Upon reading Dr. Robert Brooks’s alumni magazine tribute to his mentor and friend Baruch Professor John Bauer, Richard Friedman (’72) recalled his own experience of the popular professor. Friedman’s tribute is not as Brooks’s was—based on years as a student and mentee—but on having Dr. Bauer as a one-day substitute in the psychology class “Interviewing Techniques.” Friedman’s anecdote below underscores just how memorable Bauer was, after 40-plus years and one college class later.
In the early 1970s, the late Professor John Bauer served as a one-day substitute in my psychology class Interviewing Techniques. The recent tribute to him by my fellow alumnus Dr. Robert Brooks (’64) sparking my memory of that day. Dr. Brooks described how Professor Bauer encouraged him to achieve success in the field of psychology.
Yet his article—poignant as it was—missed the thrust of what made Bauer so popular and well regarded among the students. In essence, it was his dynamic, sometimes blunt way of communicating psychological principles and concepts in the classroom.
On that particular day, the well-known, high-profile “substitute” discussed the concept of transference, which occurs in the patient-therapist relationship and by which the patient makes the therapist the object of emotional response. Bauer bluntly and somewhat humorously pointed out that if a therapist were to ask a patient what s/he likes about the therapist, the answer may be disarming. Said Bauer, “He will say, ‘I like your big [expletive deleted].’” That question and its ilk, presupposing a different dynamic, isn’t advisable, memorably advised the professor.
That was John Bauer.
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He Asked the Right Questions: Dr. Robert Brooks (’64) Remembers Professor John Bauer