pioneers found themselves, as relatively new clinical psychologists, pursuing research or program development in the education of children with learning or behavioral disorders, primarily in hospital settings, with funding from the Bureau of Education for the Handicapped (BEH) in the U.S. Office of Education, which was being established in the mid-1960s.

Hewett did not see himself at this time as such a pioneer because his early experiences in program development often felt more desperate than pioneering. As Hewett himself would describe it, the origins of the UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute (NPI) School were the hospital nursing staff's bringing 8 to 10 children with psychiatric disorders from the unit down the A-floor hallway and locking them in a room with Frank Hewett for 2 hours. From modest expectations, innovation seemed to flourish.

Hewett's training in the Ph.D. program, as well as the prevailing therapeutic approach in psychiatry departments across the country at that time, was psychodynamic, if not psychoanalytic. Child or adolescent patients were hospitalized for months or years at a time, even in acute psychiatric hospitals such as the NPI. With only few exceptions, both psychiatry and psychology faculty supervisors at such hospitals believed in psychodynamic case formulations leading to child and family analytic therapy. Early behavioral work was viewed with suspicion, if not hostility, because addressing symptomatic behaviors was seen as antithetical to the effective treatment and resolution of underlying dynamic conflicts that presumably caused these behaviors. Behaviorism in the NPI had nonetheless begun to take hold in the early 1960s: The first child and adolescent psychiatry clinical chief, James Q. Simmons III, MD, began to collaborate with Ivar Lovaas, PhD, a behavioral psychologist. Their seminal studies on behavioral training of children with autism hospitalized at NPI were receiving considerable attention in the early 1960s, culminating in a Life magazine article in 1964. Simmons became one of Frank Hewett's most important supporters in the division.

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