ABSTRACT
Lewis decided that I should become an academic child psychiatrist and that in order to do this I would have to go to the USA to work with psychologists who could teach me about development. I was not at all sure that I wanted to do child psychiatry and I noted that one of the conditions laid down by Lewis was that I should never undertake training in child psychiatry (because it was generally poor at that time and, most especially, because it was taught in a way that inhibited creativity and original
thought). Indeed, I never have been formally trained in child psychiatry. I was excited by the possibility of training in developmental psychology and I chose to work with Herb Birch in New York (along with Alex Thomas and Stella Chess) on their developmental study of child temperament. Herb was also a polymath, who initially worked on studies of great apes but then moved to abnormal child development and, whilst a professor of psychology at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, went through medical school, alarming his teachers with the provocative and penetrating questions that he asked on everything.
