By Dr. James Gordon, Founder & CEO, The Center for Mind-Body Medicine
I was sad to read that Robert Coles had died, but pleased that The New York Times and The Washington Post obituaries honored this exemplary psychiatrist with the respect that he deserved: for providing psychological support to kids who in the late 1950s were integrating the New Orleans schools, for bringing a comprehensive understanding of the inner lives and lived challenges of the world’s children to a wide audience, and for offering a vision of moral courage and compassionate attention to generations of Harvard students.
Bob was my therapist in the 1960s and my friend in all the years after.
For two years, while I wrestled with uncertainty about whether and how I could become a doctor, and endured a romantic breakup, I sat with him twice a week. Sometimes in his basement office at the Harvard Health Services, sometimes in his home in Concord, where his dog, Grady, also welcomed me, and the spirits of Thoreau and Emerson hovered.
Bob was kind and comforting when I needed it, and lent a healing perspective to my too-pressing concerns. He made me laugh and, best of all, laugh at myself when my pretentiousness or self-pity demanded it.
Bob showed me that I could be a compassionate clinician to and also a passionate advocate for those whom our world had injured—the wretched of the earth (yes, Bob introduced me to the revolutionary psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon), as well as well-off sufferers of family dysfunction and medical misunderstanding.
Bob wrote all the time, 50 books all told (Volumes II & III of his Children of Crisis series won the Pulitzer Prize), and found his efforts both essential and amusing. “Writing,” he told me, “is a disease.” And when I expressed my own desire, he offered a corrective to my romantic hope. “A writer,” he explained with a solemn twinkle, “is someone who writes.”
Unlike so many who attained eminence, Bob always gratefully acknowledged his teachers—especially Erik Erikson, Anna Freud, and Dorothy Day. And he was just about always able to admit to what he didn’t know, and to encourage us—his patients, students, and friends—to take steps into territories of consciousness and spirituality, as well as activism, that he had only glimpsed.
And Bob was always gracious and encouraging when I did. He was happy to join our Advisory Board when I founded The Center for Mind-Body Medicine in 1991. With characteristic generosity, he told me that my mission—to make self-awareness, self-care, and mutual help central to health and mental healthcare, to the training of clinicians, and the education of our children—was “the future of psychiatry.”
I’ll miss Bob terribly. And I will find him in his writings, in his always enthusiastic appreciation of courage and creativity; in the novels of his pal, Walker Percy, and the songs of his friend, Bruce Springsteen; in his tough-minded confrontations with mindless conformity and cowardice; and in his tender regard for the wisdom that he encouraged children everywhere to share with us.
By Dr. James Gordon, Founder & CEO, The Center for Mind-Body Medicine
