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Bio
and Vita
Informal
bio
Short formal bio
Long formal bio
Vita
Informal bio
Therapist, thinker, speaker, teacher, writer, consultant…
"I listen carefully, try to be of use, and take my recreation in the arts" - Confucius
I have three grown engaged and unique creative children, and wonderful friends spread all over, I have lived first in Manhattan, then Southern and Northern California, Boston, Mexico City, Washington DC, Martha's Vineyard, Whidbey Island near Seattle, and now on the Russian River in Sonoma County, California.
For the last thirty years I have been a psychoanalyst, professor, organizational consultant, and exec at two small internet companies that used on-line conferences to help with internal communications. In 1998 I started a newsletter called y2k week (archived at www.dougcarmichael.com/y2kweek). All along I have been actively reading history, philosophy and related thinkers with a focus on cultural change - anthropology, political science, literary theory, and looking at the next steps after we learned that y2k was as much a social phenomena as a technical one - basically about how people form opinions when there is not sufficient evidence, and how the reality never emerges, because people ant to forget about it. For the last five years I've paid most attention to philanthropy and community development, especially the way smaller local and regional areas can gain more control - and be more creative - about local development.
The key themes in my life are organizeable around
Science,
Psychoanalysis,
Arts,
Management consulting,
Social concerns, and
Politics in an Internet age.
After Caltech I studied developmental psychology and wrote my dissertation at Berkeley on irony - a kind of Piagetian study looking at ways of integrating emotional and cognitive perspectives into a less split model. Irony was part of rhetoric and rhetoric was part of the classical trivium. I still consider this work ongoing.
It was while studying physics as an undergrad and working in the physics labs at Caltech that I developed a sense that the people were even more interesting than the physics. I was surrounded by wonderful characters such as Feynman and Beadle and Bonenblust - and Jon Mathews wherever you are - and had great teachers as well in the humanities. Reading Yeats, Elliot, Mann and Joyce for a year with Hallett Smith was a great antidote to physics, and philosophy with Alfred Stern provided depth I used throughout the later travels, especially his introducing me to Cassirer Ortega, Unamuno and Vahinger. I still consider myself a scientist.
Caltech led me to psychology through Oppenheimer - now there is a story - and from Berkeley took a post doc at Harvard where I worked with Jerome Bruner, and met Eric Erickson and David Riesman and got directed towards psychoanalysis, and met Michael Maccoby who was working with Erich Fromm. Off I went to Mexico and the Mexican Psychoanalytic, which Fromm Directed, and had an amazing education in psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture. And I learned to practice psychoanalysis, and appreciated the independence such a life offers - and the many hours of learning to listen, and getting clearer about what really makes a difference.
Fromm's view had always been, how do you put individual dynamics together with social dynamics; in short, for Fromm that meant Freud and Marx. At Caltech, I watched the interaction among physics, and public policy, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When I went to Berkeley there was the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio, and then came the Vietnam war, and I experienced the difference between Berkeley and Harvard - kids from mixed up backgrounds who were open and democratic (and sometimes worse), and the children of presumed privilege who didn't dare touch big issues.
I inherited this agenda but had deep misgivings - both about Freud, which Fromm also had, and about Marx, which he had less. The deep task seemed to be however an extension of Fromm's desire to re-humanize psychoanalysis. Freud and Marx are still high on my list of people worth getting to know. They were added to my own pantheon: Piaget, Cassrier, Kenneth Burke, Mumford and later I added a few others: Voegelin being the most important. More recently Roberto Ungar, Keith Hart and Phillip Mirowski.
I was fortunate to be able to practice with people open to dialog about themselves, a work I have continued over many years. I continue to look to ways of understanding that practice with deeper ties to science, art and social questions. Maccoby's work I which I participated led in 1976 to the Gamesman and opened the way to consulting. His concepts such as "the psychostructure of the organization" seem to me still-born but powerfully suggestive of future research.
Consulting led me into places I never would have been, many federal agencies at or near the top, including the Whitehouse, doing the first major use of the Internet to manage a whole company, one of the great Canadian energy companies, and into Hewlett Packard, IBM, Morgan, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many others. All of which has led me to question the corporate form if it is not constrained by social needs through the state chartering process. It has also led me to consider the very grae problem of governance in complexity. Don Michaels (Learning to Plan and Plannig to learn was a real friend and stimulant).I have been an active user of the Internet since the old dialup days of The Source in 1978, using it as a mode of dialog with clients, making it into corporate infrastructure, and learning environments.
My consulting focus now is on what I like to call " The economy after this one," and working with clients who want their organization to be there.
I think of the years practicing, reading, consulting and travels - Mexico, India, Japan, Slovenia, Sweden, Italy, Tunisia, Jordan - as continuing to work with others to put it together, to create a more humane - and interesting - world.
