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Constructivist Chronicle
Rue Cromwell:
A Color Biography in Two Parts
By Robert Hadden Mole
Vol. 9, Issue 1
(Spring 2005)
PART
II of II / Go to
Part I
Photo of Rue
Cromwell Receiving Award
This year, CPN honors the work of
Rue Cromwell by bestowing on him its Lifetime Achievement Award.
At the Gala Banquet of the Memphis conference, Dr. Cromwell was
presented the award by one of his former students, Dr. Ken Sewell.
When approached by the Chronicle
for biographical information, Dr. Cromwell indicated that he was
willing to share a ‘color’ autobiography. Part I of this piece
appeared in Volume 8, Issue 2 of the Constructivist Chronicle.
Part II, below, concludes the piece.
Cromwell’s earlier intern contact in the VA program left him greatly
interested in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. In 1959 Cromwell
completed a sabbatical period with David Shakow and his
schizophrenia research group at NIMH in Bethesda, Maryland. This
interest finally led Cromwell to leave Peabody in 1961, go across
the street, and become Director of Research in the Department of
Psychiatry at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine. With dual
appointments this gave Cromwell access to graduate student advisees
from both Vanderbilt University and Peabody College (plus medical
students and psychiatric residents). Guided partly by availability
of funding the core program in schizophrenia research expanded to
diagnosis, treatment, and outcome of 500 emotionally disturbed
children in 21 different treatment centers throughout the U.S.A. and
Canada. Also launched was a study of stress, nursing care, and
outcome predictive factors in 327 acute coronary care (myocardial
infarction) patients. Over the years attention was also paid to the
effects of psychopharmacological treatments with hyperactive
children and the psychiatrically ill.
The 1960s was a tumultuous time nationally. The U. S. State
Department blocked passage for scientists of Communist persuasion to
visit the country. Cromwell applied for a British psychologist who
was Communist to speak at an international symposium on mental
retardation. It was disapproved. Cromwell countered by next
inviting a Moscow Communist and a British conservative. These were
approved. Then, on appeal, Cromwell reapplied for the British
Communist and won a reversal of decision. It was the first British
Communist psychologist (Neil O’Connor) to be admitted into America
during this era. Also, Cromwell, along with other civil rights
participations, created and headed a charitable fund to cover bail
and legal expenses for whites arrested in sit-in and other
demonstrations in Nashville (the blacks being covered by the
NAACP). Later, during this decade Cromwell found himself heading a
lobby fight in the Tennessee legislature to kill a bill advanced by
psychiatry practitioners to repeal the Tennessee licensing law for
psychology. [In this very same Capitol lobby in 1920 women had
fought and won the final required state ratification for the right
to vote.] In this lobbying struggle Cromwell was warmly supported
by the respective Chairs of the Vanderbilt medical school
departments (including psychiatry). For either appreciation or
punishment for this work, Cromwell jokes, he was elected President
of the Tennessee Psychological Association.
In 1969 Cromwell moved to Lafayette Clinic, Wayne State University,
Detroit, to become Professor and Director of a large Division of
Psychology. This move opened opportunities to expand research
interest in computer-assisted techniques in psychological
assessment, including administration and analysis of the Kelly Rep
Grid. The Lafayette Clinic position provided the opportunity to
serve on an interdisciplinary team committed specifically to
research in schizophrenia. Finally, also, Cromwell seized the
opportunity to set up a longitudinal study of the prebirth, birth,
and postbirth of offspring of Swedish pregnant schizophrenic women
at the University of Lund in Malmų.
Then in 1972 Cromwell was invited to accept the position as
Professor of Psychiatry, Pediatrics, and Psychology at the
University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry. The
position was much coveted at the time since the Psychiatry
Department at Rochester had a psychosocial orientation in its
teaching and had removed the degree titles, public labels and
privilege indicators, and pay scale differences that distinguished
psychiatry and psychology. [This environment had arisen greatly
from the close relationship of the Chair, John Romano, with eminent
psychologists.] The Rochester position allowed Cromwell’s research
team to have postdoctoral fellows in computer science and genetics.
Research focused upon the Kelly rep grid and Shadow’s reaction time
crossover phenomenon. For example, a postdoc fellow from Holland,
Peter Dingemans, was able to show through repeated rep grid testings
of schizophrenic and depressed patients that so-called thought
disorder in schizophrenia was actually attributable to brief
“disattention epochs” wherein the patient could not comply
appropriately with instructions or attend to questions. During
periods between epochs the schizophrenic patents were more
consistent and coherent than hospitalized depressives. In
experimental support of Rowe’s clinical findings, the hospitalized
depressed differed from normals more in extent of alienation than in
indices of mood or self esteem.
