Donald E. Polkinghorne (1936–2018).

Abstract

Presents an obituary for Donald E. Polkinghorne, who passed away on January 17, 2018. He was a gifted teacher and mentor, skilled psychotherapist. Don was hired as The Saybrook Institute's academic dean in 1975 and became its first president the following year-and served in that position for a decade. Following 3 years as professor of counseling at California State University, Fullerton, he was professor of counseling psychology at the University of Southern California School of Education, from which he retired in 2005. From 2008 until the time of his death, he was a faculty member at Fielding Graduate Institute's Media Psychology program. His Methodology for the Human Sciences: Systems of Inquiry (1983) sketched the basis for a distinctively human science fitted to the complexities and nuances of human existence. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences (1988) set the bar for scholarship in narrative psychology. Here and in his last book, Practice and the Human Sciences: The Case for a Judgment-Based Practice of Care (2004), Don explicated how expert psychotherapists use narratives to conceptualize their clients and rely on moment-to-moment intuitive judgments to guide their work. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).