An Obituary for Leona Tyler - by Dick
Littman
Leona Elizabeth Tyler (1906-1993)
Leona Tyler, the eighty-firstpresident
of the American Psychological Association (APA) and
only the fourth woman to be elected to that office,
died on April 29, 1993, at the age of 86. Her professional
career as a psychologist was based at the University
of Oregon where she began as an instructor in 1940
and ended as Professor and Dean Emerita in 1993. Her
history of outstanding achievement has been cited
as a model for women, and her balanced blend of kindness
and firmness as a model for everyone.
Leona was born on May 10, 1906, in
Chetek, Wisconsin, but her formative years were on
the Mesabi Iron Range in northern Minnesota in mining
communities of hard-working immigrants, mainly Scandanavians,
Italians, and Yugoslavians. The tax revenues from
the then productive mines provided well for the local
schools, and her family encouraged Leona's evident
talents in academic studies as well as the piano,
which she enjoyed playing well into her last decade.
Her academic progress was rapid,
and she received her BA degree from the University
of Minnesota at the age of 19. Her major was English,
but she was also attracted to science. In chemistry
classes, the elegance and order of Mendeleyev's Periodic
Table inaugurated her career-long appreciation of
orderly and mathematical ways of dealing with questions.
Psychology was a natural discipline for synthesizing
her humanistic bent with her convictions about empirical
and quantitative evidence in organizing knowledge.
Psychology came late, however. For
thirteen years after graduating, Leona did what so
many intelligent and gifted women did in those days
(and, needless to say, still do) -- she taught school.
But while the English language and literature remained
key features of her life, she found the need to control
and keep order in junior-high classes increasingly
onerous and inimical. At the same time, essays written
by her students were interesting and disturbing as
they revealed the pressures and forced choices that
impelled and controlled the development of their lives.
This experience led to a preoccupation that was to
be a major theme in her professional life-- individual
differences and individuality.
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A new life began for Leona in a summer
course in individual differences at the University
of Minnesota with Donald G. Paterson who recognized
her ability and persuaded her to enter the PhD program
in psychology. In that estimable department, she was
also particularly influenced by Florence Goodenough
whose developmental textbook Leona later revised.
For her doctoral dissertation she chose to study the
development of interests in high school girls. The
interest test she constructed was a project that reflected
her many years of working with adolescents in the
course of self-discovery and heralded much of her
subsequent research, teaching, and practice. She was
granted the PhD from Minnesota in 1941.
In the fall of 1940, Leona joined
the Department of Psychology at the University of
Oregon. In those days of heavy teaching loads, professors
were expected to teach a wide variety of courses in
addition to their specialities, which for Leona, in
keeping with the Minnesota tradition, were individual
differences, testing, and counseling. During her career
in the Department of Psychology, Leona advised more
graduate students' masters and doctoral degrees than
any other faculty member; among these, it should be
[Correction: Leona was the advisor for more masters
and doctoral theses than any other faculty member.]
noted, were many outside the Department of Psychology
in counseling and education. Because being constrained
by conventional boundaries was not her inclination,
it is not surprising that she also worked in the University's
Personnel Research Bureau and taught mathematics during
the faculty shortage in World War II. Her life-long
interest in peace-making issues was reflected in her
counseling of conscientious objectors during that
period.
As the war was winding down, Leona
developed a counseling service for veterans that turned
into the University Counseling Center. When the University's
administration arbitrarily sought to limit the role
of psychology and the involvement of the Department
of Psychology in the Center out of sheer prejudice
against psychology as a discipline, Leona showed her
metal; she forced the administration to back down
by argument, marshalling support throughout the University,
and threatening to resign. Throughout her career,
Leona continued to counsel students on their vocational
and personal concerns. Her view was that the purpose
of counseling was to encourage natural, life-long
developmental processes as distinguished from psychotherapy
which, she felt, was more appropriate to clinicians'
dealings with disturbances of personality. In 1965,
Leona became Dean of the Graduate School and remained
so until her mandated retirement at the age of 65
in 1971, still very active intellectually and professionaly,
as she was to remain for the next 20 years.
Leona's thinking and attitudes never
froze. Her early concerns about vocational interests
led to a longitudinal study of the broader question
of the directions of development that interests and
personality take. A major research finding was that,
as people thought about careers, dislikes and avoidances
were more important than likes. This research led
to the study of how choices organized peoples' lives.
