Jennifer Freyd - Personal and Institutional Courage Courageous Scientist Podcast

Dr. Jennifer Freyd is a Professor of Psychology at the University of Oregon, as well as the Founder and President of a new non-profit, the Center for Institutional Courage. Dr. Freyd spoke with me about her journey from studying cognitive psychology to institutional betrayal, to institutional courage, as well as the ways she has had to show personal courage along her scholarly path. Though we don't discuss it in this episode Dr. Freyd is also fighting for pay equity at her institution via a major lawsuit.
TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Kate Clancy (Intro): Hello and welcome to the Courageous Scientists Podcast. My name is Kate Clancy and as you probably know from previous episodes this is a short, global pandemic passion project just to, I don’t know, shine a little light into our days and get to know some really amazing courageous people.
I am so excited by who I am getting to talk to today, one of my personal heroes, this is Dr. Jennifer Freyd. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon, she is a visiting scholar at Stanford and Jennifer is the founder and president of Center for Institutional Courage. So that should just give you the beginnings of the idea of why I am so excited to talk to Dr. Freyd. Thank you so much for joining me today.
Dr. Jennifer Freyd: It’s my pleasure to be here.
Clancy: So, as you know, since we talked about this before I started recording, I am going to be asking you the same three questions we ask everybody. So would you mind just starting with the first one: what brought you to science?
Freyd: Well, you know I was an undergraduate in the late 1970s and I kept switching my major because I kept having new passions from fine arts to philosophy, ending up with anthropology. And near the end of my time in college I, on a lark, took an introductory psychology course and what inspired me to do that was one day walking through the library and seeing somebody’s textbook open with a diagram of the ear, explaining how hearing worked and perception and I thought it was so neat to understand perception. So I took this introductory psychology course and I fell in love with what was then called cognitive psychology: the study of thinking, memory, perception and decided that’s what I just had to do. It was really truly just falling in love.
And so I just managed to get myself into graduate school despite not having a psychology major and I went to Stanford and I pursued cognitive psychology with great enthusiasm for really about ten years.
Clancy: And since then you’ve had certainly a bit of a shift away from cognitive psychology. Do you want to say all what’s motivated that shift.
Freyd: I think it kind of relates to your second question about courage because the shift required a lot of courage. I was in my early 30s, had mad something of a good name for myself in the field of cognitive psychology. Had tenure, was doing work that truly interested me that other people were building upon as well and in the area that I called Dynamic Representations’…had to do with perception and memory and around that time, two things happened. One was that there was a public increased interest in… what had been called different things but basically memories recovered of prior trauma so, especially prior sexual trauma and there were newspaper stories about it and it was touching to me personally in various ways as well and I realized, there are also memory psychologists. I knew a lot, but I had never really learned about this kind of striking phenomenon.
And so I decided it was really important to understand and I delved into it, I learned a lot about sexual violence and hit the history of research on memory and trauma in general and for sexual violence and decided to start doing some research on this topic. And it was met with great consternation from my colleagues.
Nobody was talking about sexual violence in academic psychology and I remember giving a colloquium starting out with some data, f