Chance meets choice on the path to autonomy: Psychology at the University of Minho, Portugal

Abstract

[Excerpt] As Albert Bandura once pointed out, “in a chance encounter the separate chains of events have their own causal determinants, but their intersection occurs fortuitously rather than through deliberate plan” (1982). The history of the new School of Psychology at the University of Minho is a good illustration of how one chance encounter leads into another, progressively drawing a path in a long journey towards autonomy. Back in 1986, I was graduating from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst under the stimulating advisorship of Allen Ivey. As I recently recounted (see Santiago-Rivera, 2009), Allen and I would meet frequently for breakfast to discuss my dissertation, the book he was working on — Developmental Therapy, philosophy of science, and world and faculty politics. After graduating from UMass, I got a promising faculty position in the counseling psychology program at the University of California, Santa Barbara. The late 1980s were an exciting time to be in Santa Barbara as a young cognitive behavioral therapist. Michael Mahoney was on the faculty, and he was attracting visiting scholars from all over the world (Gonçalves & Machado, 2006). My life was on a predictable pattern of academic achievement, but was interrupted when I was drafted into the Portuguese army. (Because I was not a U.S. resident, I could not get a waiver. For the first time in my career, the dice seemed to be against me.) [...]