I met Rudolf Arnheim in April 1971 when he was teaching at Harvard University and I was a 24-yearold art therapist at Danvers State Hospital north of Boston. I had just been admitted into the Goddard College masters program. Goddard had a new independent study system that emphasized field experience and individualized study coordinated by a Goddard professor and a mentor selected by the student. Although my psychiatric supervisors were skilled and helpful guides in the treatment of patients, they knew nothing about art and creative arts therapy. I needed an advisor who could help me clinically underst~d what art does in therapy and I desired a relationship with someone who was interested in the broad philosophy, history and psychology of creative expression. I sent for the catalogues of all the local colleges and universities-Boston College, Boston University, Brandeis, Harvard, The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts, Wellesley-and wrote to professors teaching art, aesthetics and even art history. I must have written to 20 people. Amheim and his books were in a league of their own not only in Boston but in the world that recognized him as the century’s foremost authority on the psychology of art. He had a special professorship at Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. I felt there was no chance of interesting Rudolf Amheim in what I was doing on the back wards of a state hospital. And why would an eminent professor at Harvard want to do anything with an irregular student from a tiny and most irregular experimental college? I said to myself, “It can’t hurt to send a letter.” I felt that, though I was overstepping my station in life, there was no harm in trying a Hail Mary pass through the mail. Little did I know how unlike the stereotypic “eminent professor” Rudolf Amheim would turn out to be. His lifework was more sympathetic to my divergent interests than I realized at the time. His own career and vision of integrating the completely separate professions of art and scientific psychology were no more unusual than my attempts to link different disciplines. To this day it amazes me that Amheim was the only person who answered my letter. The first of many lessons I learned from Rudolf Amheim concerns responding to mail. I don’t measure up to his standard as a coKes~ndent, but whenever someone writes and soulfully describes what they are doing in their work, I try to reply, guided by the memory of what he did for me. When I first visited Amheim at Harvard he made a point of introducing me to the Carpenter Center complex designed by Le Corbusier and completed in 1963. The building appeared to be an intimate friend, a living thing for Amheim whose office was housed in this temple of modernism. I imagined him receiving an aesthetic infusion each day from the building and its dramatic expression. For the next two years I had a personal tutorial with Amheim that feit like an induction into Valhalla. He was carefully attuned to the nuances of what I brought to his office and always generous with his time and guidance. He wrote a letter introducing me to Margaret Naumburg whom he wanted me to meet. When I showed an interest in Hans Prinzhom’s Bildnerei der ~eisteskranke~, which was not yet available in English, he re-read the original German edition (1922) and gave me summaries of chapters in our meetings. Amheim’s interest in the details of patients’ art was illuminating. He responded passionately and curiously to every image and it felt as though we were