My immediate concerns are political: what to do as the Democrats seem unable to respond to the failure of the Republican leadership.
my website and
my weblog
Short
formal bio
Dr Douglass Carmichael,
Consulting, psychotherapy, teaching, speaking, writing,
has a background in physics
and psychoanalysis, and has combined an interest in technology, the
humanities, and social issues. He works as psychotherapist, teacher,
executive coach and consultant on strategic organization, scenarios, and
the implications of informatics for organizational strategy and
structure. He is active in the design of Internet spaces for the
infrastructure to support virtual teams. He works across institutions and
organizations, locally and internationally, on issues of the social
consequences of economic policy and the implications of future change for
individual, social, political, cultural and organizational development.
Current interest in technology and society as a symptom of deeper
fissures in the human - technology symbiosis. He was part of an executive
group that, in the early '80's used 300 baud modems and Radioshack model 100's to explore
strategic issues with a globally distributed group, was one of the first
to use collaborative dialup to server spaces pre internet - 1985 - to
manage a corporate entity, using the internet as ateam based infrastructure.
In recent years he has focused on philanthropy and community development.
His longer range focus is on
the use of the humanities to enhance societal policy making.
Long formal bio
Douglass Carmichael
www.dougcarmichael.com
2001- 2005 An Invitation
to join a philanthropic effort in social thought about critical issues
has kept me focused on extending the depth of my
own historical understanding in culture and governance. It has been a
time of preparation. Along the way trying
to align business, consulting and psychotherapeutic activity with my
concerns about re-humanizing the world.
1998-2001. Clients started
getting nervous about y2k in '98, and I picked up the wind of it in
various consulting connections as I traveled around the country. It got
me nervous, because people seemed to be so sure that either it would
destroy society, or nothing would happen - and they didn't seem to have
evidence. It led me to write a paper,
Who will do what and when will they do it?" , that got wide and appreciative
distribution, and I started a newsletter called y2kweek, starting with week 89
and going to zero. It led to many more interesting consulting
opportunities, in Europe, DOD, meeting with senior VP's at the Wall
Street Journal, the senior staff at the Washington Post, and a number of
others. I have sporadically continued the newsletter because the basic theme -
technology and society - continues to be intriguing, and readers keep me
going with wonderful and occasionally painful and extensive comments.
Meanwhile, with all the travels, I thought it would be nice to come home
to nature, so I bought a house on Martha's Vineyard. In order to get
technical support for my consulting, which had turned into a company
called Shakespeare and Tao Consulting, I joined BigMindMedia on Whidbey
Island, and decided to spend some time there, which turned out to be more
extensive and heart felt than I expected. Consulting for local Island
Counties and their commissioners, and with towns such as Kent and their
City Council deepened my appreciation for the potential of local and
regional development, and this has been reinforced by my association with
the Whidbey Institute. I've continued to read widely, work at learning
Classical Chinese, perfecting tai chi, and trying to take seriously the
words of Confucius "I listen carefully, try to be of use, and take
my recreation in the arts." A little Italian, German, French, Latin
and Greek - and poetry in these languages, my guitar and occasional
paintbrush, and friends - and now living on the Russian River..
1988-98 A kind of retreat
and fascination with the world I continued to expand my consulting, and
worked with, became partner in, and finally president, of Metasystems
Design Group that had been started by Frank Burns, author of the famous
"Be all you can be." While I call it a retreat, it started in 1983
being invited to join a group of execs in La Jolla at the Western
Behavior Sciences program in what was then called School of Advanced
Management Studies. But the real thing was we were using computers to carry
on conversations we started in face-to-face meetings in La Jolla.
I got fascinated by the technology and used it to
support my consulting, which had started in the mid 70's at The world
Bank, www.dougcarmichael.com/wbaaa1980.html , and at about the same scale but such an apparently different realm, the redesign of
Management for Bell Labs in the period 87-90.
I was fortunate to be
invited by Napier Collyns to hang around the Global Business network, and
picked up a fascination with scenarios as a nudge to thinking. I kept
developing my own more participatory approach, based mainly in
Owen's Open Space approach to meeting design, and brought in elements of
drama theory and architectural design.
Meanwhile in the back of my mind there was a
growing dissatisfaction with what I knew about society, its institutions,
psychoanalysis, law, money, science. I had not been able to break through
yet to the basic idea, that we were becoming a thing centered rather than
a human centered society. Environmental concern helped me understand the
widening gap, but was not the core I was seeking. Two trips to Slovenia,
to Indonesia, and Hydra in Greece continued to deepen my appreciation for
societies on the fringe of the West.
1970-88 Washington DC.
First as an associate at the Institute for Policy Studies during the
preparation and release of the Pentagon Papers, and simultaneously clinical
professor in the graduate school at Catholic University, teacher at
Children's Hospital in the Adolescent clinic, Supervisor at St
Elizabeth's, and continued my own clinical training at the Washington
School of Psychiatry, and where I later taught, especially the Freud
course, which deepened not only my appreciation of Freud, but of history.
