1936–2010 · American clinical psychologist & Human Potential Movement teacher
John Frederick Heider was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, on 7 November 1936, graduated from Harvard College in 1960 and took a Ph.D. in clinical psychology from Duke University in 1968. He joined the Esalen Institute as a resident fellow in September 1967 and stayed until 1971 as an encounter-group leader, later founding the Human Potential School of Mendocino; Esalen co-founder Dick Price encouraged the book and helped him find a publisher. The Tao of Leadership (1985) recast the Tao Te Ching as advice for people who run groups — and, ironically, its most-shared sentences now circulate under Lao Tzu’s name rather than his. He died at his home in Lawrence, Kansas, on 26 May 2010.