At the risk of sounding like a sycophant, I not only enjoyed but I guess I loved Dr. Rockwood's EH 301. I expected to come in and write sunshine essays, those standby classics, you've-read-'em-a-thousand-times-before-folks oldie goldies of babbling brooks going off into red-hued sunsets, as they, of course, always do. Some professor, whose proudest accomplishment was that he had read without understanding nearly everything Hemingway ever wrote, would stand at a lectern somewhere in the front of the room and let us know what is the best way, after all, to get a lot of punch out of a declarative sentence. From what I have noticed of myself, and from what others in the class I have heard are spreading only to their closest and innermost esoteric circle of friends, it's not like that at all in this class and pass it on.
First, I have received more psychological help from this course than either PSY 201, or PSY 300, or direct counseling. At the beginning of the quarter my family doctor told me he thought I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I felt pretty sure he was right. I thought a psychologist would help, but I finally realized he was just as inept as I. When I read in one of Jung's books that two thirds of most analyses don't work out, and that the patient must do most of the work himself, I decided to dismiss the psychologist, a poor man fumbling with free association, and try to quit skipping class, because, it seemed to me, this is where the help would come. I would have to learn to help myself, and EH 301 was just the place to start. I've turned a lot of my friends onto dream interpretation and usually every afternoon we sit out on the porch of the fraternity house trying to help each other figure out what our psyches are trying to say. How can I explain what it's like not feeling screwed up anymore? My Jehovah's Witness roommate tells me I've been saved, and he doesn't know how right he is.
The second part of the course that affected me was the teacher, Dr. Rockwood. He made it seem worth believing and not just secretly cribbed from the departmental syllabus. It was as if I were encountering a Jungian after Jung's own (probably archetypal) Pentecost. I don't ever remember a single instance of simple fakeout on his part; on the contrary, there never seemed to be enough time in any of the class sessions.
The third part of the course that was rather apocalyptical was the fact that we could actually write what we wanted. I was worried at first, because I was a sophomore and all the others in the class were juniors, seniors, or graduate students, and certainly they would be better at second-guessing the teacher, a poorly developed attribute on my part. But I was rather dumbfounded to find I was getting good grades on papers similar to the ones that my English teacher in my junior year of high school wanted to send me to the school guidance counselor for. I was rather hesitant to believe this was really happening, and I thought that the ax of GOOD FORM AND ACCEPTED STYLE would fall for sure on the next essay. It never did, and was probably left the entire quarter in the front office of the ROTC section. I changed my major from Economics—when I had three dreams about having a cash register full of roaches fall on me—to English, and I don't care about making a million dollars anymore. I'm much more satisfied, too, because I finally think I can do something my way, satisfactorily, and that's all that really counts in the end.
© Copyright 2002 by Robert J. R. Rockwood. All rights reserved.