Psychologists at Home Part I

As a child, Barber says he wanted to be a physician, an ambition sidetracked when, at 12, he read On the Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud. "I saw a way to understand a lot of things about why people are the way we are," he says. "At the time, it didn't occur to me that I mostly wanted to know why my family was the way it was." Nevertheless, 25 years into his career, he seems to have dropped out of it. Midlife crisis? Not really, says Barber.

Yet there are consequences to major life changes. Barber says friends and colleagues "thought I was kidding. But when it was really clear I was leaving, many said how much they envied me. What they said evoked sadness and sympathy in me because we all get ourselves into a set of contingencies we think we can't get out of," he recalls "Here were people whose lives looked good from the outside, but in truth held a lot of struggle and helplessness.

Most people work too hard. There so much cultural support for working hard, making money, and buying things that it puts people on the old gerbil wheel.

"For many years I saw that as a major problem in everyone but me. I encouraged people to work less." It took him a long time to take his own advice."

Divorced, with a son who's 25, Barber feels "circumstantially lucky" to be able to make the break. Ha he stayed in L.A., he says, "I would have felt trapped." Midlife crisis? "I had my midlife crisis when I was 25 That's when I thought I had to make all my life choices."

His relationship with his son is "great, I see him a lot." He's grateful for that. "It's not a typically happy story to be the child of a therapist," he says, and mistakes were made.

"I remember at age nine or 10 he asked me why I couldn't just hit him like other fathers did and not just terminally lecture him. Later, I consciously tried to listen more and talk less, to grow in him the idea that he should do what makes him happy."

His son is currently crewing on a Greenpeace ship in Australian waters. "I don't like it," Barber admits. "It worries me. But I'm proud of him."

Barber views psychological health as a learning process involving loss, recovery, and growth, rather than as a state of constancy. His strategies for coping with major and minor life problems rest firmly on reaching out to others. "I talk to friends, most of whom are therapists. I may even seek therapy for myself. One skill I have is knowing where my resources are.

"My experience in therapy has taught me how to step outside myself and see objectively what there is that may be contributing to the difficulties in a given situation, and to try to remain calm in the face of perplexities."

While he finds it psychologically unhealthy to tolerate bad behavior, he says it's healthy to seek out people who are enjoying their lives to the fullest and to spend as much time around them as possible. "They are most rewarding to me, and one of the ways I have of helping myself is to work on seeing more of those kind of people."

As for popularized stress reducers, Barber hasn't much nice to say about the self-help movement's tendency to cast people in endless categories of victimhood. "We have become a nation full of victims, always in need of something we can't supply. Alcoholics Anonymous is an exception, but the proliferation of support groups brings a sense of entitlement about victimization.

"That's an understandable consequence of a country whose principles include protection of the individual and that has a hair-trigger focus about being stepped on by a majority. But the trouble is we're so sensitized, we tend to victimize people just to protect their rights. The unfortunate consequence is that it disempowers people and they really do become victims.

PEPPER SCHWARTZ, PH.D.

Schwartz, a social psychologist and president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sex, frequently writes for popular magazines and is a widely quoted source in articles on feminist social psychology and gender conflicts. A Yale University graduate, she wrote her thesis focused on mating and dating behavior "at a time when my mentors would have preferred one on statistical oddities in Great Britain." In 1983, she coauthored "American Couples," a landmark study on relationships.

Schwartz views the mental health of her profession with a sympathetic but skeptical eye. "I've met folks on both sides of the line. Some go into our field to sort out their own lives and it becomes an extremely dangerous part of their work; our personal experiences may color our perception rather than provide insight, and that makes our work analytically inaccurate. That makes me nervous.