Abstract:

Mezirow was introduced to Gould’s ideas in the mid-1970s, when the latter was practicing psychiatry at UCLA Outpatient and Community Psychiatry Center. At that time, Mezirow was in the early stages developing his theory of transformation and became particularly interested in the work that Gould was carrying out with psychodynamic groups in psychiatric settings. In 1980, Mezirow was granted a Teacher’s College sabbatical and was invited by Gould to spend some months as a counsellor in his laboratory. Gould and Mezirow had distinct routes and professional origins that are important to bear in mind in any type of comparison or analogue that one would like to draw. Gould was a psychiatrist and an expert in adult developmental psychology. He was not involved in educational theory. At the time he met Mezirow, Gould was focusing his research interests on the developmental stages of adult life through group observation methods and analyses that included life narratives of psychiatrists, treatment staff, and patients with mental health problems. These studies formed the basis of Gould’s theory of individual change and perhaps his most significant theoretical contribution on developmental psychology and adult theory of change. Later, Gould (1990, 1995, 1996) developed a computer-assisted self-help Therapeutic Learning Program (TLP) focused on the treatment of eating disorders and the anxiety that is associated with them. The program was accompanied in 2008 by the publication of the self-help manual Shrink Yourself (Gould, 2008), that was widely accepted in the United States, where eating disorders seem to be a major concern. Gould’s theory on adult developmental stages and subsequent transformations exerted an important influence on Mezirow’s concept of perspective transformation. Therefore, the relationship between Gould and Mezirow deserves attention in a volume dedicated to Transformation Theory.

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