Vale Malcolm (Mac) MacMillan
We are sad to announce the passing on 11 August 2024 of former MSPS staff member and Professorial Fellow, Professor Malcolm (Mac) MacMillan.
Professor Malcolm (Mac) MacMillan was an outstanding researcher and educator and remarkable person who had a long affiliation with the School, beginning as a tutor in the then Department of Psychology and, more recently, as an honorary Professorial Fellow.
The University of Melbourne Psychology Department, 1951. Mac is second from left in the back row.
Mac completed his BSc at UWA in 1950, MSc with us in 1964 and Doctor of Science at Monash in 1992. He was a founding member of the Department of Psychology at Monash University (starting in 1965), following working as a psychologist, then senior psychologist, Mental Health Hygiene Branch, Victorian Department of Health (1955-64). In addition to his role in MSPS, Mac was an adjunct Professor at Deakin University (from 1994) and held visiting professorships at universities of Arizona, Cambridge, Oxford, Pittsburgh, Stanford and Wisconsin. He was President of the Australian Psychological Society (1984-85) and founding member and President of the International Society for the History of Neuroscience in 2005.
As Australia’s leading historian of neuroscience, psychology and psychoanalysis, Mac was prolific and globally influential through articles, book chapters, reviews and four books.
Friend (and fellow Phineas Gage expert), Matthew Lena, shared his memories of Mac with the School. He writes:
"When An Odd Kind of Fame appeared in 2000, one review said it provided "one of those rare occasions on which one can truly say that further research is not necessary." I think anyone who knew Mac will understand my thinking that he probably appreciated that particular review most of all.
But the review turned out to be wrong. In 2006 I wrote to Mac, out of the blue, about some new material on Gage that he somehow had missed. Back came an encouraging message, prefaced by an apology that because he was having a hip replaced that very afternoon, he had time to write only a “brief” reply -- of 500 words. In my mind's eye I saw him propped up on a gurney, typing away.
Thus began our long collaboration to extend the Gage story. I just counted the number of email chains between us (most comprising multiple messages back-and-forth) and the figure is just short of one thousand. It was always a good morning when Mac popped up in my inbox.
After we'd begun our correspondence, it was some years before it occurred to me to find out more about this Malcolm Macmillan, whom I imagined to be some obscure professor who had fastened onto Phineas Gage as his life's work. What I discovered instead was that this pleasant chap – so interested in what I doing and so generous with his time – was: past president of the Australian Psychological Association; editor of J Hist Neurosciences; one of the top experts on Freud; and much more.
One day Mac thought (mistakenly) that he'd "trod on my toes" in some way, and apologized for the imagined offense. I wrote back:
Mac, among people I never actually met you are my best pal ever. An accomplished expert, you have treated me, a naïve amateur, as a collaborator on what feels like equal terms. That you could step on my toes seems an odd concept.
He must have been a great mentor.
Mac and I never had occasion to discuss much politics, but I had the feeling (though I stand ready to be corrected on this) that he was an old radical of the type I knew well growing up in Berkeley, California in the 1960s and 70s. I also know that he had been a coal miner in his teens – and, I would guess, an agitator for unionization or some other kind of troublemaker.
For a long time I enjoyed describing myself as "the world's second-foremost expert on Phineas Gage", always quickly clarify that there are actually only two of us anyway, Gage research being a highly exclusive field of endeavour. (One the field's luxuries: a complete absence of anxiety that someone else might "publish first".)
Now, I suppose, I'm the world's foremost, and only, expert on Phineas Gage. I do so wish it wasn't so; it was much better being Number 2."
- Matthew Lena