10 Facts About Jefferson Fish

Jefferson Morris Fish is a professor emeritus of psychology at St John's University in New York City, where he previously served as Chair of the Department of Psychology and as Director of the PhD Program in Clinical Psychology.

Jefferson Fish received his PhD in clinical psychology from Columbia University and was a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of New York at Stony Brook.

At Stony Brook, Jefferson Fish met his wife, the African American anthropologist Dolores Newton, who had just returned from her second stint of field work with the Krikati Indians in Brazil.

Jefferson Fish is the author or editor of 12 books, and well over 100 journal articles, book chapters and other works.

Jefferson Fish is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and of the Association for Psychological Science, and is board certified in Clinical Psychology and in Couple and Family Psychology by the American Board of Professional Psychology.

Jefferson Fish served in a variety of roles on local, national, and international psychology organizations and drug policy organizations, and on the editorial boards of eight psychology journals in the United States, Brazil, and India.

In Placebo Therapy, for example, Jefferson Fish argued that stimulating the client's positive expectancy of change was a primary source of the effectiveness of therapy.

Contrary to the folk view of race as a fixed biological phenomenon, Jefferson Fish argues that people can change their race simply by traveling from one culture to another.

Jefferson Fish has argued that this model is fallacious, and has argued for an alternative model: Drug prohibition causes a black market, and the black market causes crime and corruption, and spreads disease.

Jefferson Fish has served as Adjunct Coordinator of the Committee on Drugs and the Law of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York; and his broadening the discussion of policy alternatives has influenced debates in legal and policy circles.