An Interview with 2017 SPSP Convention Legacy Honoree Ravenna Helson
by Joanne Chung
You were not always a personality psychologist. What drew you to personality psychology?
After I had gotten my Ph.D. in experimental psychology, taught at Smith College for 3 years, married and accompanied my husband to Berkeley when he was offered a position in the math department there, I looked around for a job and worked for the Bureau for Maternal and Child Health for about a year.
Then I was offered a job at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research (IPAR, name later changed to Institute of Personality and Social Research, IPSR). IPAR was beginning its classic studies of the creative personality. I was hired to help Richard Crutchfield study perceptual techniques for appraising creativity, but I fell in love with the idea of creative personality. It was all around me -- the staff at IPAR, the writers whose books we were reading in preparation for assessing them, my husband and his friends.
Don MacKinnon, the director of IPAR, saw that I needed to change my field. To my surprise and delight, he asked me if I would like to direct the study IPAR had proposed to do on creativity in women. I had a lot to learn but it was my big career opportunity, and after that day I was a personality psychologist.
You are known as a feminist (i.e., www.feministvoices.com; Journal of Personality Assessment, 2008). When did you first identify as a feminist?
When I was teaching at Smith, a professor there was translating The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and lent me a copy. That book was my introduction to feminism, and it shook me (though I could not get my students interested in it at that time). Being a feminist was a little lonely then, because this was the 1950s and the women's movement hadn't arrived yet.
You also taught courses with this perspective at UC Berkeley. What was that like?
In the late 1960s and 1970s I taught courses in the psychology of women in Berkeley, first in the basement of a local church, a course sponsored by the Extension Division. Later I taught big courses at Cal. It was a lot of work because there were no textbooks, but it was very rewarding too. I experienced the women's movement at UC Berkeley. The faculty women and the women researchers would meet together and tell each other their histories and frustrations in their departments. It was a good example of how women got closer to each other and came to understand that "the personal is political." Several of these women were mentors to me. And quite a few of us, especially the women in the social sciences and humanities, built their careers, at least in part, on issues important in the Women's Movement.
Has your feminist identity influenced your work? If so, in what ways?
In my case, an example would be [my publication] Women Mathematicians and the Creative Personality, (JPSP, 1971). It showed that of women rated high on creativity by mathematicians in their field in the U.S., only one or two had a tenured position at a university! Male mathematicians love to talk with each other, but talked very little with women mathematicians. Fortunately, many of them were married to mathematicians. Many of these women were having babies, so having a career required persistence.
Another example is an article I wrote with a student, Jim Picano, entitled Is the Traditional Role Bad for Women? (JPSP, 1990). Early feminists gave evidence that it was, but Jim and I showed it in what was then my longitudinal study of women's adult development. Women who remained homemakers into their 40s had scored as very competent and well integrated women as seniors in college, but their scores declined in later follow-ups. Women who had taken less traditional paths -- those who married and had children but also worked at least part-time, divorced women, women with no children, women who never married -- all of these groups did participate in the labor force and all of them increased from ages 21 to 43 in Independence and Dominance, whereas the Homemakers did not, but increased to a very high level of Self-control. They reported physical complaints that were consistent with high Self Control. Thus the traditional role seems to have provided a shelter in which conscientious, competent women who were somewhat overcontrolled in young adulthood became maladaptively so over time. I am happy to say that the in the next follow-up showed that some of them had been able to find and enjoy productive places in the labor force.
Your important work paved the way for researchers like myself to study personality development, especially in adulthood. What inspired you to pursue this type of research? What have been the most challenging and rewarding aspects of this type of research? I am particularly struck by a passage from your memoir (JPA, 2008) about having no journal publication from the time you joined IPAR in 1957 to 1965, and nearing age 40.
I had a midlife crisis. It happened on a trip to Ireland where I assisted a colleague in a personality assessment of successful Irish entrepreneurs. It was the first time I had been away from my three young children for more than a weekend. The unconscious became active in my life in Ireland -- coincidences and unexpected happenings kept occurring, we visited an ancient cave where the sun god had been worshipped.
