Tom and His Passion

Tom was (and still is) one of the persons I know, one single thought of whom makes you smile and warms your heart. He was a truly “good guy” of the Humanistic Psychology community, being an example of what true humanist looks like. I have always had an impression that Tom was its eternal, inalienable pillar. We know that humans are no way eternal, but Tom’s spirit will stay with us far beyond his earthly life.

I met him first at the late 1980s when, inspired by Gorbachev’s perestroika, “civil diplomacy” emerged: many groups of public used to visit USSR just to establish contacts at the individual level between former enemy states. AHP was one of the most active organizations in this field, and Tom was one of the most active and partial of its members. Since then we started to communicate. In the 1990s, I met him twice at Saybrook which I was lucky to visit; in 2007, I visited his house in LA; in Summer 2010, he (suddenly, on his own decision and at his own expense) undertook a transatlantic flight to Moscow to speak at the 4th National conference on existential psychology I was organizing in Moscow. It was adventurous; he was late for the return flight and spent a few more days in my house.

His motivation of this adventure was a passion and mission of his late decades, associated with the fate of Lev Zasetsky, Soviet military officer, who was heavily wounded at WW2 and lost about one quarter of his brain. Neuropsychologists did much to restore his brain and his world, and Alexander Luria has written a book on this case. Zasetsky lived up to 1993. Tom was attracted by existential aspects of Zasetsky’s life and passionately dreamed of making a movie on his life. He was actively supported by Michael Cole and Oliver Sacks; Russian psychologist Alexei Matyushkin visited Zasetsky’s home and obtained his journals, a well-known Russian scientific journalist Karl Levitin composed a screenplay. During his visit to Moscow, Tom spoke at this project at the conference, met some film directors. Sadly, the project did not move much and now I can’t imagine who can complete it.

Last time I met him in Summer 2018, when after a conference in Vancouver and a lecture in San Francisco I decided to fly back home via LA to visit Tom. He was quite weak, but inspired as always. And light was with him, as always.

Then I communicated with him only online, mostly through his poems he kept sending around. His poems are something very special, combining extreme simplicity and top complexity. My good friend Viktor Kagan, prominent psychotherapist and renowned poet, translated a number of Tom’s poems into Russian and completed this work just in this year to put the translation to Tom’s grave. Let your enlightened and passionate spirit be with us, Tom!