I was fortunate enough to have grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the late ‘60s. During my junior year in high school, a friend introduced me to Freud, whose ideas about the unconscious, dreams and psychoanalysis sparked my interest in psychology. That same year, one of my teachers, Mr. Sigal, taught a psychology class—quite rare back then—that included access to an eye-opening box of books by civil rights leaders such as Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, as well as humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, R.D. Laing and Rollo May. From the start, psychology was both deeply personal and embedded in the political and social. This continued to be case when, as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara and then UC Berkeley, I was introduced to mind-expanding psychedelics and anti-war protests, which at the time were intimately related.

In grad school at UC Berkeley, I began doing research in what was then a new area, health psychology. My focus was on the impact of daily hassles and uplifts, and positive emotions, on health and psychological functioning. I wanted to emphasize the importance of positive experiences in a field obsessed with stress. After graduating, I completed a two-year, clinical child psychology post-doc at McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School. I then moved back to California, spending two years as a staff psychologist on the psychosomatic unit at Children’s Hospital at Stanford and, in 1986, opening a full-time clinical practice in Menlo Park. At Stanford, I met Mary Gomes, my future spouse. In 1988, I moved back to Berkeley. During this time, I taught courses at various Bay Area psychology graduate schools. This included 10 years at the Wright Institute in Berkeley, where I was a case conference leader and taught, among other subjects, multicultural psychology and ecopsychology.

In Berkeley, Mary brought together a group of psychologists and environmental activists--many group members were both--with the goal of integrating our dual interests. We began calling it “ecopsychology.” It turned out that historian/author Theodore Roszak had also been calling for such an integration. In 1995, Mary and I teamed up with Ted to co-edit Ecopsychology: Restoring the Earth, Healing the Mind. In 1997, Utne Reader chose me as one of the nation’s top ten activist therapists for my work in this area.

Within ecopsychology, I became interested in consumerism, and soon enough, capitalism. This work led to co-founding Fairplay (then The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood), an activist group that fights marketing to children and encourages media fasts. Psychologist Tim Kasser and I co-edited Psychology and Consumer Culture: The Struggle for a Good Life in a Materialistic World. I also wrote a series of articles on capitalism and its alternatives for Tikkun Magazine. At present, I am writing about why democracy requires a cap on wealth.

Through the years, I’ve approached psychology as an integral part of a larger political, social and spiritual/ethical movement based on compassion and freedom. I’ve been working towards a world far weirder and more fun than the current one. Given the times, we need such a vision more than ever.

CURRICULUM VITAE, ALLEN D. KANNER