Ralph M. Reitan: A Singular Career

Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 30 (2015) 748–750 Special Article Ralph M. Reitan: A Singular Career Kenneth M. Adams1,2 1 VA Ann Arbor Healthcare System and Department of Psychiatry, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA 2 Department of Psychology, The University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA E-mail address: . Accepted 5 October 2015 Ralph M. Reitan (1922– 2014) passed away last August after a long illness. He has had from any psychologist’s perspective, a “good run.” I am appreciative of the opportunity to make some brief observations about his origins and impact as I see them. One could write a great deal about this, but since precision and economy of communication was a particular trait prized by Ralph; I will try to honor that here. I offer these comments with personal perspective, affection, and appreciation for Ralph’s life. I owe him a great debt of thanks (along with Phillip M. Rennick) for my understanding of what clinical neuropsychology was in the past, is now, and can become. Reitan was and is an ascendant, important, sustained, and protean influence on people in our field, and in related fields of medicine. He entered into psychology from modest origins. Here was a young man who was a graduate (along with others like journalist Mike Royko) of the Chicago Central YMCA High School for Boys—then thereafter rising after undergraduate to entering graduate study at the University of Chicago. Heady stuff even if you can do the career thought-experiment today. Reitan’s education and maturation as a psychologist first came to fruition in one of the most remarkable departmental environments that psychology has ever seen in terms of “a garden of talents” in Chicago in the late 1940s and 1950s. The University of Chicago at that time had some of the most forward-thinking and innovative psychologists in the country in experimental, physiological, social, developmental,. . ., and even clinical, but that was still pretty spooky then. Reitan’s principal mentors, Ward Halstead and Louis Thurstone, were clearly immersed, steeped, and versed, in the two most exciting areas of psychology (then or now): Physiological/Experimental Psychology and Mathematical/Methodological Psychology. Halstead’s own mentor and progenitor was none other than Karl Lashley. Halstead’s dissertation concerned itself with experiments on postrotational nystagmus in pigeons. Thanks to the generosity of Halstead’s last graduate student, Helen Hughes, it sits on my bookshelf. Heinrich Klüver, a physiological psychologist, was also part of this psychology community trying to understand psychological processes mediated by the brain, mostly in animals but also in conjunction with serious neurosurgical scientist/practitioners (masters) such as Paul Bucy and Oscar Sugar. This intellectual impact of Chicago on Ralph was as stunning as it was clear; and he saw his way forward to operationalize and improve all that Halstead had done in his groundbreaking, unprecedented collaborations with neurosurgeons who saw what he was doing as indispensable knowledge. It was equally true for Thurstone’s multivariate insights and advanced algorithms that Ralph learned—that mathematically were about to be much more possible and accessible with the advent of mechanical and electromechanical calculators. Ralph was a beneficiary of all this great influence as well. Ralph as a student and thereafter participated in computational exercises that took days, employed banks of mechanical calculators (Monroe, Burroughs, and other brands) clacking away only one pull at a time with single pieces of paper being taken from one place on the work room table to another (NO SPSS/SAS/etc.). Days of devoted labor to do a single factor analysis. A lot of thought about every step and calculation. We take a lot for granted these days without ever even comparing outputs from different packages. We no longer have the competence to look under the hood of the algorithms, Ralph would observe. # The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: . doi:10.1093/arclin/acv071 K.M. Adams / Archives of Clinical Neuropsychology 30 (2015); 748–750 749 Thurstone and all the great tradition of the Chicago statistical, measurement, and psychometric mountain of talent suffused his work. It is plain as a pikestaff to all those who have worked and studied with him. Case in point. Who other than Reitan would have used linear discriminant functions as he did with Wheeler with his direction in 1963 in a complex cross-validation study (Wheeler & Reitan, 1963)? Reitan made Halstead’s empirical approach practical in trying to discriminate between cases having well-documented brain-impaired conditions directly (and correctly) contrasted with those patients who did not have such impairment but who were fully comparable. Out of all of this rich intellectual environment Ralph developed a unique vision of the inevitability of psychology as the backbone to guide our discoveries about the human brain as it behaves and misbehaves in our actual behavior. Not yielding, toadying or anything else at its core. I have seen him actualize in his work in that exact way over many decades (Adams, 1987). So many of us get distracted by siren songs outside of this verity; imagining that squiggles and pixels and voxels actually equal behavior. Ralph launched so many of the careers of leaders in our field. Those fortunate enough to have studied under his direct supervision in his practice learned valuable clinical lessons, but they also assimilated a framework for inquiry and understanding about brain– behavior relationships. Indeed, “Brain– Behavior Relationships” was Ralph’s signature term. It was and remains “pitch perfect” for what we have intellectually researched, clinically established, and have endeavored to teach in our professoriate. It is not cognitive neuroscience. Wrong idea, wrong precedence, wrong order Ralph might say. While Ralph was not thinking of clinical neuropsychology as a scientific specialty, he nonetheless created postdoctoral fellowships and studentships in which he taught the neuropsychological (not only neuromedical) substrate of neuropsychology. Two of my dearest colleagues, Igor Grant and Robert Heaton, were lucky beneficiaries of those opportunities. I think what happened from Ralph’s mentorship for them speaks for itself. And for many others. Schooling a couple dozen or so seriously productive stars in our field and writing prolifically on neuropsychological topics would have been enough for most. But not for Ralph Reitan. Remarkably, he set out to do the same thing equally in teaching workaday psychologists an approach to clinical neuropsychology that our patients and field needed so badly. He also made clinical neuropsychology attainable by all—from apprentice to master levels. Virtually, none of our neuropsychology tribe took the path that Ralph did; offering reasona (...truncated)