I'll admit that until this week, I would have had trouble distinguishing these two men.  I'm going to give you the short course.  What they have in common is that they were both healers in the humanistic/existential mold.  They both taught/worked at the W.A. White Institute and at the New School for Social Research.  They both had tuberculosis during their lives.  Rollo May wrote The Art of Counseling and Love and Will.  Erich Fromm wrote The Art of Loving and Psychoanalysis and Zen Buddhism.  Now for what was different about them.  May was born in Ohio, worked in Greece, and was associated with Saybrook Graduate School.  He lived in the San Francisco Bay area when he was older and died in 1994.  Fromm, on the other hand, was born in Germany, worked in Mexico, and was associated with Bennington College.  He lived in Switzerland when older, and died earlier than May, in 1980.  You can get an impression of each of them by watching a video on YouTube.   

I've started a Goodreads bookshelf called American Transcendentalists.  I was considering calling it 

Evaluating and giving feedback for literary, research or academic performance is quite an art; it is one which I have labored over since my academic career began.  From the feedback given by peers in the third grade classes I'm frequenting to the decision of whether a dissertation meets the standards, feedback must be given.  I tend to like everything.  As a counterpoint, I will provide Henry James, Jr's. fictionalized account of a person's response to the fact that the English translate French plays, and his assessment of a performance which he had seen. The former: << MORE >>

I've got the introductory chapter for Healers and Feelings in Draft form.  It isn't meant to cover all of the important aspects of psychology and healing, but rather to set the stage for the chapters about healers and psychological conditions that will follow.  First will be a chapter about Carl Jung and schizophrenia, then one about William James and Depression, then one about Jonathan Kellerman and OCD.  I'd love feedback about this chapter.  You can read it at this location - Introductory Chapter.  There may be other topics that would be important to cover to at least give a rounded out picture.  Be sure and let me know by comment if you can think of any.

I've enjoyed posting Facebook entries about Thinkers and Universities  Here is where they appear.  Besides indicating that there may be something wrong with it as an intellectual exercise, my enjoyment of this has led me to plan a series of 24 posts about thinkers and other interesting people, and schools below the level of universities.  Some of the first subjects will be Montessori, B. Alcott, Steiner, Just, Watts, and others.  There is so much controversy about schools, now, that it is important to look a t the big picture over time.  Where schools have been is as important as where they are going.  Are there any thinkers/teachers/schools that you would like to see featured?  If you are at a school, leave a comment, and I will feature your school.  I'm reading biographies of Alcott and Pestalozzi.  Here is the Goodreads page for Thinkers and Thinking.  My Goodreads page has bookshelves for Ethics, School Psychology, and Thinkers and Thinking readings.  Should I have gone with Google Books instead of Goodreads?  One never knows; I do also have several free books, including the Pestalozzi book on Google Books.  Keep on reading and thinking!

Time marches on, and in that spirit, I'll do a set of Facebook entries about people who spent their time  studying thinking, healing others' feelings, or doing something that made them famous and the universities with which they are mostly associated.  It must be fund raising time, because the universities that my family is associated with are calling for donations.  Considering close relatives, the list is large: UConn, University of Miami, Middlebury College, UVM, UNH, RPI, SMU, Maryland, Michigan, Shepherd University, ST. Lawrence University, Cornell.  My daughter has recently lived near Iowa and Texas.  So check out ... << MORE >>

My series of posts about criticized thinkers on Twitter and Facebook is almost finished.  I think next that I will do a series of 24 posts about children of people who I might have in my books about thinking, feeling and doing (now, that's a word for sure).  Today, the news has stories about the deaths of fifty-one year old daughters of Ted Kennedy and Walter Mondale.  It got me thinking that the status of your children if you have them is important to people.  A good way to tell if you know enough about someone to be considered their friend or to answer an exam question about them is whether you know if they have or had children, and some information about those children.  Besides, children might write a book about you.  So kind readers (both of you - if there are some out there I don't know about - send out a tweet or comment so I won't get too discouraged about this whole thing) I hope you enjoy the information about the families of the people I put in my series.

         I just finished reading Now You See It: How The Brain Science of Attention Will Transform The Way We Live, Work and Learn by Cathy N. Davidson.   The author believes that our schools and work places have not changed to take into account the changes brought about by computers and the internet.   She thinks that we need to be more collaborative, problem solving oriented, creative, appreciative of learning differences, and relevant in our teaching, ...

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Ethics: A Very Short Introduction by Simon Blackburn could serve as an owner's manual for your ethical decision making process.  There are twenty sections, including Relativism, Birth, Freedom and paternalism, Contracts and discourse, and Rights and natural rights.  One of the benefits of the book is that you can draw some guidelines from it.  Some that I drew were:

The word structuralism is used to describe two distinctly different theories or mind sets, a fact which hadn't been totally clear in my mind.  One is based in psychology and one in philosophy.  They both extend to other disciplines, and they both are seen has falling out of favor, the one in psychology replaced by functionalism, behaviorism, and cognitivism; the one in philosophy by post-structuralism, deconstruction and  the other methods.  In psychology the idea was studying the basic units of mental experience.  Edward Titchener, at Cornell is reported to have concluded that there were over 40,000 different sensations.  In philosophy, the idea was that like language, understanding involved analysis of the relationships between the words used in speaking/writing.  The theory of signs is also associated with philosophical structuralism.  Although other descriptors are used, the phenomena studied by Titchener are still studied.  Here is a student at both a Department of Philosophy and an Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, for example.  It was the definition for structuralism in The APA Dictionary of Psychology, listing the definitions separately, that helped me to see the situation clearly.