I was part of a small group with Michael Maccoby that got a grant from
Harvard's program on Technology and Society to study leaders of high tech
corporations. This took us to Hewlett Packard, IBM, Texas Instruments and
Dupont, and a handful of small tech companies. Maccoby wrote a book based
on this, The Gamesman, which I think contains seeds of work that may
never get done. I hope it does. As part of that grant I was once again a
Harvard Research Fellow. During this time I was also on the boards of
several organizations with a focus on the humanities. I was the founding
President of the Washington Conservatory of Music and on the boards of
The Forum for Psychiatry and the Humanities, and The British Institute in
America. These were also difficult family time years, yielding three
wonderful and fulfilling children, now two grandchildren, and two ex
wives, both important to me and for whom I have developed a complex appreciation,
and travel to Europe, Japan and India, and led me to
1968-70 Santa Cruz, where I
had arranged to teach winter quarters, but spent the entire year there as
an assistant professor in psychology and the rather alien Hegelian
History of Consciousness, where I held my own by teaching Brecht. I loved
the students and the freedoms there, and had an office next to Nobbie
Brown, and had a great time. But the distance from the political world,
and no visible horizon to my future, I left at the end of the year and
came to
1956-1968 Mexico City and
the Mexican psychoanalytic Institute, where discipline was intense,
almost monastic, and brought me back to the intensity of the physics labs
at Cal Tech. To be human centered and intensely disciplined was a relief.
Along with wonderful clinical courses and broad based psychoanalytic
theory, we had courses with the great Mexican philosopher Ramon Xirau,
and Cultural Anthropology that was profound. During this time I also
taught psychology and Philosophy at Universidad de las Americas, then in
Mexico City. 1968 was a tumultuous year and I was deported for political
activity just prior to the shootings involving student protests of the
Vietnam war. This gave me a free return to the US and
1965-66 Harvard and Jerome
Bruner's Center for Cognitive Studies in William James Hall. Cambridge
was another feast, and I sat in on lectures by Chomsky, Gailbraith,
I.A.Richards, and spent lots of time with Jerry Lettvin at MIT. I spent
time with Erikson, with whom it turned out we had a similar sense of
humor, and he had me each Wednesday to the faculty club for lunch. Paul
Feyerabend introduced me to Giorgio de Santillana (The Crime of Galileo,
Hamlet's Mill) and we had comfortable late evening walks. Howard and Judy
Gardener were working on their dissertations and read mine, and it had
some influence on their work. I met David Reisman, whose lectures on
DeToqueville I had heard on NPR while I was at Berkeley. That was the
first hint that there was much more intellectually to historical and
social study than I had been aware. Reisman had been psychoanalyzed by
Erich Fromm, and by happenstance I met Michael Maccoby in the elevator
and we struck up a conversation about Yugoslavia, where he was going and
about which I had just read a book. This led to an invitation to go to
Mexico to Fromm's Psychoanalytic Institute, and Reisman asked me to TA in
his course, and Lettvin tried to talk me into going on a research trip to
a river in Borneo. I am glad I chose
1959-65 Berkeley and
psychology, with lots of time in many other departments, and the Free
Speech Movement. I moved from the quantum effects and perception to child
development and the capacity for rhetoric, entranced by Piaget and
Cassirer to take mind seriously. But it was a logical mind that we
studied. My dissertation on Irony was an attempt to get beyond that
model. I was fortunate to be an auditor in a master class taught by
Segovia, and met Michael Lorimer who was my guitar teacher or a year. I
wish I had practiced then the way I do now. I spent some time with Chris
Alexander, and Paul Feyerabend, whose classes I sat in every year I was
at Berkley. I met Erik Erikson while he was visiting professor, which
took me to
1955-59 Caltech, drawn to
science as a way to understand the makings of the world, majored in
physics but most importantly worked in the physics labs, and lived with
grad students. Socialization to that world was a key step for me in
feeling part of a larger worked. Day and night the labs were active, and
physics mixed with Bertold Brecht and the poetry of Yeats. Their
personalities were amazing to me, and I realized that I was more
entranced by them as people than as oracles about state of the world
equations. I had extraordinary teachers, Pauling and Feynman, and in humanities,
David Eliot in history who supported my independent study in Russian and
Japanese history. Hallett Smith in English taught a yearlong course in
Yeats, Elliott, Mann and Joyce, for which I eternally grateful. A single
course gave me access to the stream and idea of the world's great
literature. Alfred Stern taught me philosophy - Unamnuno, Ortega and
Vaihinger - an unlikely group that has had a powerful influence on me,
especially when I later went to Mexico.
1937-55 Grew up in
Manhattan, went to Collegiate, where we learned oblige without the
nobless. I owe a real debt to the standards hinted at there. I do wish
they and I had gone even further. My current fascination in many
languages, music, history were not supported enough. I wish we had
memorized more poetry, and done much more art. But it was a good
beginning. I spent time in Phillips, Maine, and St Albans West Virginia,
and went to Glendale, California, middle America, to finish high school
on my own in 1953 - because I knew I wanted to go to..
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