Neil Jacobson, the Noble Gadfly

John Gottman
University of Washington

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to John Gottman, Department of Psychology, University of Washington, Box 351525, Seattle, Washington 98195.
E-mail: johng@u.washington.edu

Neil Jacobson and I were close friends, and our research collaboration spanned more than a decade. It was entirely delightful, much of the delight contributed by what his wife Virginia Rutter calls Neil's "Neil-ness"—that unique collection of characteristics that made him larger than life, bright, funny, irreverent, relentless, searching, penetrating, self-critical, and silly. Our weekly meetings for years were often a great deal of fun, and they had the quality that we were all solving a mystery together.

I think that we all felt humbled by the problem of violence and realized that after a decade of research on the topic, we had very little to offer the clinical community. After about nine years of work on the topic, Neil and I decided to do "exit interviews" ourselves with all of the abused women in the study. We designed very open-ended interviews and videotaped the women responding to our many unanswered questions about violence. We both cried in many of these interviews and returned amazed at the enormous courage of the battered women, particularly the amazing self-transformation of women who escape from these marriages. What we saw on our videotapes and data analyses as a transformation from fear to defensiveness, disgust and contempt in those women who left, now became a dramatic struggle inside these heroic women. We could finally write our book, armed with a new understanding of the escape from hell that these women had managed to forge.

Doing research with Neil was an adventure at all levels—imaginative, playful, scientific, and political. Neil managed to integrate it all. Always comfortable with large groups of scientists, he led movements using his own realizations. It was very exciting to watch Neil in action. As a non-joiner and much more of a social isolate than Neil, I relished the way he could approach a national meeting and make dramatic data-based statements that would rock people's assumptions and get them talking.

Our study was initiated by Amy Holtzworth-Munroe, who was Neil's student at the time but who has since become a leader in our field in her own right. When I protested to Neil that I knew little about violence, Amy arrived at my doorstep one day with a box of reprints on marital violence, which I had no choice but to read. I read them with great interest before a meeting with Neil and Amy in which we designed a study for a research grant application. We got the grant funded, but then Amy took a job at Indiana University, so Neil and I had to do the study without our brilliant young instigator of the research.

It was not easy to do the job of the research. The study involved coordinating two very different labs, with very different styles of managing a research project, but it was great fun to meet and look at videotapes together. Neil insisted that we pilot couples for almost a year before the real study actually began. This made me very nervous, but it just delighted Neil. He was playing.

This was to be the first study of very violent couples in which they actually had real marital conflict, so we asked Ann Ganley to help us design procedures to safeguard the women from what her partner might do to her as a result of an upsetting laboratory discussion. Fortunately, Ann's suggestions proved quite effective. We also learned about avoiding the road rage on which these guys seemed to thrive.

The real brilliance of Neil was his ability to integrate this vast amount of data, from attributions to blood flow velocities. He called the article his "magnum opus" article, and it had the Jacobson flair of careful understatement blended with grandiose excitement for this groundbreaking enterprise. The students found the entire project thrilling and inspiring. They could taste the fruits of discovery. Neil's enthusiasm was catching.

He is missed, and the hole left by his demise is a constant source of agony among those who loved him.