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Jim Mancuso
was born in Hazelton, Pennsylvania on January 17,
1928. His parents were both first-generation
Italian emigrants to the United States. After his
father died
in 1938, Jim was sent to the Milton Hershey boarding school in Hershey, Pennsylvania, where he
attended from
1939 to 1945. In 1946, Jim
entered the United States Navy. He
served for two years, attaining the rank of Seaman, First Class. After
his Navy
service, Jim used his GI Bill benefits to attend Dickinson College in Carlisle Pennsylvania. He
received a Bachelor
of Arts in Psychology and English in 1951. Soon after, Jim was awarded
a
Veteran’s Administration Fellowship to attend the University of Rochester. He started
graduate
studies there in 1952, and was awarded his Ph.D. in psychology in 1958.
While completing his doctoral dissertation, Jim worked
as a school psychologist. In this work he found himself “totally
inadequate to
the task of understanding the problems of the children”. To address
this, Jim
read Piaget’s work, including The Construction of Reality in the
Child.
He also found himself attracted to the writings of Donald Hebb and
Muzafir
Sherif. Around this time, Jim happened to attend a seminar at Rochester in which
someone made a
comment to the effect of “That sounds like something which would agree
with the
ideas in George Kelly’s Psychology of Personal Constructs”. As soon as
the
seminar was over, Jim went to the library and borrowed Kelly’s two
volumes,
staying awake that night reading the book. He found it highly congruent
with
the reading he had already been attracted to. Moreover, he found
Kelly’s
constructive alternativism to be congruent with his childhood
experiences. As a
child, Jim had ample opportunity to test alternative constructions
through
varied experiences including; growing up a scion of Italian immigrant
coal
miners, attending a mainly White Anglo-Saxon Protestant/Irish-American
elementary school, the death of his father at 10 years of age, and
spending six
years at the Milton Hershey school under the influence of the
Pennsylvania
Dutch.
Jim continued his interest in Kellian constructivism
on to his teaching days at SUNY Albany. When one of his graduate
students asked
him to produce empirical bases for Kelly’s postulate and corollaries,
Jim took
up the challenge. He began to gather articles in support of Kelly’s
work. By
1966, Jim had amassed a sizable collection, and invited George Kelly to
Albany to look
over it. Kelly
spent a day with Jim, and was very enthusiastic about the project.
Unfortunately, he died soon after, and never saw Jim’s final plans for
publication. In 1970, the collection appeared as Readings for a
Cognitive
Theory of Personality. By any standard, it is a remarkable work. Readings unites the
contributions
of such figures in psychology as Jerome Bruner, Carl Rogers, Muzafir
Sherif,
Jean Piaget, Charles Osgood, Solomon Asch, Irving Janis, Julian Rotter,
and
John Flavell (as well as George Kelly himself). It is no wonder Kelly
was
enthusiastic about the project.
After Readings appeared,
Jim began
communicating with Alvin Landfield of the University of Nebraska. Also at
this time, Jim
became attracted to the work of Ted Sarbin, and began a collegial
association
with him. It was Jim who recommended that Sarbin serve as a keynote
speaker for
the First International Congress on Personal Construct Psychology at Lincoln, Nebraska, in 1975.
Thus began
Jim’s long association with the personal construct psychology community.
Throughout his academic career, Jim produced many
important writings. In addition to Readings, Jim also
wrote Schizophrenia:
Medical Diagnosis or Moral Verdict (1980) with Ted Sarbin, which
was
selected as an outstanding academic textbook by Choice in 1981.
He also
co-edited two very successful books with Jack Adams-Webber, The
Construing
Person (1982), and Applications of Personal Construct Theory
(1983).
He joined Mildred Shaw on his fifth book, Cognition and Personal
Structure
(1988). Jim was careful to back up his theoretical writing with
practical
knowledge. Throughout most of his career, he maintained a hand in some
kind of
applied work. He provided regular consultation for many years to
schools and
child care agencies. He spent four years as a half-time Veteran’s
Administration trainee. He obtained his teacher certification and
worked for
two years as a school psychologist. Jim was careful to avoid the trap
of being
a “nit-picking” theorist who had, for example, never actually worked
with a
schizophrenic or a child with AD/HD.
 Jim was a
master colleague. He placed great emphasis
on the relationships he built and maintained as a psychologist and an
academic.
He was a communicator par excellence,
usually quite frank, sometimes even controversial, but always looking
to engage
others in a serious dialogue about what mattered. When he was honoured
in 1998
with CPN’s (then NAPCN) Lifetime Achievement award, he was asked to
describe
what he thought the highlights of his career were. He glossed over the
obvious
achievements—certain books and articles published, his 30-year tenure
as a
professor. Upon providing his overview, he spontaneously offered this
final observation:
“My advice to those who aspire to make contributions
to PCP, and constructivisim in general: Read assiduously and read very
carefully. Keep writing to answer questions you would ask. Circulate
your
writings to the colleagues who understand our work. Get and use all the
feedback that your colleagues offer. Have the good fortune to develop
collegial
relationships with fine scholars such as Don Bannister, Al Landfield,
Ted
Sarbin, Mildred Shaw, Seymour Rosenberg, Joseph Rychlak, and Jack
Adams-Webber.
And, add to that good fortune the good fortune of working with students
such as
Douglas Kilgus, Michael Mascolo, Karen Hunter, Michael Arcuri, Michael
Gara,
Bruce Eimer, Richard Lehrer, Uriel Meshoulam, Thomas Lickona, James
Morrison,
Richard Hamill, Kenneth Handin, Dorothy McDonald, and many more who
deserve to
feel slighted because I don’t want to lengthen further this overlong
communication.”
After living in New York state for
50 years, Jim
and his wife Susan moved to Los Angeles to be
closer to their
grown children. Shortly after the move, Jim began to develop a
degenerative
neuromuscular disorder that made it difficult to control his arm
movements. One
of his favorite past-times, communicating with colleagues via email,
began to
decline as Jim was only able to use voice-activated word processing to
communicate electronically. As the disorder progressed, Jim’s
communications
declined even further. Jim Mancuso passed away on June 10, 2005.
Robert Hadden,
Calgary, Canada |
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