Saluting odd couplings Jack Seeley is in Toronto this week to celebrate his 90th birthday with old friends.

He came up from L.A., where he has a full-time practice of lay psychoanalysis, rich in troubled five-year-olds and multiple personality disorders.

He hasn’t lived here since the 1960s, when he left his post at newly created York University to protest against betrayal of promises by Ontario’s government. It was the first real campus upheaval of those years — against perversion of higher education and its subjugation to other agendas.

The government never got over its fury and, years later, vetoed an academic job he had been offered. He says he always considered Toronto home and wanted to return, though he grew up in Britain. But that’s another story.

The story I want to tell happened in the late 1950s when I was at Forest Hill Collegiate. We knew the Seeley name because he had authored what became a classic (and, in our community, notorious) study of Forest Hill, called Crestwood Heights.

The school system was proudly “progressive” and urged students to help enrich the program. So some of us organized a little lecture series called The Individual and Society, requiring a sociologist, a psychologist and a philosopher.

We asked Jack Seeley to kick it off with sociology, though we could also have asked him to do the psych — he taught psychiatry at U of T — but if we knew that, we probably assumed it was a different Seeley.

He agreed far faster, he said, than he would have to one of the usual international conferences.

So he spoke after school one day to our earnest young group, precursors, I guess, of middle-class schools today in which nearly all the kids get categorized as “gifted.” And proceeded, in a gentle, respectful way, to critique our whole effort.

He said he knew he was meant to deal with society as a whole, then a psychologist would handle the other pole, the individual, and a philosopher would knit them together.

But that wasn’t his sense of things, he said. Each person is social, even in their most “individual” aspects. Individuals are social realities. And the same went in reverse for society, though I don’t quite recall the argument.

What stays clear, nearly 50 years later, is a sense of him modestly challenging ideas that seemed self-evident to us, in persuasive, artful ways. It was much like the stream of articles he turned out in those years (obsessively, he once said) denying social scientists could be in any essential way separate from the problems they studied — which did not exempt them from responsibility to do the work.

The point he made has felt pertinent in this week of mad-cow, following our month of SARS, some time after Walkerton.

For years, I have hated all the debates in which people like me were expected to take a collective, social(ist) stance, against the individualists on the far right.

Anybody in power on either side who ever tried to choose one over the other has ended up making a botch. At the moment, having supposedly let individualism rip via the profit motive and greed of huge corporations, while the “social” element was pared to tiny, mocked bands of regulators, inspectors etc., we are reaping predictable results.

What left an even deeper imprint that day than his “point,” I’d say now, was the willingness of a superb mind to engage unreservedly, lacking all condescension, with a bunch of kids.

What a great intro to critical social thought. It’s a bit like the dynamic of psychotherapy: What counts far more than the actual “analysis” (Oedipal conflict, castration anxiety, whatever) is the sense of respect and confidence that the therapist or analyst shows the patient.

“What holds from the Freudian legacy,” Jack Seeley said this week, “is just three things: the unconscious, dreams and, above all, the centrality of free association.”

I know most of you have never heard of him. He repeatedly risked his shining reputation, and lost many battles, including the one at York, and one with famed academic Robert Maynard Hutchins over the fate of the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in California.

But Stan Persky recently cited (at dooneyscafe.com) the lesson gleaned by George Orwell from the Spanish Civil War: “that one can be right and yet be beaten.”

In a similar way, you can be brilliant and yet be largely overlooked, as a thinker, artist or leader. The finest leaders I ever knew were not particularly successful in their areas (politics, labour etc.). That did not make them less brilliant, or less leaders, just less successful.

Jack Seeley, in that perspective, is the smartest and also — I was going to say kindest, but I think the word is — nicest person I’ve ever known. I realize people don’t often think of those terms as near identical (like the case of society and the individual), so I just wanted to make the point.

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Rick Salutin

Rick Salutin is a Canadian novelist, playwright and critic. He is a strong advocate of left wing causes and writes a regular column in the Toronto Star.