Steven J. Dauer – 50th Reunion Essay

Steven J. Dauer

383 East Illinois Road

Lake Forest, IL 60045

sdauer2@gmail.com

224-277-2843

Spouse(s): Mary Saville Schulte (2016)

Education: University of Michigan, M.A. in English, 1976; University of Massachusetts, PhD. in Clinical Psychology, 1989

Career: Clinical Psychologist/Psychotherapist in university mental health and private practice for 30 years

Avocations: Travel, languages, tennis, birdwatching

College: Pierson

For many years, I had a recurrent nightmare. It always started in the same way, with a heartening sense of relief and promise. I was back at Yale for another year. My time as a student there wasn’t over. From that point, everything would go wrong. Whereas I’d been assigned a room in a residential college, I was an anonymous interloper among young strangers. Or, I hadn’t been to class and done any work, and the semester was ending. Or, I was wandering lost and despairing along dark, deserted New Haven streets.

I will confess to idealizing Yale. I believe that my educational experience was an unmatched privilege, for which I have always been grateful. In my first freshman week, I found myself ensconced in a leather couch in the Pierson College dean’s quarters, writing notes in French as fast as my hand could go, as the professor, Joe McMahon, articulated one brilliant observation after another (“La société est un grand téton”) about literature, philosophy and life. I was hooked. And that determined both my major and an incomparable junior year in Paris.

There were other luxurious armchairs within ivy-covered walls, like those in the Linonia and Brothers alcoves, where I fought sleepiness while reading assignments or handwriting papers. I made my way into small seminars in other residential colleges and took courses offered by professors famous in their fields. I fought my way back from injuries to my public high school valedictorian’s self-esteem. And I redeemed the sex-deprived loneliness of mixer weekends thanks to the Mount Holyoke coed I met in Paris, who later became my wife.

Then I began to coast. For the next 10 years or so after graduation, I traveled and lived abroad: Athens and Skyros, Greece; Tubingen, Germany; Edinburgh, Scotland (for my wife’s doctorate in phonetics), all the while pursuing old world beauty, adventure, and a cherished but naive fantasy of being a writer—though I won a Hopwood Award at University of Michigan for a book about my year on a Greek island. By the time I returned, the window for an academic career was closing. My back against the wall in my early 30s, no clear livelihood in view, I had the good sense to pursue a related dream that suited my personality and talent. After decades, I’m still at it, facilitating self-exploration through psychotherapy, while providing myself lifelong personal growth.

At age 70, I haven’t had the nightmare for quite a while. It’s not because I’ve made the most of my Yale education. On the contrary, I’ve fallen short in more ways than I care to enumerate.

Nor is it that I recently audited a couple of undergraduate classes at Yale with famous teachers and incredibly smart kids. After losing my wife, I have a new life partner. My best friend is a classmate. And I’ve accepted that I can only go forward, fortified in early old age by the love of learning and intellectual curiosity that are Yale’s unending gifts to me.