Introduction, Part 2

Morrie: In His Own Words
by Morrie Schwartz

(Page 2 of 2)

Morrie made it to New York's tuition-free City College. Turned down for military service in World War II because of a punctured eardrum, he decided to apply to graduate school. He was torn between sociology and psychology.

"I'd always been interested in psychology," Morrie said. "What tipped the scales was that psychology involved working with rats." He wound up studying sociology at the University of Chicago.

Reading the likes of Carl Rogers, Harry Stack Sullivan, and Martin Buber, Morrie responded to their philosophy: open yourself up to what you're really feeling. The emphasis wasn't solely on the individual, as psychology would have it, or strictly on society, as the word "sociology" suggests. Instead, Morrie was drawn to the connection between the two: an emerging field known as social psychology.

With Morrie's first job came his first epiphany, because in order to work on a research project at a mental hospital, he had to undergo psychoanalysis.

"I started to understand the full impact of my mother's death...and mourn my loss," he said in his last interview. Morrie described therapy as "cathartic"; it was his first experience with seeing himself at a distance, becoming a witness to himself. As the aphorisms make clear, this became a key technique for coping with his death.

In collaboration with Alfred H. Stanton, Morrie began working on a ward in a nontraditional psychoanalytic mental hospital, watching the troubled and tormented, observing the staff and their relationships with patients. What struck him was the huge influence the attitudes of those around them had on the patients. Morrie was there to observe and talk with everyone — even those patients crouching alone in the corners. He related to them civilly, humbly. He opened his heart as best he could. Gradually, he got them to respond. The importance of opening oneself to others, no matter who they are, and the impact of community on the individual became clear to him.

The book that resulted from the research, "The Mental Hospital" by Stanton and Schwartz, became a classic of social psychology, influencing an entire generation of practitioners. Not long after the book's publication, Morrie was offered a faculty position at Brandeis. For almost four decades, to a year before his death, he continued to be a participant-observer. His undergraduate course on "group process" was an annual laboratory in learning to be nonjudgmental, to see yourself as a part of a community and open yourself to it. In short, Morrie spent the rest of his life practicing what he had begun to preach.

He had help. To his wife and two sons, he attributed his ability to suppress his ego, to understand that others can be even more important to you than you yourself are.

To "Greenhouse," a low-fee psychotherapy organization and community he formed with friends and colleagues in the '60s, he ascribed his ability to mourn loss, starting with his mother and ending with himself.

To his colleagues in the then-radical Brandeis sociology department, he credited his continuing championing of the underdog, his politics of inclusion and equality.

Morrie even thanked asthma, a disease which afflicted him relatively late in life and, he said, taught him how to distance himself from the panic of dying (or seeming to), as he gasped for breath.

In his late sixties, Morrie embarked on his final stretch of road. He learned to meditate. To Morrie, it was an extension of the practice of psychotherapy — of getting distance on himself, of reaming how to live in the moment, of opening up to the universe at large. It was, in one sense, the beginning of Morrie's "spiritual practice," as that phrase is typically employed. In another sense, it was the culmination of a spiritual practice Morrie had begun decades before.

It is from Morrie's joumey that the aphorisms come, the aphorisms around which this book is built. From Aesop to Jesus to haiku to Nietzsche, the concise insight has had an honored place in world culture. In the age of television and "bits" of information,- people sometimes mock brief utterances as "sound bites." Morrie wouldn't have worried about that. He considered these messages sound bites for the soul. All souls.

Morrie died peacefully at his home on November 4, 1995.

Paul Solman was a student of Morrie Schwartz's at Brandeis.

Excerpted from Morrie: In His Own Words by Morrie Schwartz. Excerpted by permission of Delta, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.