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Contact Jack Dresser

A Short Autobiography

Professional

Following graduate school in clinical psychology at LSU where I was active in the civil rights movement, I served for five years as an army psychologist during the Vietnam War, stationed at Letterman General Hospital in San Francisco and Madigan General Hospital in Tacoma, where I was Chief Psychologist with the rank of Captain. In this position I provided diagnostic evaluations of brain injuries and psychological impairments, conducted group, individual and family psychotherapies for Army, Navy and Air Force personnel and their dependents as well as retired veterans, and provided expert testimony regarding mental status for courts martial and other disciplinary boards.

During a decade and a half of subsequent clinical practice, PTSD was increasingly identified among veterans of Vietnam and other wars and became increasingly visible to me and other clinicians. The profound and enduring impact of combat experience cannot be understated, coloring the veteran’s entire social and psychological functioning.  I made extensive use of family systems theory and transactional analysis in my treatment, and often observed that, in the words of one wife of a returned veteran, “the whole family comes to suffer PTSD.”  Combat is a moral world turned upside down, the memories, feelings and images of which are virtually impossible to integrate with civilian life, to reconcile with the formative moral codes of church and childhood, or to express to those who lack, in the words of civil war veteran and Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, “the incommunicable experience of war.”  These effects are similar to the life-warping effects of early childhood traumata such as sexual abuse -- experiences that are at once indigestible, emotionally overwhelming, incommunicable, and isolating from “normal” life.  As a result, their memories are typically repressed to permit the veteran to function, but repression has its own costs and can result in a wide variety of dysfunctions. These, as well as brain injuries, are the invisible disabilities of war, evoking less sympathy and tolerance than the veteran in the wheel chair, but are often no less compromising to the survivor’s quality of life.

Effective psychotherapy with trauma victims is not simple, short-term or “behavioral” in emphasis.  It cannot be done at a safe emotional distance.  Trauma victims cannot return alone to the gates of hell through which they once passed, never to fully return and therefore never to fully heal.  This is what impelled Lt. John Kerry and others to establish the VVAW, to meet and share their terrible truths in Detroit, to march upon Washington, and to deliver the ringing testimony before Sen. Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee that every American should read in its entirety.

Therapy with many trauma victims over many years is profoundly draining, and the needs generated by our violent and often uncaring society seem bottomless.  And one must always wonder why.  Was all this pain necessary?  Could these horrific events not have been prevented?  From this I developed a strong belief in prevention focusing on the influence of social systems, the avoidance and early treatment of formative traumatic experiences, and the healing potential of open communication within close relationships.  As Program Director of a seven-clinic southern California agency from 1982-88, I developed and administered an array of substance abuse prevention and intervention programs applying these principles. These included prevention programs in multi-ethnic school districts and treatment programs for both adult and juvenile court-mandated clients as alternatives to incarceration.

From 1989 to the present I have worked in Oregon as a behavioral research scientist, serving as principal investigator on some dozen research projects in the areas of primary prevention and early intervention in school districts and communities, and alcohol harm reduction including prevention of driving under the influence and fetal alcohol exposure.  I do many community presentations, am published in peer-reviewed journals, and have presented numerous papers on my work at national and international conferences.

Alarmed by the forces of dysfunctional collective behavior in our own and other societies throughout history, I have extended the application of transactional analysis to an understanding of cultural and political phenomena, with a book on this subject in progress.  Each culture displays the common denominators of humankind, but like a series of funhouse mirrors, each distorts the image in its own way.  Most have at least one Achilles heel, a potentially tragic flaw that can lead to its undoing. In my view, our culture is in serious need of preventive treatment. There are deeply irrational, destructive forces loose in our land that gravely imperil us. Our government is recklessly courting its own and our destruction while much of the public remains oblivious, entranced by the witch’s magic wand of deceptive words and images.  Hubris is America’s collective flaw, blinding its citizens to the self-destructive megalomania of leaders who wear that flaw as virtue. While the unbewitched world sees with alarm a treacherous Richard III in the White House, myth-soaked Americans see a Wyatt Earp standing between them and a band of outlaws riding into town. Thus is madness perceived as mythic. The treatment, like the goal of all dynamic therapy, is the discovery, exposure and acceptance of truth, but an entranced media colludes in concealing reality.  When an individual, family, organization, or society cannot see reality, disaster becomes sooner or later inevitable.

The reading list (Information Armory) posted on this site provides a vast reservoir of well-documented and damning information on Bush, Cheney, and their administration.  Unfortunately, however, only 5% of the U.S. population reads books.  This is why I’ve distilled critically important information into highly condensed formats, also found elsewhere on this site, for use in spreading it as widely and intelligibly as possible and limiting the damage as best we can.
 

Personal

I live by one of Oregon’s designated “wild and scenic” rivers, where I take long walks daily with my wife Janice, a community journalist, and our wonderful dog, a loving, luminous being of matchless agility rescued from the Humane Society, who races back and forth in the hallway with uncontainable joy when she sees us putting on our walking shoes.  Our two contented cats prefer to stay home in the sun or by the fire.

I have five grown children from my first marriage (four biological, one step).  One daughter has followed her dad’s scholarly but pragmatic footsteps and is a J.D. and law school librarian.  One son is a writer, so the least a father can do is to plug his first book, The Power of Stillness, a 30-day self-training program in meditation.  He uses his middle name, Tobin Blake, as a nom de plume.

I also moonlight as a travel photographer, with a worldwide portfolio of images captured on extended trips Janice and I attach with mutual relish to my conference presentations.  Great films are another mutual pleasure, and we have over 900 films taped from our satellite dish.  Our house is packed with books and art, with furniture and appliances of clearly secondary importance.

My dad was a small businessman and both my grandfathers were independent business owners, so a bit of entrepreneurship is in my blood.  Drawn by this inner lure, and consistent with my own tastes and interests, I developed and owned a restaurant.  It featured the best of American culture: jazz and blues, great American artworks under glass on each table, and “the three great cuisines of America” – New Orleans, Santa Fe, and southern pit barbecue.  Having lived in Louisiana, done research for many years in New Mexico, and received training from a national champion pit master, we had superb recipes.  Although I had to give it up due to its unsupportable time demands while simultaneously directing research projects, we were listed after only one year of business in the book, Great Places in the Northwest.

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