Below are several versions, short, long, formal informal, biographies.

 

 

Informal bio Short formal bio Long formal bio

 

 

Informal bio

 

Therapist, thinker, speaker, teacher, writer, consultant…

 

"I listen carefully, try to be of use, and take my recreation in the arts" - Confucius

 

I have three grown engaged and unique creative children, and wonderful friends spread all over, I have lived first in Manhattan, then Southern and Northern California, Boston, Mexico City, Washington DC, Martha's Vineyard, Whidbey Island near Seattle, and now on the Russian River in Sonoma County, California.

 

For the last thirty years I have been a psychoanalyst, professor, organizational consultant, and exec at two small internet companies that used on-line conferences to help with internal communications. In 1998 I started a newsletter called y2k week (archived at www.dougcarmichael.com/y2kweek). All along I have been actively reading history, philosophy and related thinkers with a focus on cultural change - anthropology, political science, literary theory, and looking at the next steps after we learned that y2k was as much a social phenomena as a technical one - basically about how people form opinions when there is not sufficient evidence, and how the reality never emerges, because people ant to forget about it. For the last five years I've paid most attention to philanthropy and community development, especially the way smaller local and regional areas can gain more control - and be more creative - about local development.

 

The key themes in my life are organizeable around  Science, Psychoanalysis, Arts, Management consulting, Social concerns, and Politics in an Internet age. 

 

After Caltech I studied developmental psychology and wrote my dissertation at Berkeley on irony - a kind of Piagetian study looking at ways of integrating emotional and cognitive perspectives into a less split model. Irony was part of rhetoric and rhetoric was part of the classical trivium. I still consider this work ongoing.

 

It was while studying physics as an undergrad and working in the physics labs at Caltech that I developed a sense that the people were even more interesting than the physics. I was surrounded by wonderful characters such as Feynman and Beadle and Bonenblust - and Jon Mathews wherever you are - and had great teachers as well in the humanities. Reading Yeats, Elliot, Mann and Joyce for a year with Hallett Smith was a great antidote to physics, and philosophy with Alfred Stern provided depth I used throughout the later travels, especially his introducing me to Cassirer Ortega, Unamuno and Vahinger. I still consider myself a scientist.

 

Caltech led me to psychology through Oppenheimer - now there is a story - and from Berkeley took a post doc at Harvard where I worked with Jerome Bruner, and met Eric Erickson and David Riesman and got directed towards psychoanalysis, and met Michael Maccoby who was working with Erich Fromm. Off I went to Mexico and the Mexican Psychoanalytic, which Fromm Directed, and had an amazing education in psychoanalysis, philosophy and culture. And I learned to practice psychoanalysis, and appreciated the independence such a life offers - and the many hours of learning to listen, and getting clearer about what really makes a difference.

 

Fromm's view had always been, how do you put individual dynamics together with social dynamics; in short, for Fromm that meant Freud and Marx. At Caltech, I watched the interaction among physics, and public policy, and the House Un-American Activities Committee. When I went to Berkeley there was the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio, and then came the Vietnam war, and I experienced the difference between Berkeley and Harvard - kids from mixed up backgrounds who were open and democratic (and sometimes worse), and the children of presumed privilege who didn't dare touch big issues.

 

I inherited this agenda but had deep misgivings - both about Freud, which Fromm also had, and about Marx, which he had less. The deep task seemed to be however an extension of Fromm's desire to re-humanize psychoanalysis. Freud and Marx are still high on my list of people worth getting to know. They were added to my own pantheon: Piaget, Cassrier, Kenneth Burke, Mumford and later I added a few others: Voegelin being the most important. More recently Roberto Ungar, Keith Hart and Phillip Mirowski.

 

I was fortunate to be able to practice with people open to dialog about themselves, a work I have continued over many years. I continue to look to ways of understanding that practice with deeper ties to science, art and social questions. Maccoby's work I which I participated led in 1976 to the Gamesman and opened the way to consulting. His concepts such as "the psychostructure of the organization" seem to me still-born but powerfully suggestive of future research.

 

Consulting led me into places I never would have been, many federal agencies at or near the top, including the Whitehouse, doing the first major use of the Internet to manage a whole company, one of the great Canadian energy companies, and into Hewlett Packard, IBM, Morgan, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, and many others. All of which has led me to question the corporate form if it is not constrained by social needs through the state chartering process. It has also led me to consider the very grae problem of governance in complexity. Don Michaels (Learning to Plan and Plannig to learn was a real friend and stimulant).I have been an active user of the Internet since the old dialup days of The Source in 1978, using it as a mode of dialog with clients, making it into corporate infrastructure, and learning environments.

 

My consulting focus now is on what I like to call " The economy after this one," and working with clients who want their organization to be there.

