 |
 |
Home | Contact Us | Undergraduate Office | Graduate Office | Faculty | Alumni | News | Seay| HomePage | UT Search |
Faculty DirectoryFaculty & TA Office HoursBooks by FacultyArea Chairs and FacultyFaculty Labs & Affiliated Organizations
|
David B. Cohen, Ph.D.
|
|||
 |
Clinical psychologist and retired Psychology Department professor, DAVID B. COHEN, after 32 years of teaching, research and writing, died on Sunday, January 2, 2004. Dr. Cohen taught Introductory Psychology courses as well as upper-division courses in abnormal psychology at the University of Texas at Austin from 1969-2001. He was the author of six books, including "Stranger in the Nest" and "Out of the Blue". Local journalist Dick Stanley has written a fine tribute to Dr. Cohen in the Thursday, January 6 2005 edition of the Austin American-Statesman. There is also an obituary in the January 5, 2005 edition. |
David B. Cohen, a native Brooklynite, received his B.A. degree in 1963 from Columbia College, Columbia University, before moving to Ann Arbor as a doctoral student in the clinical psychology graduate program at the University of Michigan where, in 1968, he received his Ph.D. Professor Cohen taught in the areas of Clinical Psychology and Individual Differences/Evolutionary Psychology of the University of Texas at Austin.
Cohen's early research on the recall, content, and function of dreams resulted in numerous articles, book chapters, and a book, Sleep and Dreaming: Origins, Nature, and Functions (Pergamon, 1979). Later, his interests in personality and abnormal behavior were directed to questions about the biological mechanisms and risk factors in psychopathology and their implications for the classification of psychiatric disorders. In 1990, many of these ideas were laid out in Psychopathology, an advanced textbook that he and the late Lee Willerman co-authored. Later, based on evidence of genetic and other biological sources of individual differences, came Out of the Blue: Depression and Human Nature, published in 1994 by Norton. Blue illuminates depression within the larger context of biological and evolutionary influences on both normal and abnormal behavior.
Cohen's next book Stranger in the Nest: Do Parents Really Determine a Child's Personality, Intelligence, or Character?, published in 1999, explored three major ideas about the power of parental influence over a child's development: first, that genetic and other biological influences are more powerful than most have imagined; second, and more controversial, that parental influence is much less powerful than we have imagined; and third, that the influence of nature and nurture can lead to surprising, that is, highly unpredictable, psychological developments, all of which has profound implication for parents. The jolting contribution of this work is its mobilization of strong evidence that much parental influence is not only weak or transitory but also illusory.
Where Did THAT Child Come From!, was written for parents rather than for an academic audience. With engaging anecdotes, vivid analogies, and layman-friendly descriptions of compelling scientific findings it simplified the message of Out of the Blue and Stranger in the Nest, that much of our children's development normally comes from inner sources that strongly constrain the influence of parents and peers, however responsive children may be to such short-term social influences. None of this denies the obvious fact that parenting is essential, only that biology limits parenting influence and therefore parents' moral responsibility for the kind of person their child becomes. Where Did THAT Child Come From! was thus a strong antidote to a prevalent yet false and destructive notion advanced by conventional social science and much expert opinion, namely that parents should get the lion's share of credit or blame for how their children turn out.
