Harry Bone, Ph.D.

I MET HARRY more than twenty years ago. I don't remember exactly when, but he, and the meeting, remain fixed forever. I was asking him to be my teacher. I wasn't bargaining on getting a dear friend.

I started conventionally enough. I had done this before. But Harry was never conventional. He had a way of involving himself with you so that you knew something important was happening beyond the case. He had himself been through too much to believe old mumbo-jumbos and he was not going to pass those on. So things had to make sense; and he made sense. One time I found myself working so hard to impress him that I was in danger of losing my patient. Harry simply said, "We'll work on another one." No criticism. No dissection of what was wrong. That was not the time. He knew, I think, before Skinner, that punishment doesn't enhance learning. At any rate, he was passionately devoted to growth rather than alteration; and he knew how to create the conditions for growth. He spoke of it as the difference between horticulture and carpentry, and he was able to teach, perhaps by example, how to nurture people rather than reconstruct them, how to help them to their own essence rather than to some psychoanalytic model of what they should be.

He had an abiding distrust of models just as he had an abiding faith in people, if only they dared find themselves. He himself never gave up that personal struggle. If there was anyone who could add to his knowledge of himself, Harry sought him out. It mattered not what their status was, nor for that matter, their geography. It was not long ago that he was willing to travel to the Pacific end of Canada where Fritz Perls might have had something to offer. His readiness to search high and low often confounded the real and would-be elder statesmen, but it was an inspiration to his students.

Harry was a man of ideas, and his inquiries never stopped. He was never in my house without looking through my books, not to see what I was rea