Irv Katz

Dr. Irv Katz: Wise Guy

Have you ever been surprised to recognize another Marin Valley resident as someone you knew long ago and maybe far away? It usually goes, “I knew you from somewhere, just can’t remember where or when.” 

It happened to me when I first saw Irv Katz walking the neighborhood. As we exchanged pleasantries, I kept thinking I knew this guru/gnome-like “wise guy” from somewhere. I walked him home and continued to my own little “tin-can- alley” house, where it came to me:  This was the same (yes, wise) guy who was my clinical psychology and hypnosis professor in Antioch University’s graduate program. 

At that time, he already had a lengthy academic CV: B.A. (magnum cum laude) M.S., Ph.D. and a long list of honors as a scholar, faculty member, researcher, consultant, department director. Lest you think of him as a stuffy academic, he has long been recognized as a major player in what started out as the “humanistic, new age, human potential movement.” (Think Carl Rogers, Fritz Perls, Milton Erickson’s hypnosis model and EMDR Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: a form of psychotherapy commonly used for
the treatment of post-traumatic stress and other disorders). 

Although he has lost or discarded many of his certificates of accomplishment, a long list remains. He is presently Chancellor of the International University of Professional Studies in Maui, Hawaii (www.iups.edu). His super-supportive wife Inula is the Academic Dean. The university’s mission is to provide students with a mentor-based, individualized, nonresident, and self-paced alternative learning system, with a primary goal to produce competent professionals rooted in deep self-awareness, sensitive to multicultural and global issues, and committed to serving humanity.
The programs include customized degrees in Consciousness Studies, Counseling Psychology, Transpersonal Psychology, and holistic and general health sciences. Canadian and US. students — mostly mid-career professionals working on masters and doctorate degrees — are spreading the awareness in Singapore, Africa, China, Europe, Mexico, Canada, and the U.S.  

Fundamental to all this work is the philosophy of “changing the world by understanding and working with the individual and collective universal truth that we are all ‘One’.”

This understanding of “Oneness” was exemplified by a continuing education class that Irv taught recently in multi-cultural Hawaii, to a group of psychologists. After articulating the differences between the Japanese, native Hawaiians, Caucasians, et al., he told the group to forget what he had just taught them. Why? 

Because he wanted the therapists not to treat the patient as a “Japanese” individual, but rather as a whole person (Oneness) having a cultural background.  

This “Wise Guy” is acutely aware that if humanity is ever to get along with itself, we must “get-it” about the fact that we are One. When you stop to think about it, we, Irv’s neighbors here in our one-of-a-kind village, are in a perfect laboratory to experience oneness. We build community by knowing and helping our neighbors.

Our “Wise Guy” has come a long way since he started out in the South Bronx ghetto, October 7, 1929, just 22 days before the Wall Street crash. His mother was from Russia, his father from Poland. Along the way, his university trajectory included Michigan State University and a full, tenured professorship and Chair of the Psych Department at the University of Nevada, which he gave up because he wanted to move beyond the limited (now dated) scope of psychotherapy models. People advised him not to come to here because there were already too many psychotherapists. So he came to the Bay Area and became the therapists’ therapist, using holistic healing, hypnotherapy, and transpersonal psychology. 

Six years ago, he and Inula discovered our over-the-hill enclave, where they relish the culture provided by the interesting and friendly members of the community, the management team, and the many fascinating committees that serve us so well. You might find him enjoying his garden, walking the relatively peaceful streets of the Park, playing ping-pong with Larry Cohen, or in the Jacuzzi, a warm, wet, wonderful place to meet your neighbor!