The following should be seen as a very brief and deliberately incomplete synopsis. Some of the content of the discussion was personal, and thus not appropriate to share here on the web.

Rae's daughter, Leslie Carlson, spoke (very movingly) on the morning of the 29th. It was tremendously generous of her to be on hand, and to prepare a biographical sketch of her mother. On the subject of autobiography and its necessity for personologists in particular, Leslie noted: "Rae was honest and forthcoming about using her own life as material for illuminating others, and as a prism for understanding the truths of other people."

As for the Society itself, Rae apparently initially wanted to form a small working group with whom she could collaborate closely--active yet small; no big expansion. Yet another aim was to provide Silvan Tomkins with a forum for expressing his ideas.

Dan Ogilvie talked about Rae's years at Rutgers (where Dan teaches still); Brewster Smith (UC Santa Cruz) called Rae a "master critic of mainstream personality psychology" and spoke of how he felt her "Where's The Person... " paper was "still right on" (I thoroughly agree); Alan Elms mentioned how Rae referred to herself as an "agitator". Alan then suggested she might be better described as a charismatic leader, with not only highly active nuclear scripts, but commitment scripts as well. After all, she had a "vision" and she had a "plan."

(A few thoughts of my own on Rae Carlson. I first got to know Rae through her work, in particular her polemical paper, "Where's the Person in Personality Research?" That essay was a godsend for me, as I gather it was for many others. I assign it to my students sometimes. When I read it I was still in grad school, trying--against some opposition from within the UC Davis Psychology Department--to write a purely psychobiographical dissertation. Naturally I was wondering if what I was doing was somehow misguided. Rae's article revealed the contrary, or at least gave me a leg to stand on; she was arguing, in effect, for something almost exactly like psychobiography. So I kept at it. At least one other person agreed with me, I reasoned (although Alan Elms was always by my side, taking a lot of the blows meant for me!--Thanks Alan!).

Then I met Rae when I chaired a symposium on Psychobiography at APA in 1998. She consented to be on the panel, even though she wasn't doing that great at the time. I remember her flowing white hair, the aura of subtle audaciousness about her person. She seemed, like me, always to be on a mission, which I later learned had a lot to do with championing the work of her close friend Silvan Tomkins, making him comprehensible to everyone in a way that he, alone, sometimes was not. She told me, "You are a theory freak just like me." I always remember that line for some reason. It was one small acknowledgment of our assorted commonalities, our shared aims. She also told me, when she learned of my interest in Tomkins and of the fact that I was having students read his work in my Personality Seminar: "I am so glad that you are really into the brilliant ideas [Tomkins'] that too many misunderstand" (July 13, 2000).

I used to send her my work, and she was unwaveringly encouraging at a time when I needed a lot of encouragement (she called my paper on Wilde "delightful in every way"). She told me she wanted to get to work on a paper of her own that she planned to title "Enriching Personology" (this was September 12, 1998). She wasn't like this with everyone, but I found her always very modest, unprepossessing, very open to hearing what I thought, almost never critical. It surprised me, actually. I wasn't prepared for such expansiveness, such generosity.

I never got to know Rae as well as I would have liked to--we lived too far apart, and she had no email, so that made regular communication a little difficult--but I always felt I could count on her support. She was an ally, and a tenacious one. As the field of personology and psychobiography advances, captures converts, gains more recognition, vanquishes even the shrillest of critics, Rae ought to be kept constantly in mind, as someone who really did pave the way, really did nurture a lot of talent, really did carry the flag in a very small confederacy for a very long time. I miss her)

Also on day one we discussed Suzanne Ouellette's essay called "Painting Lessons" (discussant Ruthellen Josselson), which uses the analogy of portrait painting as a way of illuminating aspects of the process of doing narrative research. Suzanne's chapter appears in Up Close and Personal: Teaching and Learning Narrative Research (eds, Josselson, McAdams, & Lieblich, APA Press, 2002).

Day two was devoted to discussion of Bert Cohler's essay "Writing and Reading Desire: Generation and Life Writing by Men Having Sex With Other Men" (discussant Todd Schultz). This essay is in fact part of a larger work that will examine "autobiographies and memoirs written by men coming of age across four post-war generations and seeking other men for socio-erotic intimate relationships."

Alan Elms, standing before what appears to be a replica of Jung's Collective Unconscious
This is Alan Elms and me at my house in Forest Grove, OR, a day or so before the conference. I am the guy in the middle
Bert Cohler, inside the Heathman meeting room
Jim Anderson, Alan Elms, Mac Runyan, and Nicole Barenbaum at Portland's Chinese Gardens
Mac Runyan and Irv Alexander talking during a break in the proceedings