As a teenager, my wife would periodically instruct her father about contemporary culture. He would tolerate the lectures for a bit, then declare: “Enough Franny. All my teachers are dead.” I identify with Al – not only because it can be exasperating to be instructed by teenagers, but because I generally don’t take instruction well. I was the eldest child — at three, my mother’s “little man” when my father was in the Army – and I grew up believing my opinions mattered as much as anyone else’s. I had plenty of teachers over the years, but no true teacher to guide me, intellectually and personally. My dad played that role some, but he lacked the confidence to take it on fully; and he died when I was still young.
But one person did come close: my colleague, friend, and mentor David Kantor, who died recently at 93.
I met him in 1968, when I joined an encounter group for couples, facilitated by David and his wife, Meredith. They led us through a variety of psycho-dramatic exercises, meant to bring us rapidly and powerfully in touch with our deepest yearnings and fears. The experience seemed, at first, more terrifying than enlightening. But what I remember best from that day was a quiet moment when David stopped me in the middle of a response to another participant, who had bravely given me some feedback. Before he got very far, I had begun to respond—or, more properly, to ward off the criticism that I “knew” was coming.
With a gentle smile and a soft voice, David said: “Barry, Barry, you’re like a good shortstop. The ball—feedback from others—comes to you and almost before it touches your glove, the throw is out to first base. Why not hold it for a bit, feel it, turn it over, see what it means, see what you’ve not seen before—learn.” I remember that intervention, 53 years ago, as if it was yesterday. It has guided the best of my relationships ever since.
Several months later, when the encounter group ended, I asked David to be my mentor. I was just finishing up my doctoral dissertation in intellectual history at Harvard, whose ivied halls felt stiff and constraining. I wanted action, some way to have a direct impact on people and communities. It was the 60’s, after all. David had recently started Wellmet, a community-based halfway house that challenged the institutional claims of what Irving Goffman called the “asylums” that paraded as mental hospitals. With David — and, of course, my left-wing parents, in mind – I yearned to leave the hallowed halls and join the front lines of change.
But he turned down my request—and a few more during the next year or two. Instead, he introduced me to another teacher, Ildrie Bee, a Norwegian psychodrama teacher, whose psycho-dramatic method would drive me out of my mind — that is, out of my overly intellectual focus — and open me to the profound power of empathy and compassion. I was grateful for what Ildrie offered me, but persisted with David. While he never agreed to be my mentor, we began to spend more and more time together, first socially, then as officemates, and later, as partners with Carter Umbarger, building the Family Institute of Cambridge. Even though he refused to explicitly instruct me, I observed his work, the way that he connected to people. I learned immeasurably in his presence.
One of his “practices” struck me with special force. When people had something to say to him, especially something that seemed to matter to them, he invariably said “yes.” “Yes, I see what you mean…Yes, that makes sense… Yes, I see you.” He would explain what he thought they meant, and it seemed that he understood them better than they did themselves. Often he transformed what had appeared mundane or defensive into something special, elaborate, startling — without ever seeming to contradict them.
As he did so, as people began to see the full meaning and implications of their thoughts, they opened to David. His way of saying “yes” provided the passkey to their hearts. With great comfort and even eagerness, they invited him in, further and further. And what followed was often the start of conversations that changed lives. I loved that and began, as best I could, to emulate him. At 78 years of age, I still do.
I was with him for a biton the day before he died, though mostly to comfort Meredith, who is a dear friend of mine, and who has suffered terribly (though she wouldn’t say so) through years of David’s illnesses. As I gazed upon his almost frozen mask of a face, I thought about his extraordinary, long life.
It began in Brooklyn, where he was the fourth of five children, born of a strong but laissez-faire mother and an absent father. David needed to find his way on the streets, which he did, as a leader among boys. His mother was the more direct influence on David, but it was a yearning for that distant father, I think, like the green light at the end of Gatsby’s pier, that captured David’s imagination and animated so much his life. One more idea, one more book, one more organization to build. He combined a strange combination of imaginative play and dogged determination right to the end.
If you knew him well, you knew that David yearned for the world would better know and honor his theories. They were his green lights. A while ago, after his debilitating stroke, I visited David. As I entered the room and touched his hair, once black curls and now straight and white, I asked:
“How are you, David?”
“Ok.”
“What are you doing?”
“Thinking.”
“What are you thinking about?” Even after 55 years of knowing him, I imagined that he’d be thinking about eternity and death and the meaning of his life. I should have known better.
“Chapter 14,” he said, without irony. David was eager, almost desperate to complete that last book, to cement his legacy. No philosophical ruminations at such an important moment.
Unlike so many theorists, David seemed always present—listening, affirming, questioning, philosophizing. He was a consummate therapist and conversationalist who might have thrived in an 18th Century French Salon. I learned that too, the importance of being present, from David, not so much by what he taught me in any explicit way, as by being in proximity, in his orbit. I could literally feel how intensely he attended to others—and to ideas. In his hands, ideas felt not at all abstract but personal, even religious.
Through the years of my own therapy and executive coaching practices, as I joined with countless people, I sometimes felt David’s presence, heard his voice inside my own. “Yes,” I would say, and try, at least, to articulate for them what they were striving to say for themselves. “Yes, you can do what you want to do, what you need to do, what you dream of doing.”
Even the greatest teachers can’t reach you unless you are ready, yourself. No doubt, all those years ago, I was ready to hear David’s faith in me and in others; and you should never underestimate how powerful your own readiness is when adopting a new idea. At the age of 15, still a mostly diffident and lonely adolescent, I remember saying to my skeptical mother: “I can change my relationship to others. All I have to do is attend to the best in them, relate to them as if that’s almost the whole, and our relationship will be transformed.” And, simple as it seemed, it worked. It was an idea that changed my life.
So over 50 years ago, when I first sat with David, observing his gift of attention to the best in others and his skill at helping them articulate what that was, I felt not so much inspired, as liberated. I could be who I yearned to be, and more so. I could help others be that too. I admired David and saw in him a refinement of what I dreamed to be. I practiced and practiced what he had taught me. And I measured my experience against what I imagined his would have been. I internalized what I loved in him. And that is how he became and remained my mentor.
Barry Dym 