Faculty/Staff Profile
Mark Kunkel
Associate Professor
Phone: 678-839-0621 | Fax: 678-839-0611 | mkunkel@westga.edu
Biography
Dante was right - heaven and hell are about circles. The circling that brought me to West Georgia runs around a life-long appreciation for psychology as philosophy, science, social heuristic, and treatment modality, but mostly as a path through life. Here are some milestones along that path. I read Skinner and Frankl and Anne Frank and Ayn Rand in high school, graduated at 16, tripped intentionally on the stage after being handed my diploma, and that was that. Then it was on to undergraduate and masters work in psychology at BYU, and there's not much to say about that other than I learned a great deal and was much more certain of pretty much everything then than I am of pretty much anything now. A year of work as a school counselor and psychologist followed, then a move to Tennessee to do my Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology. Counseling Psychology is that applied psychology branch that purports to facilitate the development of normal persons throughout the lifespan, and sometimes we do. At Tennessee I was far more interested in social philosophy, Freud, struggles with educational praxis, and upstream psychology than in organizing my responses to client material along Carkhuff's four levels of empathy, but somehow survived. I wrote a grant to do my dissertation research in Mexico and spent 1987 at the Universidad Autonoma de Yucatan in Merida, where Diane and I, our daughters Lisa and Marianne, our parrot Carlos, and our 1973 VW Bus had a magical and transformative time of it. Internship at Vanderbilt and the Nashville VA was wonderfully consolidating, and I began to appreciate the mutually healing power of courageous involvement with others. I continued my academic career as a new assistant professor in the psychology department at Texas Tech University for my first five years, where I enjoyed fine colleagues and wonderful students and taught assessment and theory and accompanied many bright and gracious students in their research and practice efforts.
