Stories
The Cook for Congress Campaign
Patti Palmer
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I was attracted to Yale for graduate school in psychology by its Institute of Human Relations (IHR), a bold experiment at the end of the 1930's in interdisciplinary studies, including psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and biologists. The program had produced many important books, including integrations of psychoanalysis and psychology, the biology and anthropology of sexual behavior, the foundation of cross-cultural anthropology, etc. The building was still there in the medical school area when I arrived on campus in 1962, but I was surprised to learn that IHR was defunct. The anthropology and sociology departments had moved back to the main campus and it seemed symbolic that their place was taken by the locked wards of the Yale Psychiatric Institute, so that you could not even pass from one part of the building to another.
I set about to find a lab in which I could work and ended up in that of John Flynn. I was considered, along with Nina Relin, to be the most brilliant of the graduate students in those years. Nina and I became friends in the first days of our graduate careers. She was the first true leftist I had ever met, as she had gone to Cuba on a Venceremos brigade, and a close friend from college had gone on to a career in the Communist Party (Lee Dlugin with whom I worked later). In 1965 Nina and I got married.
Wedding photo with Nina and our parents at Tavern-on-the-Green in New York's Central Park
I received very little supervision at Yale and worked and wrote mostly on my own. Writing on two topics early on in this period, I foreshadowed much of what I would do for the rest of my life. The first concerned the brain mechanisms of behavior. I wrote an essay for a course on sensory processes, in which I proposed a research model for the understanding of behavior. I saw at the time that the key was to invent a technique for recording from single brain cells during active behavior and to use it to understand how the brain mediates complex behavior. This, I undertook for my dissertation. I recall many ours in the machine shop building the system for stable recording of neuronal activity and my joy when it worked. For many years, I was quite well-known among brain researchers because of this breakthrough. Now, almost a half century later, there are still few researchers who have accomplished this, and in my recent review (Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 2006), I am still proposing methods to continue this approach. Also, at that time, I wrote a long library paper reviewing the many field studies being conducted on primate behavior. This overview of the aggressive behavior of primates would provide a background for my future work, and I would come back 15 years later to publish an experimental study extending our work to primates.
The other thing I wrote, foreshadowing my future, was a novel originally called By What Ways, and later renamed simply "Peace", which was inspired by the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 and a strange relationship with Joayne O'Connell. In some ways it was a great failure, as Joayne and I had devised elaborate fantastic plans for the fortune that she claimed - a true "folie à deux" as the French so aptly call it. On the other hand, because of my experience in having already written one novel and believing in the power of writing, I turned the failure into a writing challenge.
This was the second time I set about writing a novel, and once again, I went up to Rice Peak in order to write it, but this time the key was its message: a global radio network that mobilizes people for peace after an accidental nuclear explosion destroys a wide area of the United States. Although the novel, like the fantasy on which it was based, proved to be a failure, in the long run in contributed very much to other successes. Thirty years later, the imaginary radio network would become the model for the Culture of Peace News Network using Internet, on which I am still working at the present time.
In 1965 the Vietnam War was escalated by the United States and, beginning with my appearance on an unforgettable nation-wide television program, I became an activist to oppose it. Then, in 1966, Nina and I became involved in the Cook for Congress Campaign to oppose the war. We left for a year in Italy in 1968, and then returned the following year, as I worked as a postdoctoral fellow, and we continued our political work in the New Left.
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Stages
1986-1992
Seville and Peoples Peace Appeal
1992-1997
UNESCO Culture of Peace Programme