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 currently serves on the executive boards of five, national associations. At West Georgia, he offers courses in Creativity, Intuition, Hermeneutics, the History of Psychology, Human Growth and Potential, Myths and Symbols, and Personality and Motivation.

Influential books & authors:

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

Siddartha, 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

Office phone#: 770-836-4583
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