When APA President Nadine J. Kaslow, PhD, first became involved with the association, "she was seen as my daughter," says Florence Kaslow, PhD, a psychologist who has served in various leadership positions within the organization, including as president of the Div. 43 (Society for Family Psychology), Div. 46 (Media Psychology and Technology) and co-chair of APA's Committee on International Relations in Psychology.
Now that Nadine has forged her own identity, says Florence, "to some extent, it's reversed. I'm seen as Nadine's mother and not as much for what I myself have contributed and accomplished."
On the upside, the mother-daughter pair benefits from a sort of bi-directional mentorship, Nadine Kaslow says. She credits one of her mom's graduate school books on IQ with first fueling her fascination with psychology as early as age 8. "I learned what standard deviation was and I decided that was a really big deal and it made me super curious about different types of intelligence," says Nadine Kaslow, who went on to attend some of her mother's lectures and decided to major in psychology "before I even went to college," she says. In turn, Nadine Kaslow now helps her mom stay up to date with the latest happenings at APA.
Psychologists such as the Kaslows who work in the same field as family members can face issues such as competition and resentment, but can also benefit from the added support. Academics or clinicians who fall in love, too, must confront the challenges of mixing business and pleasure.
"There has to be a lot of care and attention given to how you work through power dynamics," says Nadine Kaslow, who is also a professor of psychiatry and behavioral medicine at Emory University School of Medicine. "When do you decide to really assert yourself? When do you decide to collaborate? When do you decide it's just not worth it? You're making decisions that aren't just in a work relationship. They're in a personal relationship."
Psychologist couples know this well.
Paul Verhaeghen, PhD, and Shelley Aikman, PhD, for example, met when he was on faculty at Syracuse University and she was a visiting professor. They decided to move to Atlanta, where there are many universities, so that they both had good opportunities of landing faculty positions. Verhaeghen is now a professor at Georgia Tech University and Aikman commutes 50 miles to her position as a psychology professor at the University of North Georgia.
The pair, parents of a 5-year-old son, say such joint decisions and compromises aren't unique to psychology, but rather reflective of a life in academia. "It's not strange that academics would find each other because you spend all of your time doing research in academia, and the other people you meet are in the same position," Verhaeghen says, "so it always strikes me as strange that universities still don't have a very good solution for it."
Sharing a profession with a partner can sometimes mean taking a hit to your confidence, some say. Lauren and her wife Jillian, for example, met in graduate school and went through the internship match process at the same time. When Jillian landed interviews, Lauren was filled with self-doubt. Now, when one in the pair books clients for her new private practice, the other questions the development of her own.
"Ninety-nine percent of the time," though, it's a bonus to share a career passion with a partner, says Lauren, who lives in Natick, Massachusetts, with Jillian and their 11-month-old son. "I'll talk to her about clinical stuff and she can be useful, or the other way around," Lauren says. "If I had a difficult session, she gets it in a way that someone not in the field wouldn't."
Verhaeghen and Aikman agree that the benefits of working in the same field as a spouse outweigh the drawbacks. The pair — he studies cognitive aging and she focuses on health and social psychology — have collaborated on research projects, most recently exploring the link between rumination, creativity and depression.
"We have enough of a common language to collaborate, but we're diverse enough to come up with stuff that the other one wouldn't," Verhaeghen says. "It's really a collaboration where the whole is much more than the sum of the parts."