Fatherly Wisdom From the Founding Psychologists

We live in a world influenced by psychological ideas—whether on happiness, well-being, love, or career success. Though these ideas affect our decisions, goals, and even values, it's easy to forget that they always emanate from real-life individuals. As we celebrate Father's Day, it may therefore be useful to recall the empathic guidance given by three seminal figures of modern psychology—Sigmund Freud, Alfred Adler, and William James—to their own children.

It's appropriate to begin with Freud, for he essentially launched the modern fields of personality study and psychotherapy. Though indisputably brilliant, Freud was arrogant and vengeful to those who disagreed with his ideas on human sexuality and aggression. In later years, his philosophical writings were marked by a bitter, cynical view of human nature. But as the father of six children with his wife Martha (nee Bernays), Freud had a surprisingly warm, gentle side.

In 1908, his oldest child, Mathilde, was 21 years old and suffering from chronic health problems that affected her appearance and self-esteem. While she recuperated in the Austrian countryside with family friends, her father gave this advice: "I have guessed for some time that in spite of all your common sense, you fret because you think you are not good-looking enough... I have watched this with a smile, first of all because you seem quite attractive enough to me, and second because I know that in reality, it is no longer physical beauty which decides the fate (of a woman) but the impression of her whole personality....Your memory will confirm that you have manged to inspire respect and sympathy in any circle of human beings."

However old-fashioned, such counsel seems to have had a bracing effect—for Mathilde (who lived to age 91) soon wed a Viennese businessman who was quickly welcomed into the Freud clan—and later, with her father's financial help, opened a fashionable women's clothing store in Vienna.

Freud's great intellectual rival was his former colleague Alfred Adler, founder of what Adler called individual psychology—but he too was a loving, devoted father. More than Freud, he stressed the role of family dynamics in affecting children's development—and emphasized the importance of sustained encouragement in building their self-esteem. He and his wife Raissa (nee Epstein) had four children, two of whom (Alexandra and Kurt) became psychiatrists. They greatly admired their warm, charismatic father, and in later life, told many anecdotes about him.

When Kurt was in the second grade, he was struggling academically. "My father was not at all impressed with the teachers we had," he related to me (as his father's biographer), "although we went to a so-called progressive school." One day, Kurt's teacher ridiculed him before the entire class about his lack of ability. That evening, upon sobbing to his father about the incident, Kurt half-expected to be scolded, but was startled to hear the words, "Your teacher is an idiot." More than 70 years later, he could still smile in recounting how that pithy statement had bolstered his scholastic self-confidence.

Finally, at a time when many American teenagers are struggling with anxiety and loneliness, the fatherly advice of William James seems prescient. He and his wife Alice (nee Gibbens) together had five children. As our country's founding psychologist and perhaps its greatest philosopher, James was a controversial figure at Harvard due to his ardent writings on spiritual experiences, mysticism, and alternative forms of healing.

James was also well acquainted with the darker dimensions of human experience, for his own family (including his father) had a multi-generational history of severe depression. Undoubtedly, he drew upon this legacy when writing to his 13-year-old daughter Margaret, miserable at a boarding school near London, where her famous novelist uncle Henry James was then living: "Now, my dear little girl, you have come to an age when the inward life develops and when some people (and on the whole those who have most of a destiny) find that all is not a bed of roses. Among other things, there will be waves of terrible sadness, which sometimes last for days; and dissatisfaction with one's self, and irritation at others, and anger in circumstances, and stony insensibility--which taken together form a melancholy."

"If we find ourselves like that, we must make ourselves do something different, go with people, speak cheerfully, set ourselves some hard work, make ourselves sweat; and that is the good way.. .that makes of us a valuable character." Such recommendations were more than a century ahead of their time.

How fatherhood inspired each of these seminal thinkers is a fascinating topic, deserving full attention. We can be glad that their own children sparked qualities of empathy, guidance, and affection that undoubtedly enhanced their work.