 

I think of the years practicing, reading, consulting and travels - Mexico, India, Japan, Slovenia, Sweden, Italy, Tunisia, Jordan - as continuing to work with others to put it together, to create a more humane - and interesting - world.

 

Currently I have the privelage of being a Visiting Distinguisehd Scholar at Stanford in the Media X program, which is a great cross roads to explore the interactions between the humanities and the technoogies.

 

My immediate concerns are political: what to do as the Democrats seem unable to respond to the failure of the Republican leadership, and the draft of the book GardenWorld Politics on this site. Also see

 

my website

my weblog

 

Short formal bio

 

Dr Douglass Carmichael,

Consulting, psychotherapy, teaching, speaking, writing,

has a background in physics and psychoanalysis, and has combined an interest in technology, the humanities, and social issues. He works as psychotherapist, teacher, executive coach and consultant on strategic organization, scenarios, and the implications of informatics for organizational strategy and structure. He is active in the design of Internet spaces for the infrastructure to support virtual teams. He works across institutions and organizations, locally and internationally, on issues of the social consequences of economic policy and the implications of future change for individual, social, political, cultural and organizational development.

Current interest in technology and society as a symptom of deeper fissures in the human - technology symbiosis. He was part of an executive group that, in the early '80's used 300 baud modems and Radioshack model 100's to explore strategic issues with a globally distributed group, was one of the first to use collaborative dialup to server spaces pre internet - 1985 - to manage a corporate entity, using the internet as ateam based infrastructure. In recent years he has focused on philanthropy and community development. His longer range focus is on the use of the humanities to enhance societal policy making. He is at Stanford's media X program and finishing a book GardenWorld Politics.

 

Long formal bio

 

Douglass Carmichael

www.dougcarmichael.com

 

2004-current moved to Sonma County for love and its complexity, and looking for ways to reengage with the more active isuues. In 2007 I became a Distibguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford's Media x. I contiue consulting and my versionof psychoanalysis, and writing, especially GardenWorld Politics where I am engaged with projects on incfeasing dialog between the humanities and the technologies, and in craeting a strategy room, with artifacts of conversations to support ongoing strategic conversations.

 

2001- 2004 An Invitation to join a philanthropic effort in social thought about critical issues kept me focused on extending the depth of my own historical understanding in culture and governance. It has been a time of preparation. Along the way trying to align business, consulting and psychotherapeutic activity with my concerns about re-humanizing the world.

 

1998-2001. Clients started getting nervous about y2k in '98, and I picked up the wind of it in various consulting connections as I traveled around the country. It got me nervous, because people seemed to be so sure that either it would destroy society, or nothing would happen - and they didn't seem to have evidence. It led me to write a paper, Who will do what and when will they do it?" , that got wide and appreciative distribution, and I started a newsletter called y2kweek, starting with week 89 and going to zero. It led to many more interesting consulting opportunities, in Europe, DOD, meeting with senior VP's at the Wall Street Journal, the senior staff at the Washington Post, and a number of others. I have sporadically continued the newsletter because the basic theme - technology and society - continues to be intriguing, and readers keep me going with wonderful and occasionally painful and extensive comments.

 

Meanwhile, with all the travels, I thought it would be nice to come home to nature, so I bought a house on Martha's Vineyard. In order to get technical support for my consulting, which had turned into a company called Shakespeare and Tao Consulting, I joined BigMindMedia on Whidbey Island, and decided to spend some time there, which turned out to be more extensive and heart felt than I expected. Consulting for local Island Counties and their commissioners, and with towns such as Kent and their City Council deepened my appreciation for the potential of local and regional development, and this has been reinforced by my association with the Whidbey Institute. I've continued to read widely, work at learning Classical Chinese, perfecting tai chi, and trying to take seriously the words of Confucius "I listen carefully, try to be of use, and take my recreation in the arts." A little Italian, German, French, Latin and Greek - and poetry in these languages, my guitar and occasional paintbrush, and friends - and now living on the Russian River..

 

1984-98 A kind of retreat and fascination with the world I continued to expand my consulting, and worked with, became partner in, and finally president, of Metasystems Design Group that had been started by Frank Burns, author of the famous "Be all you can be." While I call it a retreat, it started in 1983 being invited to join a group of execs in La Jolla at the Western Behavior Sciences program in what was then called School of Advanced Management Studies. But the real thing was we were using computers to carry on conversations we started in face-to-face meetings in La Jolla. I got fascinated by the technology and used it to support my consulting, which had started in the mid 70's at The world Bank, www.dougcarmichael.com/wbaaa1980.html , and at about the same scale but such an apparently different realm, the redesign of Management for Bell Labs in the period 87-90.

