Alumni in the Spotlight

John Richer, Class of 1964

John Richer (class of 1964), shares his fascinating career with us and talks about the Trinity values he has taken through life with him.

You have described your time at Trinity as happy and fun, where you felt safe and encouraged. What lessons or character traits did Trinity instil in you that you have carried though life?

The founder of the Jesuit Order, Saint Ignatius Loyola, is quoted as saying, “Give me a child till he is seven years old, and I will show you the man.” As much child development research finds, the early years are vital. But that does not mean that schooling in the secondary years is unimportant. Far from it. But it does mean that children come to their secondary years already with certain dispositions which impact on their behaviour and that behaviour affects how that person is treated by others. We partly make our own social environments. But not entirely. A mixture of good luck and particular peers and teachers and general ethos of a school can steer a young person’s development, especially in those areas that are developing in adolescence: abstract moral values, societal beliefs, interests in certain areas of knowledge, quality of intellectual thought and so on.

At Trinity there was of course the usual grind of having to learn stuff for exams, but this was lightened by enthusiastic, charismatic, and clear teachers, (despite one French teacher having an execrable accent!). The background ethos was one of relaxed but focussed learning where we were simply expected to do well, but it was not hyper competitive and there was not, as I recall, much denigration of those less able. There were too, as there are now, numerous societies and other after school activities.

So, we grew up in a school environment that was nurturing, kindly, and interesting but which expected high standards academically and ethically. As to lessons which I carried with me, they involve the idea that a world which embodies Trinity’s values and ethos is worth striving for.

John aged 11

When you reflect on your varied career, what aspects have you found the most rewarding and the most challenging?

All have had their positive and negative aspects.

As a child clinical psychologist there is the privilege and interest, usually denied to purely academic researchers, of learning about the inside story of the lives of others, which is combined with the satisfaction of trying to help them. There is the frustration of not being able to do enough, and not knowing how to help. There is the challenge of trying to produce the maximum of benefit in the minimum of NHS time. There is the pleasure of teaching and mentoring students and addressing audiences of parents or colleagues or via TV or radio. There is the guilt and stress of the long waiting list, sometimes as long as a child has lived. This has got worse in the last decade as the government gradually underfunds and so undermines the NHS.

A research ethologist. Ethology is a branch of zoology and is defined as the biological study of behaviour. Humans are just one amongst a myriad of species which ethologists study. It is different from psychology and focuses on trying to understand observable behaviour in everyday environments. As a research ethologist there is the absorbing interest in one’s subject (in my case child behaviour, especially autistic behaviour), the development of new ideas, the communication with colleagues around the world, presenting ideas at conferences or in papers and getting feedback and learning from that, the feeling that one is offering ideas to many which may, or may not, be helpful and advance a field. There is the frustration at the slowness of it, the (sometimes justifiable) nit picking and ivory tower mentality of some scientists, and of having to plough through numerous tedious scientific papers. One colleague once called me a maverick, which has positive and negative aspects. The negative ones related to my view that much psychology was both non-science and nonsense, which meant that many standard psychology methods were not ones I wanted to use. The positive aspect was that I was different from the mainstream, although supported by many likeminded colleagues around the world and we felt we were helping to develop a more coherent, more useful science of human behaviour.

I fell by chance into the commercial field for three reasons, to make money (let’s be honest), secondly it was different, fun, fast and required a different way of thinking from clinical and research work and, thirdly, to introduce human science ideas into the commercial arena.

I started the expert witness work late in my career. I see that job as offering the court an understanding of the case to help them help the children. The reward is the interest in the cases and being able to apply one’s knowledge to the benefit of the child and to explain that in court if need be. The frustration is dealing with combative barristers who try and impugn one’s competence, although it is sometimes satisfying to put their arguments down. There is, very occasionally, a clash of my ethics with court rules or a judge’s mistakes which can be unpleasant. Ethics wins.

Being a charity trustee or official in a scientific society can be interesting and one feels one is contributing, meeting new people and perhaps furthering one’s career, but the details of administration, of finance and, especially, of keeping up with government regulations are areas I find very tiring and unmotivating.

In general, the nice thing about working in different areas – clinical, research, training, business, team building (I haven’t mentioned that), administration - is that there is a refreshing and stimulating crossfertilisation of ideas and skills.

John in Arizona with a Navajo child, 1975

Your help was instrumental in the renowned well-known Persil Campaign “Dirt is Good”. How does a clinical psychologist become involved in something like that?

As I said, I fell by chance into the commercial field after being contacted by someone who had heard of my work designing playrooms for autistic children. I gradually developed contacts, became a director of a friend’s company in London and later started my own small company whose aim was to bring the fruits of the human sciences into the commercial area. I presented at business conferences in the UK and Europe. That profile led to me being contacted to help companies develop background research to support their various endeavours. This usually also involved a series of interviews on radio or with print journalists. Examples were research into children’s play for a charity to support play (for Debenhams), research into children’s dreams, (for Warner Brothers’ production of Alice in Wonderland), into children’s video watching and the evolution of storytelling in humans (for Disney), and for Unilever, human’s relationship with dirt in their worldwide “Dirt is Good” campaign for, as the soap powder is called in the UK, Persil. This was part of Unilever’s more general promotion of “vitality”. So, we researched the value of play and sport (good for you, you get dirty, but Persil can clean the clothes), but also the physiological and behavioural immune systems dealing with the threats of dirt. As I pointed out to Unilever, I work in a hospital, and we are only too aware that people die from dirt, I insisted a balance was necessary and that would also prevent criticism that their message was dangerously one-sided.

John with the 1st XI hockey team in 1964

What one piece of advice would you give to your younger self?

As any counsellor or psychotherapist knows, giving advice is one of the least effective ways of changing behaviour! So, I am not sure I would have taken the advice!

The question implies a recognition of mistakes that could have been avoided with the right advice. There have certainly been lots of mistakes and errors of judgement, but perhaps one has to make them to learn from them.

I recall the Chinese saying, “I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand”.