Freedom Summer’s Shrink: Remembering Robert Coles

The esteemed psychiatrist—and New Republic contributor—urged moral intelligence and alertness to life’s confounding specificity.

A famous figure who lives a very long life risks outliving his fame. That was the case for Robert Coles, the celebrated child psychiatrist and social critic, who died earlier this week at age 97. From the 1960s through the 1990s, Coles was revered by succeeding generations of young people (including mine) for his empathic writings about everyday experience in an America divided by race and class. Many of these writings first appeared in The New Republic, where Coles was for many years a contributing editor. 

I encountered Coles in the spring of 1979 when, as a Harvard junior, I took his wildly popular lecture course, Soc. Sci. 33: Moral and Social Inquiry. Coles was a campus celebrity, profiled the year before on the cover of The New York Times Magazine, and not especially admired by his academic colleagues because he lacked “rigor.” (Coles returned the disdain by heaping scorn on the social sciences for being too abstracted from the meat and gristle of everyday life.) Drawing on an eclectic and compelling reading list—George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by James Agee and Walker Evans, essays by Simone Weil, short stories by Flannery O’Connor—Coles urged his votaries to lead lives that made moral sense. He didn’t tell us exactly how to go about it, but he made clear we would find no spiritual refreshment on Wall Street. 

Coles also warned his compatriots on the political left against ideological complacency. A veteran of social movements regarding civil rights, Appalachian poverty, and migrant farmers, Coles told the Harvard Crimson in 1968 that “I’m very worried about the dangers of a kind of political activity that ignores the ironies and ambiguities of life, including political life.” For example:

The [predominantly Black low-income] people in Roxbury—regardless of what the leaders of SDS or I have to think about it—want to get into the system rather than leave it. The families I work with want to be able to get better service at the Boston City Hospital, they want garbage collection more frequently, they want better heating, they want welfare workers who will help them out. They are not going to take to the streets in order to storm the Winter Palace—there is no Winter Palace to storm.

The [predominantly Black low-income] people in Roxbury—regardless of what the leaders of SDS or I have to think about it—want to get into the system rather than leave it. The families I work with want to be able to get better service at the Boston City Hospital, they want garbage collection more frequently, they want better heating, they want welfare workers who will help them out. They are not going to take to the streets in order to storm the Winter Palace—there is no Winter Palace to storm.

In his excellent Coles obituary in The Boston Globe, David Shribman writes about Coles’s devotion to what he called in medias res, a literary term that describes a narrative........

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