After I returned to my home I found that my monograph on the Mills Longitudinal Study had been returned -- for the second time. I went into a strange state. One night as I went to bed, I said "Unconscious, what is wrong with me?" And that night I had a terrible dream. An enormous bird man -- a bird man is a messenger -- and this one told me that I was going to be burned at the stake by the sun god. I was terrified but the next morning I felt like Popeye after a can of spinach. I finished a rewrite of the monograph. I also felt my brain was working differently -- more interested in symbols, more able to put meaning in old memories. Somehow I felt that though the unconscious had almost scared me to death, it was friendly and "on my side". I wondered whether I was experiencing what Jung called individuation. I wondered if a psychologist could study that, and decided I would try if I had the chance.
Then, Valory Mitchell and I submitted a grant proposal to make the Mills Study into a longitudinal study of women's adult development. It was funded, and I was promoted to adjunct professor.
That dream is incredibly vivid and sounds like quite a turning point! I can't help but relate it back to my own experience and to those of my peers who did not start out in psychology and/or have felt uncertainties about an academic career. Can you identify what led to that moment where things clicked for you?
When I first started to do research on creativity in women, a Jungian analyst gave me an article by another Jungian analyst who lived in Israel, Erich Neumann. Neumann conceptualized two kinds of consciousness, patriarchal and matriarchal. Patriarchal consciousness. was purposive, assertive, and objective, whereas in matriarchal consciousness the psyche was filled with an emotional content over which it brooded. The style was more concerned with the emotionally meaningful than with facts, dates, or mechanical or logical causation. Patriarchal consciousness was related to creativity in men, he said, and matriarchal consciousness to creativity in women, though some men showed the matriarchal style. His article ended with a lyrical hope for the future of women -- he hoped that the light of the moon would come to shine as brightly as that of the sun.
I was impressed by these ideas and used them in studies of differences between creative men and women mathematicians, and ones not so creative. The results supported Neumann's ideas!
I think that I also hoped that the light of the moon would come to shine as brightly as that of the sun, and felt guilty for this hope. Was that guilt the reason for the horrible dream after I came back from Ireland -- that the Sun God was going to burn me at the stake? I now think that the dream did not have to do with my real father or husband, but with an archetype. Jung said you could never tell who was going to have an archetypal dream, so maybe I did. In his book on Amor and Psyche (1971), Neumann describes how Psyche is given the task of taking a bit of wool from a flock of golden sheep who are fierce and frenzied because they take their heat from the Sun. She is advised to approach them at night. Neumann says that "the rending golden rams of the sun symbolize an archetypal overpowering male-spiritual power which the feminine (ego) cannot face."
But that dream released or re-constellated something in me. I didn't tell anybody about it for several years, because there was something holy about it. But I have felt that the Unconscious did give me "gifts" on other occasions, not many, but precious gifts, helping me get together an identity as a creative woman. I think I accepted that I was a Feeling type, which I hadn't wanted to do, and developed my extraversion in my responsibilities to my career. I maintained an interest in symbols of the unconscious, especially in the research on fantasy for children, but also in my study of women's adult development, where I looked for confirmation of Jungian ideas. This is evidence of my modest journey on the path of individuation, and I will mention one more thing about changing our lives.
In an article published in 2016, Val Mitchell and I described women whose purpose in life (using Ryff's Purpose in Life scale) changed in different ways from age 61 to age 70. One group scored very low at age 50. Then at about age 60 they seemed to decide that they were not the people they wanted to be, and resolved to make becoming the people they wanted to be their purpose in life. Perhaps they were energized by the feeling that this was their "last chance", that soon they would be too old to make effective change. They had been high on Neuroticism and low on Extraversion and also inclined to the avoidant form of attachment, which may have made them less distracted in their efforts to change. Of course they didn't change enough on Neuroticism and Extraversion to score more favorably than the comparison group, but they were still impressive in how they changed their lives. These were all women in the Mills Longitudinal Study. They were one of four groups described in the article, The Place of Purpose in Life in Women's Positive Aging (Women & Therapy, 2016). I don't see you, dear Interviewer, as one of this group, but there are other women in the Mills sample who did the same thing a little younger, who did not start from so low, but made changes and improved their lives. I'm thinking of a violinist who ruined her body and had to work hard to bring it back, and who then got a website and a pianist to play with and started giving concerts again, including some in Europe. After several years of being the musician she wanted to be, she retired and spends time with her grandchildren. In many of these stories about life changes, there is surprise, the unexpected, and other signs that the unconscious is participating.