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medico-legal work with children. In important respects, therefore, fate handed me a varied range of learning opportunities – more than I had bargained for, and most probably many more than I would have been exposed to in regular South African psychiatric hospitals in those days. However, I never had the privilege of learning what a typical clinical psychology internship in South Africa entailed. In my most generous moments I imagined that one would have learnt some of the basics of psychometric diagnostic testing as well as aspects of counselling and psychotherapy.

      At Baragwanath my yearning for further study was difficult to ignore. Conditions were so auspicious that, in 1969, I was ready to register as a doctoral student under the supervision of Professor Roux. I did so with the full knowledge and active support of Professor Lipschitz and his senior colleagues. The theme of my doctoral research was body image in paraplegia.¹⁶ It was a daring move on my part to have decided on a research topic in a field that, in today’s terms, falls into the challenging and fascinating domain of neuropsychology. I am still heartened by the fact that no one expressed any uneasiness about the unusual research subject I had chosen. I can only assume that both Lipschitz and Roux believed that I could meet the challenge.

      My research sample consisted of male paraplegics receiving treatment and rehabilitation in Ward 12, a unit under the direct supervision of Professor Lipschitz. Paraplegia, commonly the loss of regular use of the lower limbs, is a result of traumatic injury to the spine. In the course of individual development from childhood to adulthood, each of us develops a concept or image of his or her body. Such a body image is a psychological and mental representation of one’s identity as one experiences it in good health and in serious conditions such as paraplegia. The mental representation of one’s body may be distorted – that is, interfered with – by physical and psychological trauma such as the loss of the mobility of one’s legs following injuries to the spine.

      My interest in disturbances of the body image was aroused by the noticeable attention such disturbances were receiving in the neuropsychological literature of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Fortunately, I encountered none of the difficulties I had experienced with my promoter in the course of my master’s research, and in November 1970 I was ready to submit my thesis for examination.

      Although much has been said in recent times about racism in South African institutions such as the National Institute for Personnel Research (NIPR) and among the country’s leaders in the years of apartheid, I must admit that, as a young African psychologist who was working largely under conditions of professional isolation, I experienced the NIPR, with its substantial psychology and social science library and research atmosphere, as a welcome haven. My unrestricted access to the institute’s substantial book and journal collections, its reading areas and its earliest computer system contributed immeasurably to my doctoral research and development as a psychologist. I seized the opportunity to interact with and observe research psychologists at work outside a university and hospital setting.

      Some of the researchers, such as Dr S Barran, who later left the country, offered me collegiality and friendship at a time when my professional identity was in its formative stages. During the closing stages of my doctoral studies my work was facilitated in no small measure by the installation of new computer facilities, which saved me from what would have turned out to be an unwelcome and time-consuming treatment of complex non-parametric statistical tests of significance during the analysis and discussion of my research results. In the winter of 1971 I was awarded the degree of DLitt et Phil at a graduation ceremony for black graduates of Unisa held in Ga-Rankuwa, an African residential area outside Pretoria.

      By the time I began my first postdoctoral year at Baragwanath in 1971, I had started thinking and dreaming about academic work in a university as a prospective career. However, I soon found out that no black university was willing to employ me as a lecturer in psychology. I applied for a lectureship at my old university, but the fact that I was a former student who had completed his doctoral studies by the age of 30 failed even to secure a formal letter of rejection of my application.

      What followed soon thereafter, however, was a windfall. I was invited to undertake an extensive coast-to-coast study tour of clinical psychology training centres at premier US universities. I term it a windfall for two reasons. One was that the invitation came as a surprise and at a time when I needed that kind of wide-ranging professional exposure. The second was that the trip included a visit that resulted in my subsequent return to Yale University as a postdoctoral fellow in July 1973.

      I still remember how novel and memorable everything connected with the visit turned out to be. Hearing the song ‘Oh Happy Day’ on take-off and landing on the flight from Johannesburg to Paris was heart-warming and unforgettable. From Paris it was off to London. The US leg of the journey began with my arrival in Boston. During a visit to Harvard University I enjoyed an interesting hour or so in the company of the prominent psychiatrist Robert Coles. I left his office with copies of his well known series Children of Crisis. I travelled to Connecticut by train and arrived in the visibly affluent town of Westport, where I spent a number of days observing the daily work of an American private psychiatric hospital. It was there that I first observed group-therapy sessions as a treatment modality within a private hospital setting. During my stay in Westport I undertook a day’s visit to Yale University’s Department of Psychiatry, in the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC) at 34 Park Street in New Haven, where a series of meetings had been arranged. My discussions with several senior staff members revealed that professional staff in the Department of Psychiatry included men and women from psychiatry, psychology, social work and nursing, each of whom participated to varying degrees in the treatment of patients and in teaching and supervising pre-doctoral students and postdoctoral fellows.

      Although I visited Yale in the early stages of my study tour, I was so taken by what I learnt about its postdoctoral programme that I made up my mind then that I would like to return to New Haven as a postdoctoral fellow as soon as was practicably possible. I promptly discussed the matter with Dr Jesse Geller, the responsible academic at the time. The discussion was not in vain because I was able to learn, before my return to Westport that day, that my prospects for admission were good. At that time I was unaware of the part played by the state of Connecticut and Clifford Beers in the development of psychology in the US, including the establishment of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene (now known as the National Mental Health Association) in 1909.¹⁷

      Following my visits to Harvard, Westport and Yale, there was much to experience and learn in New York City and the rest of the country. The experience I relished most in America’s world-renowned metropolis was my visit to the Harlem Counseling Center on 125th Street. It was a black-run facility that catered primarily for black and Hispanic residents of Harlem. During my visit I familiarised myself with an approach to mental health that was gaining ascendancy in the early 1970s – the practice of what was popularly known as community psychology, a tradition that had been introduced to me during my discussions at the CMHC. At the Harlem Counseling Center mental health professionals were developing community psychology treatment strategies that required professionals to work where people lived, in order to enable regular community members to act as agents for positive mental health change.

      After my New York visit my itinerary included visits to psychology departments at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the smaller, predominantly black colleges in the southern city of Atlanta, Georgia, which are such a notable feature of the higher-education sector in that city. In California, upon arrival at Stanford University, my itinerary included a visit to the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Studies, where I was pleased to meet Professor Monica Wilson of the University of Cape Town.

      Although it was Christmas time, visits to the University of California in San Francisco and Los Angeles followed, as well as a day’s stay at the California Institute of Technology. It was that visit that resulted in a longish association between myself and Professor Ed Munger, who was instrumental in securing my participation in the regular meetings of the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs in the years following my visit.

      A snapshot of such a wide-ranging visit leaves out many experiences and interesting individuals from whom I learnt a great deal. The tour exposed me to a world of applied psychology that was varied, purposefully structured and, in some instances, community based. It

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