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Ted Landsman, 1985 |
The Ted Landsman Award in Counseling Psychology
Ted Landsman's Curriculum Vita and Dissertations Supervised
Photos with Family and Friends
Ted was born January 24, 1922, in Rochester, New York, one of four boys. He began college at the University of Rochester and then transferred to the University of Iowa to study journalism. At Iowa he took his first psychology course with Kurt Lewin, became Lewin's research assistant, and obtained his BA in psychology in 1943, with a certificate in journalism. Having been grounded in the empirically rigorous but conceptually enriched perspective of Lewin's formulations, Ted went to Syracuse University, where he worked closely with his advisor Arthur Combs, a recent student of Carl Rogers. While completing his thesis on nondirective group psychotherapy (1947) and his dissertation on student centered learning methods (1950), Ted developed a close personal and professional relationship with Rogers and became a strong advocate of Rogerian psychotherapy.
From 1949 to 1950, Ted was assistant professor in the Psychology Department of the University of Delaware. In 1951, he became associate professor of psychology and director of the counseling center at Vanderbilt University, where he remained until 1957. In addition to his counseling center duties, he participated in planning and administering the clinical psychology program and conducted community-based workshops throughout the state. He served as president of the Tennessee Psychological Association in 1955, drafted the state's first licensing law, and was awarded License Number 1 in Tennessee for his efforts. During this period he also organized the first symposium on phenomenological psychology at a meeting of the American Psychological Association (APA), was one of the first psychologists to use closed-circuit television in counselor training, and had one of the first television shows (1950) on parenting, called "You and Your Child."
At Arthur Combs's urging, Ted joined Combs in 1958 as professor of education at the University of Florida, where he began his theoretical and empirical work on healthy personality. His formulation of the Beautiful and Noble Person (seen as a developmental progression starting with passionate love of self, moving to a passionate love of task and environment, and finding completion in the compassionate love of others), was the focus of his own work and the work of his students. Encouraged and supported in a close personal and professional relationship with Abraham Maslow, Ted carried his venture into empirical studies of positive experiences of both adults and children, negative experiences that have led to positive experiences, solitude experiences, authentic dialogue, and transcendent experiences. In this work he also formulated a theory of the Beautiful and Noble Society. At the beginning of his illness, Ted began to draft a book summarizing his work, a project now taken over by his son Moshe and some of his former students.
In 1975, he moved to the Psychology Department at the University of Florida to become the first director of the APA-accredited Counseling Psychology Program, jointly administered with the Department of Counselor Education. He retired from the directorship in 1978 and from the Psychology Department in 1983. Over the years Ted held visiting professorships at the University of Maryland, Harvard University, the University of Vermont, Tel-Aviv University, and the University of Haifa, to name but a few.
Ted, a fellow of the APA and diplomate in clinical psychology, held many important positions: president of the Southeastern Psychological Association; president of the Florida Psychological Association; APA Council of Representatives; National Executive Committee, American Professors for Peace in the Middle East; and chair of the Committee on Peace Studies, Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues. Ted was dedicated to the idea that one must go past instruction in conflict resolution to a direct investigation of the peacemaking process. Because of his research program in intercultural communication, he was invited to serve as an advisor to the Ministry of Education in Israel in order to prepare a report on intercultural communication in the schools. Ted also assisted both Jewish and Palestinian Israeli students in coming to the United States for graduate study in counseling psychology.
Ted was passionately engaged with life, a lover of nature, photography, opera, sailing, and the company of good friends. On the death of his very close friend, Sidney Jourard, Ted took on the task of revising and updating Jourard's basic adjustment text, Healthy Personality. Ted significantly advanced understanding of the optimally functioning person. His warm presence is missed by everyone who knew him, and his work will continue to point the way toward our understanding how we can all be our best selves.
This award is conferred annually upon a doctoral student in counseling psychology whose projects or initiatives promise to promote an understanding of, or contribution to, positive human growth.
