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Robert Coles, Pulitzer-winning psychiatrist who shaped public policy, dies at 97 - The Boston Globe.Robert Coles — psychologist and poet, social historian and social critic, Christian existentialist and intellectual entrepreneur — has died.He was 97.He died Thursday at a hospice center in Lincoln, according to The Washington Post, which said his son, Michael, confirmed the death.Coles won international renown, and a Pulitzer Prize, for his work on the inner lives of children and won the admiration, and lifelong mentorship, of Harvard undergraduates he taught in “General Education 105: Literature of Social Reflection,” a course students sometimes labeled “Guilt 105″ that routinely attracted more than 800 students.The author of more than 50 books, he sometimes was known on the Cambridge campus as Robert “Never an Unpublished Thought” Coles.Coles’s thoughts came with a quiet passion and a stunning velocity that shook the worlds of medicine and education, civil rights and American civic life.“He added greatly to our understanding of children and the world they live in,” said Judith Palfrey, chief of the division of general pediatrics at Children’s Hospital Boston for more than two decades and a professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School.“He taught students of all ages through his books, and he studied the social determinants of health long before it became an important topic in popular conversation.He made these issues very accessible.” Dr.Coles did so while helping to reinvent the professions of psychiatry and pediatrics and elementary and undergraduate education.“His combination of brilliance and humility is what provided his lasting insights,” said David Greene, an expert in human development and psychology who is the president of Colby College.“He was open to hearing others and learning from them, not simply being the teacher or the expert.Seeing value in others and in their experiences seems to be a lost art, but he kept it very much alive and helped countless others recognize the power of the stories in us all.” Dr.Coles’s acolytes and onetime teaching fellows are scattered across the country, a kind of diaspora sustaining the principal precepts of his teaching: the thoughts of children are significant; the lives of adults are empty without introspection and intervention in social problems; and people of all ages can profit by, as he would counsel his students, “putting your neuroses to work.” One of Dr.Coles’s own neuroses — he might have called it his preoccupation — was to fill each moment not only with purpose but also with reflection.“In an environment where everyone was ambitiously rushing around,” said one of those Coles graduate fellows, Gene Corbin, Harvard’s former dean for public service, “he created a space for students to reflect on who they were and their responsibilities to others and to society.” When Corbin headed Harvard’s Phillips Brooks House Center for Public Service and Engaged Scholarship, he created an annual Robert Coles “Call of Service” Lecture and Award, a play on the title of a book Dr.Coles wrote that examines motivations for service.Coles’s life ricocheted into unconventional, unpredictable, and unconnected directions.He was outspoken on issues of race and faith.He strayed into areas such as music (a book about Bruce Springsteen) and social activism (a book on the Catholic Worker leader Dorothy Day).He was as interested in the victims of polio as in the victims of racial discrimination (among the topics in the multivolume “Children of Crisis” that was awarded the Pulitzer in 1973).He published two volumes about the psychoanalyst Erik Erickson and one book illustrated by Norman Rockwell.He joined the poet-physician William Carlos Williams on medical house calls and hid the antiwar priest Daniel Berrigan from the FBI in his Concord home and the two produced “The Geography of Faith: Underground Conversations on Religious, Political, and Social Change.” He taught the novels of Dickens to law students and campaigned with Senator Robert F.But his most evocative and enduring encounter may have been with a 6-year-old Black girl in segregated Louisiana, the best example of Dr.Coles’s devotion to what he called “in medias res,” Latin for “into the middle of things,” or, as he defined, it, “’in the midst of trouble,’ right in the midst of it.’’ Dr.Coles was an Air Force psychiatrist stationed in New Orleans when he learned about the integration crucible of Ruby Bridges, whose entry into the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in the autumn of 1960 triggered street protests and led the white parents to withdraw their children from the premises.He approached the local branch of the NAACP and asked to consult with the child, who was taught — in an otherwise empty first grade classroom — by an inspiring teacher from West Roxbury, Barbara Henry.Henry said she did not know until years later the role Dr.Coles played for Ruby.“A teacher told me there was some doctor involved with Ruby,” she said in an interview for this obituary.“I thought it was some kind of physical doctor.” But Ruby surmised what Dr.Coles was up to.“Every week Dr.Coles would come to my house with his tape recorder,” Bridges said in “Through My Eyes,” a book she wrote about her early life.“He would ask how I was doing, and I mostly told him I was doing fine.Then he would pull out crayons and asked me to draw pictures of myself or the school or some of the people in my life.” She said she enjoyed the time with Dr.Coles, who also would write a children’s picture book about Ruby, “because an important man was coming to visit and color with me, and that made me feel special.” Separately in “The Moral Life of Children,” Dr.Coles wrote, “Ruby had a will and used it to make an ethical choice; she demonstrated moral stamina; she possessed honor, courage.” Moral stamina, honor, and courage were the touchstones of the creed of Dr.Coles, who was awarded a MacArthur “genius” award in 1981 and the Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor America bestows, by President Clinton in 1998.“From Dr.Coles I learned the importance of staying committed to the things you love, the things you cared about, along with your professionalism,” said Brian Buckley, who took the Coles course in 1989, became a Coles teaching fellow a decade later, and eventually became executive director of the Southwest Native American Foundation.“He constantly told me how I could put my thoughts, insights, and ideals into action in practical daily life.” For Dr.Coles in his own life, that meant a lifelong commitment to understanding how children thought and acted.“There weren’t that many people around who were looking at the lives of children in such an open and deep way and who didn’t restrict the role of a doctor to just practicing medicine,” said Richard Goldstein, a pediatric palliative care doctor at Boston Children’s.“He really wanted to think about the insights a doctor might have for the world.He particularly cared about the moral lives of children.” That inevitably drew him into religious waters.In his influential 1990 “The Spiritual Life of Children,” he argued that the seeds of religious practice were planted by parents who “talked about faith with them as children and practiced the faith in their presence.” That constituted another break with the conventional thinking of the academic and medical milieu that Dr.Coles inhabited.“Because he was a psychiatrist, he wrestled with the antireligious bias of his own profession,” said J.Bradley Wigger, a minister who teaches at Kentucky’s Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary and whose research was inspired by Dr.Coles’s work.“But he understood that religion could be a deep and powerful resource in the lives of children, particularly if they were in the hospital or going through trauma or other difficult circumstances.” Though he possessed some of the instincts and methods of a reporter, Dr.Coles was not a journalist but a scholar, trusting the insights a chil