How does a psychologist come to make violins or a violin maker do psychotherapy?
In the mid-70s, after college, I got trained to do emergency psychiatric work in a hospital in Waterville, Maine, basically doing crisis intervention. I had been working there for two years and in one day I had seen three very suicidal people in a row. It had gone on for hours and hours and when finally I was finished my working day, I left the hospital and got in my ’65 VW Bug and about 600 yards from the hospital I was pulled over by the police. The guy came up to me and he said, “Do you know how fast you were going?” I said, “No, sir, I have no idea.” He told me that I was doing 60 in a 25-mile per hour zone. I went in the next day and resigned my position. That’s when I decided to become a violin maker. I had already started working with a [craftsman] before I left the hospital but I didn’t really imagine it as a career. Once I’d worked at the hospital for two years, I realized that I wanted to do something else. I came back to psychology 14 years later when I started to look for m