Upon arrival in Rochester Cromwell was also appointed to direct
another schizophrenia high-risk project. This one involved
investigators of several disciplines following over a number of
years the progress of children living in households where at least
one parent was diagnosed with schizophrenia. In addition to these
research examples the opportunity was also presented for Rue to
prepare critical papers regarding strategies for psychiatric
nosology and for diagnostic classification of children.
In 1986 Cromwell accepted the M. Erik Wright Distinguished
Professorship in Clinical Psychology at the University of Kansas.
This move had the advantages of being based primarily in a
psychology department where students were best trained in statistics
and research methodology. A disadvantage was to have his work
removed from large psychiatric and other populations and from
interdisciplinary research teams. Interest in schizophrenia turned
to work relevant to alternative genetic models. Research efforts
indicated that specific perceptual deficits relevant to certain
schizophrenic patents were not widely distributed in the general
population. So, they failed to serve as a marker for study. The
model of schizophrenia which included at least one genetic factor
rare in the human population and at least one factor broadly
distributed in the population plus the necessary environmental
variance appeared to be a superior model to either a monogenic or
polygenic model.
Research topics expanded to PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder),
childhood physical and sexual abuse, and aspects of mood disorders
and mood disturbance. Among various findings Sewell’s examination of
Vietnam combat veterans and also survivors of a massive killing by a
gunman entering a crowded restaurant suggested dissociative and
curtailed elaboration of hierarchical thought appear to be
identifiable and most efficiently measured on the rep grid.
***
Retiring in 2001,
Cromwell received the 2002 Zubin Award for lifetime achievement in
psychopathology research, and the 2004 the award for lifetime
achievement for research and mentoring by the Constructivist
Psychology Network. A large gulf exists between the valid working
constructs of these two research areas. Yet each area is an attempt
to understand the vicissitudes and workings of humankind.
Retirement has provided time for Cromwell to pursue a long held
interest in how great researchers and scholars develop constructs.
Knowledge domains exist because each individual uses his or her own
fragile and partly flawed tools of construct-building to make an
advance. The wise workers within each domain tend to treat each
advance with doubt.
The advances within each knowledge domain coalesce, and the gulfs
between domains become sacrosanct markers of identity. One flaw in
our thinking is that the gulfs will be there forever. As
individual achievements are made and assimilated into the whole, the
second and spectacular flaw of humankind has been to throw off doubt
and to assign a status of unvarnished truth. We try not to remember
the fragility, partial flaws, and doubt that went into the initial
construct-building process. It feels well not to remember.
In reading Einstein’s own book on relativity one can not only get a
glimpse of the brilliant theoretical product but also of the fragile
process and doubt that went into the construct-building. For
example, when his hypotheses about nature of light were eventually
supported by empirical research his attitude appeared to be one of
surprise and relief, not one of “I told you so.” In at least part
of Einstein’s writings he recognized this human tendency to declare
findings absolute and try not to remember the fragility, the flaws,
and the doubt.
In general, we all, including the scientists, ride of a cloud when
we follow the megalomanic flaw and declare something absolute.
Everything is up to date in Kansas City. Here is the one and true
religion. Capitalist democracy (or a form of communism if you will)
is the best form of government the world will ever know. Physicists
repeatedly say they have identified the ultimate particle, and we
now can explain everything. There are no more searches necessary.
But sometimes the cloud collapses and we become aware of the flaws
and the fragility of construct-building and the initial doubt.
Einstein made clear, at least part of the time, that he recognized
this human failing. When he did this he was able to set aside old
“truths” and the human temptation to remove the doubt from memory.
Cromwell concluded that this recognition was the only clear evidence
of genius that Einstein displayed in the book. Otherwise, he was
struggling with the same fragile and uncertain tools of
construct’building that all of us have and use.
In the construct-building of successive human beings, each domain
with separate rules and separated by the gulfs, a surprising series
of knowledge domains have emerged from humankind through its history
and prehistory. The progression includes art, religion,
mathematics, music, government/law/justice, and, as the last kid on
the block, science. Each has its own rules for construct building,
yet each domain is built on the common platform of human endeavor.
Cromwell now enjoys his primary interest in how contributors to
knowledge develop their constructs. He argues that one need not be
a physicist to study how a physicist builds constructs. On does not
have to be a theologian to study how a theologian builds
constructs. Au contraire. Only the psychologist with expertise in
how human folk build constructs can develop an understanding of how
the great contributors did it/do it. Psychologists must not be
blinded by creative achievement and write it off as genius outside
the realm of scientific study or independent understanding. Then,
who knows, maybe some gulfs will close.
...end of Part II
Rue Cromwell (right) receives CPN's Lifetime
Achievement Award
from Kenneth Sewell at the 2004 conference in
Memphis
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