David Schuldberg

— 10th — (1982) Ronald Reagan

I have recently received my Ph.D. in clinical psychology (research and clinical practice) from U.C. Berkeley, and needless to say it has changed my life. When I think of Harvard, I feel like I'm getting on a bit in years, but I think it's a groovy place; I'm sure our paths will cross again. I still like academia.

Various transitions are coming up for me, which is also just fine with me, and pretty gripping and exciting. However, I really, really hope we don't nuke or starve ourselves in the next ten; seems like hard times are coming.

Classmates, dare to struggle, dare to win!

— 15th — (1987) Ronald Reagan

After working at a number of psychological jobs, I am now an assistant professor here in Big Sky country, at the University of Montana (Missoula). I am enjoying professoring. The parts I prefer consist of doing research, teaching, supervising clinical psychology graduate students, and doing clinical work. There are, of course, other facets to the job. My research interests include studying overlap in the measurement of creativity and psychopathology, and automated assessment. I rejoice daily that microcomputer technology is so much more accessible than when we were UG's. I am also happy to have married Shan Guisinger, another clinical psychologist, whom I met at the end of graduate school. It turned out that she is also from Washington state, and together we form a unification of eastern and western Washington. We have a near-two-year-old daughter, Larke Guisinger Schuldberg, who is causing us no end of joy.

Surveying the current landscape, I want to say that I hope that when the big book is written up 'yonder, we and our fellows will not go down as the generation that culminated in the yuppies: Postmodern houses "Come inside and have something"; Time to talk some talk.

— 20th — (1992) George H. W. Bush

I am very happy to have found a good partner, Shan Guisinger, also a clinical psychologist. We have two children, Larke Guisinger Schuldberg (aged 6 1/2) and A. Forrest Guisinger Schuldberg (aged 1 1/2); these three people are an incredibly essential part of my life. When I began at Harvard, I fancied myself as an intellectual and personal lone-wolf, with visions of communities largely composed of bands of lone wolves of both genders who would occasionally come together out of "existential horniness" but would likely have difficulty forming social units. My life in a family and a small community has blessedly not progressed according to this picture. In many ways, as a male in the early 90s I am attempting to conform to the earlier "super-woman" myth of wanting to have it all. I am still ambitious for my career; I value feeling as well as intellect, and it is important to me to be a very involved father.

I teach in the Clinical Psychology program at the University of Montana and much of my life is firmly lodged in academia; I am pursuing a number of paths of intellectual praxis begun in Cambridge. At the moment my activism takes place through the teaching of clinical skills and values of care and" doing good"; more is needed.

Life at a very non-ivy institution has been good to me, and I keep both feet in the mainstream in my fields (assessment, psychopathology, psychological health) and use electronic mail heavily (py_das@selway.umt.edu). Apart from a one-year post-doc at Yale (Harvard of the South), I have maintained myself as a Westerner. As an aside, the progression in availability of personalized computing power, from walks up Oxford St. and a teletype in the basement of Weld, has been a great source of pleasurable labor for me.

I am concerned for the world of the next twenty-five years. Although 1991 presented a bipolar rollercoaster of despair and hope for a livable world, it is absurd that the media-styled "death of communism" has pushed an obviously unworkable market capitalism as the route to global good life.

— 25th — (1997) Bill Clinton

IS it time to be filling out one of these again?

I am living still in Missoula, Montana, somewhat East of where I started from (Seattle) but considerably West of Cambridge. This situates things. Living in a small town, in a small mountain valley, in a sparsely populated state suits me well. With a nod to Montana's notoriety, this place is not only perhaps the "last best place to hide," but also a good place to remain engaged, with community, family, land, and other creatures. After years of living in a lovely but somewhat generic "university area" near UM's campus, my family recently moved to an acre "up the Rattlesnake," a little out of town with irrigation ditches, garden, and some more altitude.

I am still married, and very happy that I am. The work that is necessary to make this so encompasses the best things that have been going on since the last time I wrote a personal note for the class report. My spouse, Shan Guisinger, and I are both in the process of writing books, both of which make some claims as "theories of everything"; our partnership has to deal with collaboration and competition, as well as everything else. We have two children, Larke (eleven) and Forrest (six); Forrest was a babe in a stroller at the last reunion, and these two are a wonderful focus of my life. I am still teaching in the Psychology Department (clinical program) at the University of Montana; I am now a full professor, tenured, and have been serving as director of clinical training for the last several years. This latter administrative work initially provided some pleasure stemming from having some power to do good, e.g., to deepen my program's mentoring; now I've developed an attitude to match the paperwork and endless diplomacy, and I am looking forward to being "just a professor" next year.

