Pipe Dream sat down with Ellyn Kaschak, ‘65, an award-winning psychologist and one of the founders of the field of feminist and multicultural psychology. Her TEDxBinghamtonUniversity Talk, “Seeing Is Believing or Is Believing Seeing?,” focused on her research with individuals who have been blind since birth and how they conceptualize both race and gender. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Pipe Dream: What brings you to give a talk today at Binghamton University’s TEDx?

Ellyn Kaschak: Well, I was invited to do the talk, and I don’t make decisions quickly. I live in Costa Rica, but luckily I was in California, and I thought, “Am I really going to go all the way back to Binghamton to give a TED talk?” I said to my friends, “No, I’m absolutely not doing it.” But then I woke up the next morning and said, “Okay, I’m doing it.” I graduated from here, but haven’t been back all this time, and I didn’t really want to see all the changes — and I heard there were enormous changes. But it still looks like the campus I remember, and I’m happy to be back.

PD: What was your time like here at the University?

EK: It was Harpur College, it was just starting up and it was a small school. There were four dorms — two men’s and two women’s — and four other buildings: the student union, the library, the science building and the [administration] building with classrooms. The men were allowed to move off campus their second year, and the women weren’t allowed and they had a 10:30 [p.m.] curfew. So things have changed a lot.

PD: What did you major in while you were here?

EK: I majored in Russian language and literature. I did my honors thesis on [Anton] Chekhov’s short stories, so I sometimes say, “But Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky were my first supervisors, how could I go wrong?”

PD: Tell me a little about yourself and your career.

EK: I got a master’s degree at George Washington University, was in the top of my class, but they didn’t allow women in their Ph.D. programs. So I went to work as a school psychologist for a couple of years, but when Title IX passed, they compelled the universities to allow women and people of color into the programs. And so, I went to Ohio State University and got a doctorate, and I had planned to get a doctorate in personality and in clinical [psychology], but the feminist movement was happening. When we got there, half of the class was women, there were people of color and all of the faculty were white males. And they started to teach us their version of psychology, and we said, “Wait a minute, excuse me, this is not my experience.” Before, psychology treated women as if our experiences were pathological, which gives you a clue on who wrote the books. So I became very interested in feminism and in the kind of psychology that feminism developed, which was trying to look through the lens of gender and look at everything through gender. So most of the work I have done has been on gender and ethnicity. I was a professor at San Jose State University for 35 years, I’ve written a couple of books and have been working in Costa Rica at the University for Peace.

I’m thinking of writing a memoir, not because I think I’m special, but because people don’t know how [feminist psychology] started. There’s a lot of mythology about the beginning, even among people who have been practicing feminist psychology. So I’m thinking of writing a memoir on the first day … and I’m still here.

The University for Peace is a United Nations campus, and what they do is they give a master’s in starting a Ph.D. program. They bring in students from all over the world, from Africa, Asia and some European countries to study peacekeeping. I’m teaching about gender and peace, and the sort of things that make girls and women better at making peace and not wanting to wage wars. These kids get a master’s degree and they go back to their countries and hopefully work in the government and do things where they can apply it. It’s a really cool gig, I really like it.

PD: What’s your TEDx talk about, and why do you think it’s an important topic to share with university students?

EK: My topic is about the last book I wrote, which is about how people who have been blind since birth conceptualize gender and race. As I followed the topic, I thought, this is the ultimate question that the path took me to. They’ve never seen any cues; if I were blind, I’d have no idea what you look like, no idea what your gender is, besides from your voice, no idea what your race is, and I thought, let me see if they have an alternate system or if they adopt our system and let me see once and for all if gender and race are socially constructed or something that everyone just learns.

I wrote the book in a narrative style. I didn’t intend it to be an academic book, but I guess the way I write, everyone thought [it] was academic. It’s conversations with me and the blind people and what’s going on in my brain.

PD: The theme of this year’s talks is “Beyond the Canvas.” How do you think your topic relates?

EK: I think I’m drawing outside of the frame, and I think I am outside of the frame in the work I do. This issue about blind people hasn’t been explored at all, and the idea just came to me in a moment of insight. The first book I wrote, “Engendered Lives,” was about how gender involves itself in psychotherapy, and psychotherapy’s not really about pathology, about 90 percent is about gender. I had a chapter in it about Oedipus, and in the Oedipus trilogy, he blinds himself, but he says that it won’t be much of an importance because he has his daughter’s eyes. I took that as a paradigm for male and female psychology, that men think they have entitlement to any part of women’s bodies that they want. From that, came the “What if no one could see, not just Oedipus?”

PD: What is the main thing you hope attendees take away from your talk?

EK: I hope they see the world completely differently from when they came in, in terms of what we think we see. That really, it’s already predetermined by what we believe that we’re seeing, but we think that what we’re seeing is telling us what to believe. I want to turn that on its head.