Remembering Roy Kern

Remembering Roy Kern Len Sperry, Kelly Gfroerer, Gary Bauman, Susan Belangee, Paul R. Peluso, Paul R. Rasmussen, and William Curlette Dr. Roy Kern: As I Remember Him -Len Sperry This special section recounts five decades of memories of Roy Kern, including remembrances of academic collaborations and personal time together. The section also highlights Dr. Kern’s major contributions to Adlerian psychology research and practice. My training at the adler institute of chicago began after i finished my PhD at Northwestern University and started an academic career. I was quite eager to connect with similar Adlerians in a university setting. Since the 1970s were the heyday in the United States of Adlerian psychology, it was not surprising that there were at least two dozen potential colleagues with similar interests. Of these, one name that stood out: that of a young Adlerian from a university in Atlanta, that is, Roy M. Kern, EdD. At the time I never would have imagined that our lives would have intersected as much as they did over the next 50 years. BEGINNINGS My first connection with Roy was in 1972 at the annual conference of Region III of the then American Society of Adlerian Psychology. For years this conference was held in Orlando, Florida, during February, and it attracted large numbers particularly snow-bound Northerners like me. On the first day of the conference, Jon Carlson and I were heading into a nearby restaurant for lunch just as an enthusiastic group was exiting. Jon said: “That’s Roy Kern from Georgia State University and that bevy of folks with him are his graduate students.” Needless to say, there was an engaging energy about Roy, an energy that persisted over the years. Later that day we formally met and conversed privately. After sharing our professional interests, we quickly found ourselves planning one of our first collaborations. Boy, I sure did not expect that! When I reflect on that day, the film Catch Me If You Can comes to mind. There is a scene in that movie in which Leonardo DiCaprio, dressed in [End Page 3] a captain’s uniform, leads a bevy of Pan American Airlines flight attendants through Miami International Airport and past the FBI team trying to apprehend him. I cannot help but recall Roy buoyantly emerging from that restaurant with his bevy of grad students. Of course, he was not using others or evading anyone at those meetings, but he sure got the attention of conference-goers and effectively advertised his university program. For his Georgia State program, Roy earned the reputation of attracting, mentoring, and graduating some of the best and brightest doctoral students. He valued professional organizations and expected his students to attend their conferences. Today, some professional organizations of psychologists and counselors give an award to the university and faculty member who brought the most graduate students to a conference. If there were such an award back then, Roy and Georgia State would have won it for every year of that Adlerian conference. COLLABORATIONS Some of the professional projects that we undertook together involved research, publications, and journal editing. We were both concerned about promoting Individual Psychology and knew that expanding empirical research was essential for that to happen. Because we both directed the research of master’s and doctoral students we could influence the quality of their research. Roy was planning his first book, A Case for Adlerian Counseling: Theory, Techniques, and Research Evidence (Kern et al., 1978) but was having difficulty finding authors to develop chapters for the book’s fourth part, “New Directions in Designing Counseling Research.” As research methodology was one of my areas, he persuaded me—gently, as I recall—to write a chapter on cutting-edge research methods useful in testing the constructs of the Adlerian approach. While that chapter was completed in 1975, it was not until 1978 that the book was published. To Roy’s credit, it was the first book on Adlerian outcome research and research methods. Our mutual interest in research continued over the years, and Roy often asked for my involvement in consulting on the dissertation research of his students and other students in his doctoral...