Intelligent and inquisitive, Firestone advanced through school easily, enrolling at Syracuse University in 1946 at the age of 16. His desire to understand himself and people in his life led him to study psychology. His need for a creative outlet led him to painting. Both passions were influenced by his early studies of the great men in both fields, especially Freud and the early psychoanalysts in psychology, and Van Gogh and Gaugin in art. While obviously impressed with the ideas and creations, Firestone was even more influenced by the lives these men led, finding inspiration in their devotion and dedication to express themselves in manners beyond ordinary life. Freud’s intellectual courage and willingness to follow his ideas in the face of conventional resistance and hostilities were an inspiration and model for Firestone’s own innovative, sometimes controversial, psychological contributions. His adventurous nature found a kindred spirit in Gaugin’s restless search for places that captured his imagination, and Van Gogh’s existential pain and aloneness resonated deeply in the young man’s keen awareness of life’s fleeting, often painful, nature.

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After graduating from UC Berkeley in 1949, Firestone attended graduate school in Nebraska and Denver. His postgraduate work was spent studying schizophrenia and working with patients in the extremes of emotional suffering. During this time he also began his first serious artistic endeavors, although the pursuit of his doctorate degree in psychology dominated most of his intellectual and creative energy throughout the mid-fifties.

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Firestone worked for a time with Dr. John A. Rosen, author of “Direct Analysis”, at his innovative live-in treatment center for schizophrenics in Pennsylvania. Firestone was impressed with Rosen’s concept of dealing directly with the psychological factors of schizophrenics; a concept frowned upon in the general profession. This experience had a powerful effect on the young psychologist:

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 ‘I had the benefit of actually living with the problem of schizophrenia in close quarters. I found it very easy to move in that circle even though there were some very uncomfortable scenes – serious violence and turmoil. I got to understand what was happening with these unfortunate people in a way that would be impossible under any other circumstance. The essential humanness of the people was emphasized in the living situation. You come face to face with the fragility of their adaptations. And I found them to be very honest, not directly, but in their symbolism and their hallucinations. They were telling a kind of truth and I felt that by listening I was able to begin to understand them.’ 

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He received his PhD from the University of Denver in 1957. His doctoral dissertation A Concept of the Schizophrenic Process was largely based on his experience with Rosen and was presented as a theoretical paper rather than the typical research project. Stuart Boyd, Firestone’s doctorate sponsor, recounts the impression Firestone made that day on his normally skeptical audience:

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‘I presented Bob to the examining panel of my colleagues and for the first time in my experience, a genuine and exciting conversation took place on a dissertation which was a moving and intense description of the attempt to come to grips, physically and intellectually, with pain and human wretchedness. This was no mechanical response to mechanical administrative demands; this was real understanding, a real illumination of a dark and seemingly hopeless corner of those human prisons called hospitals. The committee responded in a way I had never seen them do before. They genuinely tried to understand, learn and see the implications of what Bob had faced them with.’

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