Frank, We Hardly Knew Ye: The Very Personal Side of Frank Parsons
✍ Scribed by Mark Pope; Maria Sveinsdottir
- Publisher
- American Counseling Association
- Year
- 2005
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 150 KB
- Volume
- 83
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1556-6678
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Little is known about the personal life of Professor Frank Parsons, the person who is one of the preeminent figures in the development of, and credited with founding, the career counseling specialization of modern day professional counseling as well as all professional counseling and the related fields of vocational psychology and counseling psychology (Aubrey, 1977;Salomone, 1988;Whiteley, 1984). Almost all who write on the life of Frank Parsons have focused on the facts one might find in any biography. Parsons was born on such-and-such a date, went to such-and-such school, did such-and-such, died on such-and-such date, and was buried in such-and-such cemetery. There is also some information regarding persons with whom he worked and information on the very few who were his friends, but rarely are readers given any in-depth assessment of the type or quality of these relationships. Nowhere is there any data on persons whom Frank Parsons cared about, loved, flirted with, dated, slept with, or married. In fact, it is only after Parsons's illness that his archives contain information of a more personal nature. It could have been that Professor Parsons felt no need to preserve his more personal writings or it could have been that he was only able to personally edit his archival legacy while he was still in good health. We can only speculate on the cause of this difference. Such personal information as this can be useful in helping to bring the historical figure to life in the eyes of those unable to experience the actual person. It has been left to people like us to piece together the bits of extant data to attempt to provide a more complete picture of Frank Parsons. Watts (1994) reviewed what had been written previously about the personal side of Frank Parsons and found that "regarding Parsons' private life, all his biographers agree little is known. There are very few papers of a personal nature among the Parsons Collection at Yale University" (p. 266).
Although John Brewer (1942) was a personal acquaintance of Parsons, Brewer's account of Parsons was limited to Parsons's ideas and accomplishments, with limited hints about those with whom Parsons was intimate. H. V. Davis (1969) provided another account of Parsons's life, but focused on Parsons's more negative traits, specifically his "peculiarity of attitude" (p. 21) and lack of a sense of humor. Gummere's (1988) article on Parsons also noted his more eccentric behavior. Flower (1915), who also knew Parsons personally, and Mann (1950) both described Parsons clearly, placed him into his historical context, and provided some insight into what motivated Parsons's public life. According to Watts (1994), "all of Parsons' biographers have [had] a true Victorian reticence regarding his personal life" (p. 265). Each of the previous biographers, however, has added a piece to the Parsons's personal puzzle.