She developed the Choice Pattern Technique, that required
people to indicate their construals of occupations
and free-time activities. A Fulbright award for the
Netherlands in 1962-1963 allowed her to test her ideas
and methods cross-culturally. Her research was extended
to India and Australia and expanded to take in values,
daily activities, and future time-perspectives in
adolescents. (In a visit to New Delhi, Leona had an
interview with Indira Gandhi and asked how it was
that she, a woman, could become the leader of the
world's largest democracy; Gandhi responded by pointing
to traditional Indian and Hindu traditions of female
models of power.) Because Leona's most basic tenet
was that personal development depended on selecting
and actualizing from a great number of possibilities
those few which time and situation permitted, her
further inquiries were aimed at revealing cognitive
possibility structures. Thus, she moved from rather
concrete vocational interests to the broadest considerations
about the various selves which a person might actualize.
Leona was a skilled and graceful
writer. Her books were written to clarify and organize
her own thinking for her courses and her students.
They are models of lucidity, aptness, economy, mastery
of material, and judiciousness of evaluations and
conclusions. Her concern for clarifying the human
puzzle of personal change moved, over time, from individual
differences to individuality, and from a psychometric
perspective to a systems-ecological view of real-world
choices. Titles of her 100 or so articles and books
reveal some of this progression: The Psychology of
Human Differences (1947), The Work of the Counselor
(1953), Developmental Psychology (1959), "Research
explorations in the realm of choice" (1961),
Clinical Psychology (1962), "Patterns of choice
in Dutch, American, and Indian adolescents" (1968),
Individuality: Human Possibilities and Personal Development
of Men and Women (1978), and Thinking Creatively:
A New Approach to Psychology and Individual Lives
(1983). Her textbooks were highly regarded and widely
used, and the three editions of The Work of the Counselor
were perhaps the leading influence on the development
of the counseling profession in their day. She had
a singular ability to avoid eclecticism while incorporating
and integrating diverse views that individually were
doctrinaire rallying points.
Leona was disciplined but also a
warm, generous, and idealistic person. She took friendship
and duty seriously, and so it is no surprise that
in addition to her teaching, counseling, research,
and writing she seemed always to have time and energy
for community and professional service and administration.
She served on many local and state boards and was
an active participant in national groups and movements
to better peoples' lives, such as Amnesty International,
Common Cause, and peace organizations. Her leadership
at the University of Oregon consisted of membership
on just about every significant faculty and university
committee and culminated in her position as Dean of
the Graduate School. Unpolitical as she was, everyone
respected and trusted her rationality, directness,
honesty, fairness, and decisiveness in both conflict
and agreement. There was neither soft-soap nor bludgeon
in her approach to life and work, and people sought
her out for her warm intelligence. Psychology is surely
the better for Leona's service on the APA's Board
of Directors in 1966-1968 and 1971-1974, the Policy
and Planning Board in 1968-1970, and the Board of
Social and Ethical Responsibility in 1980-1982.
There were numerous honors and recognitions
for Leona. She was successively elected president
of the Oregon Psychological Association, the Western
Psychological Association, and the Counseling Division
of the American Psychological Association, and finally,
as mentioned earlier, she served as president of the
American Psychological Association in 1972-73. She
received the Distinguished Achievement Award from
the University of Minnesota, an honorary doctorate
from Linfield College, the Distinguished Service Award
from the University of Oregon, a University colloquium
series in her honor on her eightieth birthday in 1986,
and the American Psychological Foundation's Gold Medal
for Life-time Achievement in the Public Interest.
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Leona died in Eugene of congestive
heart failure after a series of illnesses and accidents.
Alert and vital to the end and in keeping with her
rationality and decisiveness, she prohibited life-prolonging
measures while sharing her last days and providing
"counseling" for a few close relatives and
friends who had gathered around her bed.
Leona Tyler was vigorous and organized
in thought and action and generous and humane in her
sentiments. She leaves a legacy of significant ideas
and programs and an enriched legion of friends, colleagues,
students, counselees, and fellow psychologists in
many places around the nation and world.
Norman D. Sundberg
Richard A. Littman
Department of Psychology
University of Oregon
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