 

 

1968-70 Santa Cruz, where I had arranged to teach winter quarters, but spent the entire year there as an assistant professor in psychology and the rather alien Hegelian History of Consciousness, where I held my own by teaching Brecht. I loved the students and the freedoms there, and had an office next to Nobbie Brown, and had a great time. But the distance from the political world, and no visible horizon to my future, I left at the end of the year going to Washington, D.C.

 

1956-1968 Mexico City and the Mexican psychoanalytic Institute, where discipline was intense, almost monastic, and brought me back to the intensity of the physics labs at Cal Tech. To be human centered and intensely disciplined was a relief. Along with wonderful clinical courses and broad based psychoanalytic theory, we had courses with the great Mexican philosopher Ramon Xirau, and Cultural Anthropology that was profound. During this time I also taught psychology and Philosophy at Universidad de las Americas, then in Mexico City. 1968 was a tumultuous year and I was deported for political activity just prior to the shootings involving student protests of the Vietnam war. This gave me a free return to the US Santa Cruz

 

1965-66 Harvard and Jerome Bruner's Center for Cognitive Studies in William James Hall. Cambridge was another feast, and I sat in on lectures by Chomsky, Gailbraith, I.A.Richards, and spent lots of time with Jerry Lettvin at MIT. I spent time with Erikson, with whom it turned out we had a similar sense of humor, and he had me each Wednesday to the faculty club for lunch. Paul Feyerabend introduced me to Giorgio de Santillana (The Crime of Galileo, Hamlet's Mill) and we had comfortable late evening walks. Howard and Judy Gardener were working on their dissertations and read mine, and it had some influence on their work. I met David Reisman, whose lectures on DeToqueville I had heard on NPR while I was at Berkeley. That was the first hint that there was much more intellectually to historical and social study than I had been aware. Reisman had been psychoanalyzed by Erich Fromm, and by happenstance I met Michael Maccoby in the elevator and we struck up a conversation about Yugoslavia, where he was going and about which I had just read a book. This led to an invitation to go to Mexico to Fromm's Psychoanalytic Institute, and Reisman asked me to TA in his course, and Lettvin tried to talk me into going on a research trip to a river in Borneo. I am glad I chose

1959-65 Berkeley and psychology, with lots of time in many other departments, and the Free Speech Movement. I moved from the quantum effects and perception to child development and the capacity for rhetoric, entranced by Piaget and Cassirer to take mind seriously. But it was a logical mind that we studied. My dissertation on Irony was an attempt to get beyond that model. I was fortunate to be an auditor in a master class taught by Segovia, and met Michael Lorimer who was my guitar teacher or a year. I wish I had practiced then the way I do now. I spent some time with Chris Alexander, and Paul Feyerabend, whose classes I sat in every year I was at Berkley. I met Erik Erikson while he was visiting professor, which took Harvard.

 

1955-59 Caltech, drawn to science as a way to understand the makings of the world, majored in physics but most importantly worked in the physics labs, and lived with grad students. Socialization to that world was a key step for me in feeling part of a larger worked. Day and night the labs were active, and physics mixed with Bertold Brecht and the poetry of Yeats. Their personalities were amazing to me, and I realized that I was more entranced by them as people than as oracles about state of the world equations. I had extraordinary teachers, Pauling and Feynman, and in humanities, David Eliot in history who supported my independent study in Russian and Japanese history. Hallett Smith in English taught a yearlong course in Yeats, Elliott, Mann and Joyce, for which I eternally grateful. A single course gave me access to the stream and idea of the world's great literature. Alfred Stern taught me philosophy - Unamnuno, Ortega and Vaihinger - an unlikely group that has had a powerful influence on me, especially when I later went to Mexico.

 

1937-55 Grew up in Manhattan, went to Collegiate, where we learned oblige without the nobless. I owe a real debt to the standards hinted at there. I do wish they and I had gone even further. My current fascination in many languages, music, history were not supported enough. I wish we had memorized more poetry, and done much more art. But it was a good beginning. I spent time in Phillips, Maine, and St Albans West Virginia, and went to Glendale, California, middle America, to finish high school on my own in 1953 - because I knew I wanted to go to..

 

 

1970-1983. I came looking for a way to exist in DC. was a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies, and assistant professsor at Catholic Universitty in the clinical program. I taught at the Washington School of Psychiatry and supervise clinical cases at Children's Hospital and St Elizabeth's (within the shadow of Ezra pound). I worked with Michael Maccoby and was  ahrvard research Fellow in the Program on Technology work an Charater, and egan consulting in organizations. Iwas fortunate to be invited by Napier Collyns to hang around the Global Business network, and picked up a fascination with scenarios as a nudge to thinking. I kept developing my own more participatory approach, based mainly in Owen's Open Space approach to meeting design, and brought in elements of drama theory and architectural design.