ABSTRACT
The first time I was paid to do something officially psychotherapeutic, I was 18, and working in a summer job after my second year of undergraduate school. I was a recreation therapy assistant at the local state psychiatric hospital. It was the realization of a dream that had begun when I was nine, the year that my own encounters with a school psychologist created in me the desire to become one of those people. He had listened well to my distress, and I had asked him what you called what he did. “I'm a psychologist,” said Mr. Skipper—and thus I decided half a century ago that I, too, would be one of these people who listened for a living.
