Background

Dr. Hamburg, welcome to Berkeley.

Thank you. I'm very glad to be back.

You've had a very interesting career: psychiatry, head of research institutes, and then president of a major foundation. How did your formative years point you in the direction of your life's work?

Well, a complicated question. I guess a couple of strands come to mind. In terms of medicine, I grew up in a family and a community which had very high esteem for medicine as a profession, as manifested in their attitudes toward local family doctors, toward the Mayo Clinic or what have you. So there was that aspect of it. My father was the son of an immigrant from Latvia. He had really wanted to go medical school, and indeed had wanted to do academic medicine at a time when there wasn't much academic medicine. But he had to help his father bring people over from the Old Country. The whole attitude was to bring as many family members as possible while there was still time. So he gave up that aspiration and, to some extent, I suppose it was conveyed to me. But the image of it was a very humanitarian kind of a profession.

A related aspect of it, though, that has to do with my later interest in war and peace and oppression and injustice, was that I grew up in the time of the Holocaust, and even before there was a Holocaust my grandfather, in the very beginning of the century, was deeply concerned about the fate of Jews in Europe. And the whole issue of anti-Semitism and its roots, and more broadly prejudice and ethnocentrism, were matters of considerable intellectual interest and emotional concern and perplexity in my family. And then when the Holocaust actually occurred, I recall vividly from my father in particular, not only the deep regret and horror but also intellectual curiosity: how could this happen? One of the most advanced countries in the world, Germany, where people went for advanced work in medicine and science and music and so on, how could it be that such a country could undertake such a slaughter? So I guess those are some of the strands of my early experience that certainly shaped my professional interests.

In the introduction to your book, Today's Children: Creating a Future for a Generation in Crisis, you talk about your early family life and speak about the social support that your family provided. So I'm hearing a sense of the world's problems and intellectual problems, but also a very nurturing and supportive environment.

Definitely so. And that also, I'm sure, shaped the long-term interest in social support networks and the like. My grandfather came here alone as a pushcart peddler without the English language and with great courage, and as a kid I was deeply impressed with and devoted to him. At the same time, in a way, I think it heightened his appreciation of what it means to have a supportive family and a supportive community. I wrote in Today's Children about how their house on Second Street in Evansville, Indiana, was always open. It was open to the family. We'd drop in two or three nights a week; at any given time there was some configuration of family members present, and the message was, "You're always welcome here. We have certain shared interests and values and we have to prop each other up, particularly in times of stress."

And also exchanges of information.

Very much so. It was like an information pool, and you could draw upon it. Everyone in the family would have something to put in, and it was shared. And it could help you in taking advantage of opportunities or whatever might arise.

What books did you read as a young person that influenced you?

Well, I read a lot of current events and a lot of contemporary history. I was very much focused on the here and now. And then, American novels -- particularly in high school and college. I was very fascinated with this set of American novelists, Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck, Dos Passos and to some extent Hemingway, to a lesser extent Faulkner. It was interesting; American history and American novelists of that period really were the focus of my attention.

Where did you go to college?

Indiana University.

And then on to medical school. You discussed why you chose medicine, but what about psychiatry? Why did you wind up, do you think, specializing in psychology?

Well, there was really a prior step of "why science?" Because although my father had an interest in academic medicine, there was very little about science in my home town. At any rate, whatever there was hadn't rubbed off on me particularly. But in a kind of busman's holiday fashion, I took an elective course in the then-emerging science of genetics -- mainly because I heard that the teacher was terrific, although I thought it was fascinating, somehow or another, that species would replicate themselves. The subject matter did intrigue me, but it was more the teacher. Professor Tracy Sonneborn turned out to be one of the pioneers of modern genetics and a brilliant teacher, an inspiration to me. He turned me on to science, and from then on the inherited intellectual curiosity that had been reinforced in the family was shifted to the scientific mode of inquiry as well as the subject matter of genetics and the then-emerging modern biology. So that really altered what I would do in medicine.

I extended the interest that was premedical in genetics to an interest in cellular physiology in medical school, again because of an excellent teacher, Professor Steer. And then to mammalian physiology and the physiology of the whole organism: how do the cells fit in the body? The body couldn't be just a collection of cells; they had, so to say, to talk to each other.

Then in my senior year in medical school I read Freud's General Introductory Lectures. I had always had curiosity about behavior for a number of reasons; some of it was family reasons: the nature of family relationships were much talked about and gossiped about at home. But also because of this Holocaust issue and the prior anti-Semitism in Russia. All of that had piqued my curiosity about why human beings behave as they do. So when I read Freud's General Introductory Lectures, it gave me a sense that there might be some organized, systematic way of inquiring into human behavior, and I even wondered if you could then relate it to human biology in some way. It was just a question in my mind in medical school, but what I actually saw in fact in psychology was very depressing ... very depressing. In some respects the city hospital is more like a prison than medical treatment. So I had to go on later in my career to find out whether there was more to psychiatry than that, and was there a way to really understand more about human behavior through psychiatry.

What years were you in medical school?

I graduated in 1947. There was a wartime speed-up, and indeed the army sent me to medical school because the army wanted as many doctors as possible as soon as possible. I was very lucky in that respect because we didn't have a lot of money in my family and the army paid for my medical education, or most of it. And then, I'm sure that the reports of stress in wartime experience also shaped my interest toward psychiatry. The single key event after Freud's lectures was reading a book by Roy Grinker and John Speigel called Men under Stress: Combat Reactions. I was lucky enough to get to go and have an internship with Roy Grinker and John Speigel. And that was the final thing that led me into psychiatry.

And what was your main focus in psychiatry? Human aggression?

Well initially it was stress responses. It was really the biology and psychology of human stress responses, undoubtedly the influence of the wartime experience. Grinker made a number of clinical observations about reactions to stress, severe and prolonged stress, and I began to be curious how you could find out more about that. And so, for a variety of complicated reasons, I went for a year to Yale with the notion of coming back to Grinker the following year in Chicago. And during that year at Yale I heard a lecture by a Hungarian émigré from Canada, Hans Seyle, a pioneer in the endocrinology of stress, the hormonal reactions to stress, particularly the hormones of the adrenal cortex, although there was prior work by the great Harvard physiologist, Walter Kennon, on the adrenal medulla's response to stress. So I began getting into that line of work, and as I proceeded with that line of work, I got very much interested in how it was that people cope with stressful experiences. So those two lines went along, mostly in parallel, sometimes intersecting. Coping behavior on the one hand, and the biological responses, mainly hormonal but also to some extent cardiovascular and other biological responses to stress.

And you maintained all this time a broader interest in society and the context in which these conditions occurred?

Yes. Mostly in the back of my mind, at least professionally, but in the front of my mind personally. Avidly following the wartime and postwar developments, being appalled by, as the news came out, the actual events of the Holocaust being even worse than we had anticipated. And many other things of that sort. The question of how a postwar structure could be created that might prevent World War III. Those things interested me as a citizen, but I had no professional involvement with them. However, as I went along with the stress interest, it was true as you suggested a moment ago, that a branch off the stress tree is human aggressiveness and conflict resolution. Surely among the most stressful, difficult and troubling of all human experiences are those that involve aggression, violence, conflict. And so gradually the attention I paid to that aspect of stress response increased over the years.

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