Ronald F. Levant is Clinical Associate Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, and is in Independent Practice. He served as President of Division 43 and as Editor of the Journal of Family Psychology.

     I am thrilled to receive the 1996 Family Psychologist of the Year Award from the Division of Family Psychology, and deeply honored to join the illustrious group of previous award recipients.

     When I was in graduate school in the early 1970's, family therapy was very hot among students, but not among the faculty, who really didn't see the need for course work in this new area. I got my introduction to the field from an informal tutorial that I worked out with an advanced student in the program. Here I read voraciously about exciting developments beginning in the 1950's when a number of independent investigators at various locations throughout the US and England began to experiment by inviting the families of schizophrenic patients into the treatment room, and even into the hospital, as Murray Bowen did, in what Jay Haley, in his inimitable wit referred to as the "hospitalize the whole damn maelstrom approach to family therapy." Most of this early work was not widely reported. The first journal in the field, Family Process, had begun on a small scale in 1961, and the Journal of Marital and Family Therapy was not to be launched until 1975. Indeed many of the pioneers working in this area did not know each other until 1967, when a conference chaired by James Framo, one of the first family psychologists, brought many of these people together: Nathan Ackerman, Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy, Murray Bowen, Jay Haley, Robert MacGregor, Salvador Minuchin, David Reiss, Murray Strauss, Paul Watzlawick, John Weakland, Carl Whitaker, and Lyman Wynne, to name only the most prominent. Can you imagine what a conference that must have been!

     As I understand from the writings about that conference, Murray Bowen stole the show with a startling presentation, later published anonymously as "Toward the differentiation of a self in one's own family," in which he explored, in great detail, his own efforts to differentiate a self within his family of origin. In today's era of reveal-your-darkest-secrets-to-3-million-viewers-television and shock-jock radio, this doesn't seem all that stunning, but back in the 1960's it violated some of the taboos of the mental health profession -- namely the injunction for clinicians to be opaque and neutral, and the assumption that mental patients were somehow different from the rest of us. Of course the freshness of these innovations faded over time. A more enduring contribution was his theory of emotional relationship systems, which, to describe it simply, took the essence of the psychoanalytic perspective and put it into a systems framework. Bowen described the shift in perspective from intrapsychic to systemic in terms of the experience of going from the high to the low magnification lens on a microscope. The high magnification lens is used to see the details of cell structure; by analogy, an intrapsychic perspective allows you to see the details of projection and introjection within individuals, and even the projective identification between family members. The low magnification lens, on the other hand, is used to see the larger pattern of tissue structure; again, by analogy, a systemic perspective allows you to see the patterns over generations that these intrapsychic dynamics create.

     As a young psychologist I found these ideas quite heady and got immersed in the field of family therapy, working on a client-centered approach to family therapy in the mid-1970's, publishing a graduate textbook in 1984, and conducting an ongoing program of research from 1975-1988 in which I and my students developed and evaluated psychoeducational programs to help parents in variety of family structures (foster parents, single parents, step-parents and working parents) cope with the task of parenting, which I have come to view as life's toughest job, and the one for which we all receive the least preparation.

     Like Bowen, at a certain point I began to apply my work to my own life. I date this to the late 1970's, when I had been functioning for quite a few years as a divorced father, trying to maintain a relationship with my then-adolescent daughter who lived 200 miles away in New York City. I went down for weekends and she came up for summers. I struggled with this role and often felt disappointed in myself. In fact, when teaching my fatherhood course years later, I would jokingly admit to the fathers that, as a father myself, I aspired to follow the philosophies of John Dewey and Carl Rogers, but on some days I just went with Attila the Hun. The 1979 movie Kramer vs. Kramer was an eye-opener for me. I recall watching with baited breath as Dustin Hofman portrayed the internal struggles that I knew only too well -- the struggles between my ideas of what a man should be and the skills that I had acquired as a result of my own gender role socialization in a traditional working class family on the one hand, and the demands of being a fully-involved, the-buck-stops-with-you father on the other hand.

     Being an academic at the time I turned to the literature, and discovered that none of the major reviews of the literature on parent education identified whether the studies reviewed included fathers in their groups. I concluded that parent education was synonymous with mother education, and that Michael Lamb was right: Fathers are the forgotten parent. Thus began my work with fatherhood. Over a nine year period at Boston University which culminated in the establishment of the Fatherhood Project, I worked with married fathers, recently separated fathers, divorced fathers, step-fathers, dual-earner fathers, expectant fathers, fathers of infants to fathers of grown children. With my students we developed user-friendly, experience-near versions of parent education for men, which did not require that they talk about feelings, but rather offered them opportunities to develop skills. Ironically, the further I got into this work the more I realized that the main skills men need to learn are emotional skills -- the skills of emotional empathy and emotional self-awareness -- and they need these skills not only to function in their role as fathers, but also for their roles as husband, son, friend, and member of families and communities.

     But I must quickly add that throughout this period of working with men, first in the Fatherhood Project and later in private practice, I have not only come to understand these limitations that we men have by virtue of our gender role socialization, but I also have come to appreciate the strengths of men -- those traditional virtues that go unrecognized and unappreciated today, getting swept away with the dust and debris resulting from the collapse of traditional masculinity.

     In closing, in the spirit of the Academy Awards, I want to thank my parents for being there, my wife Carol for tolerating my crazy work schedule, my daughter Caren for turning out all right anyway, my analyst, my friends, and the many mentors, colleagues, students, and patients -- too numerous to name -- that I have had the good fortune of working with over the years.

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