Osborne P. Wiggins, Jr., PhD, 1943–2021 John Z. Sadler Click for larger view View full resolution Friends, family, and the Association of the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry (AAPP) community mourn the death of Osborne "Ozzie" Wiggins this past May 18. In many ways, his story contributes a large portion to the founding of the AAPP, this journal, and the philosophy/psychiatry community worldwide. I met Professor Wiggins as a sophomore at Southern Methodist University in Dallas in 1974. I was a student in his twentieth-century humanities class. I didn't know at the time that he was in his early years as an academic, having recently obtained his PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research in New York. Moreover, I hadn't yet encountered a teacher who was so audacious as to tell his students on the first day of class: "This class will change the way you see the world." It didn't happen that day. However, I did view the world differently by the time the semester was over. In retrospect, Wiggins inculcated his students, and me, into what I later learned was the "phenomenological attitude" (Natanson, 1973). At the time, I would have described this change as the suspension of the impulse to judge my experiences, and instead, cultivate an attitude of ongoing openness to experience. I moved away from my adolescent critical attitude, and toward one informed by continuous curiosity, a contemplative stance where appraisals required no hurry, and the unfolding of experience was not just a way to knowledge and wisdom, but a source of joy and renewal. He was one of those professors you read about but seldom encounter, ones who "touch lives." I was a kid who knew his vocational path, however naively, from my teens. I sought out Wiggins because of his apparent interest in psychology and mental illness. He welcomed me into his office and I shared, tentatively, my belief that people with mental illness had "philosophical problems" and that philosophy was a way for people with mental illness to "figure out how to live." Rather [End Page 291] than the bemusement that I had feared, Professor Wiggins told me this made a lot of sense, and told me about his dissertation research at the New School, a phenomenological examination of the developmental psychology of Jean Piaget under his mentor's guidance, Aron Gurwitsch. Thus began a lifetime of mentorship, friendship, collaboration, and collegiality with me. In my meetings with Wiggins over my remaining years at SMU, he told me about his undergraduate years at Lamar State College where he initially majored in music performance. He was a promising bassist and jazz arranger/composer. However, he realized early that he did not have the "stuff" to succeed in the art/music world; he was already chagrined at Charles Mingus' extraordinary music, the brilliant corners of Thelonious Monk's compositions, and this new player with Chick Corea's band, Stanley Clarke, who had seemingly impossible technique on the double bass. Instead of music, Wiggins turned to philosophy. However, his aesthetic sense and skills were always sharp, and much of what I have learned about jazz I learned from Ozzie. We have shared this joy in music in general, and jazz in particular, over both our lifetimes. Years passed, and the next time Wiggins changed my life was when I was a freshly trained psychiatrist starting out my career in academic medicine. The year was 1986, and I was busy earning my keep as an medical educator, a consultation–liaison psychiatrist, and maintaining a small outpatient practice. Since college, my academic dream had been to explore the relationships between philosophy and psychiatry, but in the hurly-burly of my new career, I was discouraged. I had no colleagues, no community, and few prospects. Then that October, the cover article of the "green journal," The American Journal of Psychiatry, was an article by Michael Alan Schwartz and Osborne P. Wiggins, with a convoluted but intriguing title (Schwartz & Wiggins, 1986a). The bald fact that the top journal in American psychiatry was publishing a philosophical article hit me like a bucketful of cold water. I remember telling myself "it...
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Mar 1, 2021
Kenneth Parker 
Open Access