As mentioned, I am working on a book. I have become interested in defining and modeling processes of psychological health. After years of resisting another trendy theory (there have been so many trendy theories!), I am involved in applying nonlinear dynamical systems theory (chaos theory) to the problems of "normal" human functioning. Thinking differently about psychological health has liberating implications at the personal level and possibly useful policy implications. Valery said something like, "Every theory is a fragment of someone's autobiography." I marvel at how my own intellectual and personal preoccupations can remain relatively stable across long periods of time, how I can suddenly realize that I have been working on the same sets of problems all along. Let me intersperse the intellectual and the personal: Friends from 1968-1973 would-I think-still recognize my interests in ordinary language philosophy, as well as my attraction to the well-told yarn (preferably with a rural theme, references to the problems of consciousness, and some dialect), interpersonal psychoanalytic theories and the personal striving to be beloved, discontinuities in human development and Buddhist enlightenment. Throughout this all, some heroes are constant: Wittgenstein, Basho, Noam Chomsky, and especially Muddy Waters. This is also a "mid-life story": While still treading the path of Achievement Motivation, I am also turning more inward.

— 30th — (2002) George W. Bush I am delighted to be pasting this text into the Reunion web page from Tuscany, where I am on sabbatical (a truly wonderful perk of the academic existence) with family for the spring. My spouse, Shan Guisinger, and our son, Alex (age eleven), are here too. Alex is very bravely attending the local small-town school, with far better Italian than the rest of us. Our daughter, Larke (sixteen), decided to spend this period as an exchange student in Berlin, and it is exciting to see her independent, urban, and almost out of the nest.

We will return to Montana in June. I am still working on (finishing, I trust) a book on theoretical issues involved in defining and modeling physical and mental health. I have even dusted off some memories of Math 21 in this process. I am struggling to learn more Italian, occasionally trying to translate the words of Muddy Waters songs.

I too feel the perils of our current historical moment, with a somewhat disorienting expatriate's view of local politics; the Middle East is very close to here, and I just found out that the rain-borne mud settling into the clothes on the line is from the "deserts of Africa." And, as I finish this note for a Monday U.S. deadline, Italy is getting ready for its first general strike in twenty-or-so years. I am sorry not to be coming to Cambridge for this Reunion; I have good memories of the Twentyfifth, and I remain a lurker and occasional respondent on the listserv.

Tuscany's son Dante wrote: "Midway on our life's journey, I found myself/In dark woods, the right road lost." (Pinsky translation.) For me, some of the mid-life agony is past; perhaps this is the transition to post-mid-life!

— 35th — (2007) George W. Bush

Still at it, comrades. Although aging, I am in decent health, still working, and with no retirement in sight. I remain tilling the fields of the academy; working in an applied behavioral science has been very satisfying.

I feel incredibly lucky to be married to my beloved spouse and to have two wonderful, rapidly growing children. I am now almost completely a Montanan, although I still can't claim "born here" status. There are chickens in the yard; this is not the precise "two cats" promised by Crosby, Stills, and Nash, but it is very nice. I think often of Harvard, with both fondness and sometimes ressentiment [A generalized feeling of resentment and often hostility harbored by one individual or group against another, especially chronically and with no means of direct expression. — RRL]. I still see some of you, notably alums of Jordan J, and would like to be in contact with more classmates. Dare to struggle.

— 40th — (2012) Barack Obama

Still standing!

Yoga has helped with the aches and pains, and I am enjoying good health, but I suddenly feel old! My memory is not what it used to be.

No matter where you go, there you are! I feel considerably wiser, and the little things don't bother me so much; this has made me a much better teacher and administrator. But I still have my same old personality, parts of which seem to have gelled in middle school. I note that the New York Times article on the Red Book mentions this phenomenon.

Approaching retirement, my academic work takes on more of the feel of a mortality project. In addition, it is weird to see culture and then technology pull ahead. I used to be an early adopter. No more.

Even I can hear that I sometimes sound like an old fart. For example, every two years I teach a course on psychological assessment; in addition to specific techniques, I try to teach ways to listen, to keep track of sequences of client behavior and then visit and revisit these sequences, searching for useful information about patterning and content. This attention to "process" is a fundamental aspect of clinical training in mental health.

An important part of this has involved note-taking, heretofore using a pad of paper and pen. You know where this is going. This year's students have expressed deepening discomfort with notetaking, feeling that it distracts them; perhaps they could simply record their interactions and transcribe them electronically, or type on an iPad or laptop as they talk to clients? Perhaps. But doesn't writing focus the mind? Isn't thinking motoric? Isn't a pad less intrusive than an iPad? But enough of this. It is an incredibly exciting time to be an academic, when — despite a love of paper — it is possible to carry one's reference materials around as PDFs, and when searching the literature becomes easier and easier, deeper and deeper, more and more far-reaching as more becomes digitized.

My spouse, Shan Guisinger, remains the best thing that ever happened to me; I am more content than ever before, and I feel very blessed to have married a beautiful scholar. She is applying evolutionary theory to the treatment of anorexia nervosa.

I am also taking incredible pride and pleasure in watching the trajectories of my children. Larke, twenty-six, is a playwright in Portlandia. Alex, twenty-one, is a sophomore majoring in computer science at Washington State University in Pullman.

It remains very important to me to live in a relatively small community on the fringes of urbanization. It is crucial in my daily life to smell vegetation in the air, to see expanses of sky (this is Big Sky country after all), and to walk on and be able to scan natural earth contours. Being spared nature deficit disorder has had positive health effects as well. I strongly recommend raising chickens, wherever you are. See you at the Fortieth!

