Lillian B. Rubin
Entering Cohort: 1967
Psychotherapist, Writer, Public Sociologist
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My entry into Berkeley?s graduate program in sociology when I was already a well-formed forty-two-year old adult proved to be a transforming event in unexpected ways. Until then I had lived the public life of a political activist and organizer, managing political campaigns in Southern California. And although the tumultuous political climate of my graduate student years (1968-72) gave me plenty of opportunity for political action, all of which I took, the years of study opened up the more private, scholarly part of myself that I hadn?t known very well before.
Seeing the world through the sociological lens came naturally to me, since, as a child of poverty, I understood very early how powerfully the social context determines life?s chances. But it was only in graduate school that I came to understand fully how closely the development of the self is tied to the institutional structures that frame our lives. That knowledge, however, left me with a series of questions: If that?s true, how does social change come about? Why and how do some people manage to break free of those structural forces? And how free are they? Questions that led me to enter a course of study and training in clinical psychology.
I?m probably one of the few people in the world who thought that the year spent writing her dissertation was one of life?s great moments because, in that private process of thinking and writing, I found a calling. In the ensuing years, I?ve taught from time to time, lectured all over the world, spent 12-15 hours a week doing psychotherapy, but my heart work has been in writing. I?ve produced eleven books, each in its own way an attempt to bridge the gap between sociology and psychology, to fill in the blanks that each discipline leaves to the other.
Dissertation: The Politics of Rage: School Desegregation and the Revolt of Middle America