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"If Reader's Digest ever asks me for an article on 'The Most Unforgettable Character I Ever Met,' my choice would be easy.  I think everyone who knows Mike Arons well would choose him without a second thought.  Mike is Socrates and Zorba, Apollo and Dionysus, an elf and a wizard.  He is ever-ready to encouter life, to embrace alterity, replete with dialectical contradictories, available to every possibility, every nuance.  Where others would meet with disaster, Mike's openness discloses unforeseen opportunity."
    - Chris Aanstoos

Cabbies, like bartenders and barbers, listen to and tell stories. The storyteller and listener are somehow personally implicated in these life stories, even when they are ostensibly centered on others. After years of factory work, sales, and cab driving in Detroit, Mike started college and chose psychology as a major. No enterprise could have stood more starkly in opposition to the narrative perspective on the world than the field of psychology at the time. Yet, its claims to detachment and objectivity notwithstanding and in fact, with these as its central themes, psychology revealed itself to the former cabbie as a story of particular intrigue: an ironic ongoing story that erases its fuller historical, cultural, and existential meanings with the very "positivistic pen" it uses to itemize its achievements.

Thanks to its exceptions, such as Jung, Campbell, Keen and Krippner, the particular truth-revealing potentials of myth are currently gaining coin even in this field that has prided itself on myth-busting. Mike entered Wayne State University as a twenty-seven year old freshman. He graduated in 1961 with a degree in psychology, and went on to the Sorbonne where, under Paul Ricoeur, he completed his doctorate on the subject of creativity research as expression of the implicit story of American psychology. He returned to the United States for post-graduate study under Abe Maslow, Jim Klee, and George Kelly at Brandeis University and then helped pioneer two humanistic psychology programs, the first on Prince Edward Island, Canada, and the second at West Georgia College.

Mike has published or presented over a hundred papers in such areas as creative and intuitive processes, human science research, psi phenomena, and humanistic and transpersonal education and psychology. He participated in the creation of three, and has served on the executive boards of five, national associations.

Mike retired from the West Georgia faculty in 2000.  Today, when he is not traveling the globe, he facilitates Carrollton's weekly Philo-Cafe.
 

Influential Works
Creativity and Psychological Health (Frank Barron)
Creative Consciousness (Henri Bergson)
L'Invention (Rene Boirel)
The Myth of Sisyphus (Albert Camus)
Notes From the Underground (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
From Death-Camp to Existentialism (Viktor Frankl)
Toward a Psychology of Being (Abraham Maslow)
Siddhartha (Herman Hesse)
Freedom and Culture (Dorothy Lee)
The Courage to Create (Rollo May)
Phenomenology of Perception (Maurice Merleau-Ponty)
The Meeting of East and West (F. S. C. Northrup)
Freud and Philosophy (Paul Ricoeur)
The Little Prince (Antoine de St. Exupery)
Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology (Jean-Paul Sartre)
lots of comic books and fairy tales
 

e-mail: marons@westga.edu