— 45th — (2017) Donald Trump

As Keith Richards says, "It's good to be here. It's good to be anywhere." Life continues to be good here in the Rocky Mountain West. Basically healthy at this point and not yet retired, but intend to be in 2020. I am still feeling that there is a lot to do in my academic work life. These are very strange days, with strange realities even in comparison to, say, some of our own radical left-wing ideas about what multinationals were doing. It is as if, from my perspective, 1970 conspiracy theories (about corporations) were not only true, but we were not paranoid enough. I also am a bit of a privacy nut, and I am troubled.

I live in a large and mainly very rural red state of just over a million people. Montana is also a red state with a Democratic governor and we may, as I am writing this, "flip" its one House seat to a Democrat.

My son has a "Trump jar" (analogous to a "cuss jar") in his apartment; the dollar fine keeps conversation from being monotonous. That said, I will pay the dollar to say: This is a state with a lot of strange bedfellows. A lot of Trump — there, I said it — voters are my coworkers and constituents; I am a state employee. Strange days are upon us, and I need to figure out how to deal. I am still married to Shan Guisinger; meeting her was the best thing that ever happened to me, and we are partners and collaborators in our field as well. She is retiring from her practice next year and continuing her scholarship and research in evolutionary theory and eating disorders. Our children, Larke and Alex, have gone in different and yet overlapping directions, working out on the edge of the known, I'd say. Larke is a writer and a practitioner and teacher of circus (aerials), with a day job as a massage therapist. Alex is a software developer in security, which is an interesting area these days! They are both incredibly dear, and I feel very lucky that, with children in Portland and Seattle, we are able to get together and have some fun. One thing that has changed since '72 is my belief in the (perhaps necessarily inherent) toxicity of parents. Despite the decline of my own brick-and-mortar institution of higher ed, this is still a great time to be an academician. Part of my work involves seeking to diversify the "professoriate." I have the honor of working with a number of Native American communities in Montana and elsewhere. Since high school I wanted the chance to play more with computers, and now I've been able to do so for quite a while. In the areas of genomics, AI, and nonlinear dynamical systems, I think some paradigms are gonna be shifting, perhaps during some of our lifetimes. It is certainly time to stay engaged, for as long as we are up to it. Dare to struggle, dare to win.

— 50th — (2022)

Is it because it is the 50th that this one is so hard to write? They all have been hard.

Looking over past Red Books (using the wonderful meta-Red Book compiled by my friend and double classmate Robert Livingston), I see in my trajectory an earnestness, a long-term groping for identity, for who I was (and am) as a Harvardian and after. I cringe a little at my Harvard self, at the guy in some of those class reports.

I remember and still reference strange and uncanny images of Harvard, its brand, its iconography, seeming – as an undergraduate -- sort of like Ken Kesey’s “combine,” with its historical and institutional fog machine. How did we fit in, and how do we stand out?

One place Harvard led me was academia, and that’s where I still am, even though retired. It also has led me to define myself to some extent in opposition to the institution, as a westerner, small town, small university guy, idiosyncratic research programs. And that has worked well.

I am still pretty healthy. Retired for a year, but just had my retirement party/roast last month and finally fully cleaned out my lab last week. (COVID delayed actualizing being retired.) I have finally finished a book (coming out in January), though not the one I talked about in past reports. Still married to Shan Guisinger and so glad about that!

And, children – Larke and Alex – are launched and both doing well. We welcomed a son-in-law into the family in March 2020. (To quote in part Chuck Berry: It was a virtual wedding and the old folks wished them well....)

Cleaning out my research room of bins of xeroxes, thousands of notes on yellow sheets of paper, I am beginning to see that the next generation, not paper based, will have an easier time retiring, less to recycle, less to landfill at this life stage. What purpose did all those notes serve? I believe they did focus the mind.

On the applied level – and even though retired – my labors have focused on rural and rural minority mental health, and on training versatile and sensitive clinicians. The challenges in areas with very low population density, I believe, also have lessons for our larger systems of care.

On a theoretical and empirical level, I am now a complete convert to nonlinear dynamical systems theory. The COVID pandemic -- with its multiple interacting facets, its odd twists, turns, and dynamics, with its daily time-series graph of new cases -- continues to be a fruitful area to understand, model, intervene with, and this is where a lot of my interest is now. I believe that chaos is the wave of the future, that thinking in the language of complex systems, intervening for change with an understanding of interconnectedness and nonlinear connections among the pieces, these are things that have a chance of preventing us from circling the drain of climate crisis and social injustice, as we are now doing.

I am still working on these things, and in some ways I still feel profoundly unfinished academically, professionally and even as a person. And unsettled as a participant in a deteriorating polity. At the same time, it is a bit late to feel so unfinished, and I am not sure how far this goes. These are all life and academic themes for me, and I continue to pursue them. As we say about our still-rambunctious puppy: I want to be good.

University of Montana