On July 1, 2002, I became an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at UC Davis. That does not mean I'm retired (except to the University's payroll division). I plan to spend the next decade or so in finishing a number of long-in-progress writing projects and beginning several new ones. I expect to teach an occasional undergraduate course or graduate seminar, but not in the immediate future; teaching tends to draw my attention away from writing, and I really do want to finish the book on Cordwainer Smith, the book on C. G. Jung, the book on Elvis Presley, the book on Sigmund Freud, the book on Oz, the book on political extremism (right and left), the book on Stanley Milgram and obedience to authority ... etc.

Last year one of my papers, written fairly quickly but long "in press," finally appeared in print: "Responsibilities," in Between Fathers and Sons: Critical Incident Narratives in the Development of Men's Lives, edited by Robert J. Pellegrini and Theodore R. Sarbin (published by the Haworth Press). Several years ago, Bob Pellegrini and Ted Sarbin sent invitations to a number of (male) psychologists: "Write a story about an experience in [your] life as either father or son, where the event had an especially meaningful ... perhaps even turning-point-like influence" on father or son. I chose to write about my father and two key events in his youth that made a big difference in my life. Look this chapter up (the whole book is well worth buying), or ask me for a copy by e-mail, and you'll probably learn more about certain aspects of the country music business than you ever realized you wanted to know.

Still another paper long in process appeared in 2002: "Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch," in the May issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction. This is my first publication, after twenty-some years of research about the topic, on the question of whether the science fiction writer who called himself Cordwainer Smith was the patient in the famous clinical case study titled "The Jet-Propelled Couch," in Robert Lindner's classic book of "true psychoanalytic tales," The Fifty-Minute Hour. That may not sound like a question worth twenty years of research to answer, but it remains of interest to a number of people in the science fiction world, and it got me into doing research on Paul M. A. Linebarger, the man behind the Cordwainer Smith pseudonym. Paul Linebarger turned out to be fascinating for many reasons other than that question of whether he had been Lindner's patient, and so I am now far into the writing of the first full-scale biography of Linebarger. (Half a dozen or so papers I've already written and published about Linebarger are listed on the "Unofficial Cordwainer Smith Biography Page" in the Science Fiction section of this website.) In the paper "Behind the Jet-Propelled Couch," I provide evidence for a tentative answer to my initial question; by the time the biography is completed (soon, I hope!), maybe I'll have a conclusive answer. I welcome further information on Cordwainer Smith, Paul Linebarger, and Robert Lindner from anyone who reads this page. My mailing address is Department of Psychology, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616-8686 -- but the quickest way to reach me is via e-mail at acelms@ucdavis.edu .