In the Fall of 1978, I had a short telephone conversation with Langer when I was furthering my knowledge of Carl Rogers’ client-centred therapy at the University of Illinois.
I had discovered Langer’s writings a year before and following several insights linking her ideas with the field of psychotherapy had become so enthralled that I had given her a phone call.

I found her very proper and formal, communicating a certain disdain at my being a psychologist—fair enough. I was attempting to convey how great an impact her ideas were having upon me, as well as inquiring how things were going in terms of publishing the third volume of ‘Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling’.

In response to me Langer expressed some concern that she was not going to be able complete this final volume, which I took to mean that she was concerned that she was going to die before this would be possible. And here, in replying, her disdain was even greater with respect to the idea that it was her death that was concerning her.

Without any further explanation from her, It was only later that I learned that she was likely referring to her concern over her failing eyesight.

The phone call ended with my wishing her well in terms of completing volume three.

In March 1984, following completion of a PhD dissertation inspired by Langer’s ideas that dealt with understanding different states of consciousness, I was travelling near where Langer lived on the return journey to my home in England. I took the opportunity of phoning Langer’s house once more, in the hope that I might visit her.

I was, though, answered by a woman, presumably a nurse, who told me that Dr Langer was not able to receive visitors.

Once back in England, I for the first time read Whitehead in some depth, previously not having realised how much he had influenced Langer’s thought. The fact that there was a plaque outside a school, Stanley Technical College, less than mile from my boyhood home, recording the fact it had been opened by Whitehead in 1910 (?) now took on new significance and In June 1984 I ended up visiting the University of Cambridge where I met up with two Whiteheadians: first Norman Pittenger then, through him, Dorothy Emmet, who at the time was sharing a house with Alasdair MacIntyre.

Dorothy Emmet attended Whitehead’s lectures at Harvard in the late 1920s and she wrote a very early overview of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism published in 1932. What she said to me was that I should express my own ideas, not simply parrot those of Whitehead, also that Whitehead was very fond of his own voice.

It occurs to me that Emmet might well have known Langer through their mutual association with Whitehead in the late 1920s.

Also, one not entirely inconceivable possibility is that Emmet might have even have visited Langer’s home. For when at the University of Illinois I was a member of the squash club, and once, when playing against Loyd, a professor of Chinese history, I mentioned my interest in Susanne Langer, and he responded by giving me an enthusiastic account of attending dinners at the Langers’ home when he had been an undergraduate.