Mim Pew Ferguson dropped out of nursing school to get married and start a family. But when she met renowned psychiatrist Dr. Rudolf Dreikurs at a classroom lecture in 1959, Pew Ferguson confessed that she was "smitten."
"He was so compelling and so exciting," she said in a YouTube video recounting her first meeting with Dreikurs, a psychoanalyst whose pioneering approach to using "social discipline" to work with misbehaving children grew out of the teachings of Alfred Adler.
Pew Ferguson became a Dreikurs protégée and, while raising five children, immersed herself in the emerging Adlerian approach to family counseling. At 42, she earned a master's degree in social work from the University of Minnesota and became instrumental in spreading Adler's concepts in the Midwest.
Pew Ferguson died of heart failure on Sept. 8. She was 88.
Her friendship with Dreikurs and admiration of Adler's theories of "individual psychology" spilled over to her first husband, Bill Pew, a pediatrician, who later became a child and adult psychiatrist.
"We became groupies," Pew Ferguson said.
In 1967, with Dreikurs' support, the couple helped launch the Minnesota Adlerian Society. Now based in Richfield, the Adler Graduate School trains and certifies hundreds of educators and mental health practitioners each year. A family education center at the school is named after Pew Ferguson.
Adler was a psychiatrist in Vienna in the late 1880s and a member of Freud's Vienna Circle. He split with Freud over philosophical differences and developed a more holistic approach of psychotherapy that emphasized mutual respect and self-responsibility.His renegade approach appealed to the young mother with a house full of children.
"It was the beauty of working with kids without violence, without spanking, without onerous discipline," said daughter Choli Merrill-Jaja, a Minneapolis artist and jeweler.
Pew Ferguson was born in La Crosse, Wis., and moved to Eugene, Ore., in the mid-1950s, where her husband launched a medical practice. Seeking parenting advice over an adolescent daughter, she attended a class at the University of Oregon where Dreikurs was teaching.
The meeting turned into a friendship and a calling. The Vienna-born Dreikurs became a frequent house guest, professing a fondness for Pew Ferguson's cooking and her steaming mugs of kaffee mit schlagsahne. He played piano and led provocative conversations with graduate students and other Adlerian admirers.
"It was groundbreaking," said daughter Dr. Becky Pew, a psychiatrist who lives in St. Louis, Mo. "Mom would tell stories of women folding diapers and reading Betty Friedan's book, 'The Feminist Mystique.' They really had to tiptoe around."
Retired U professor Harvey Sarles, her teacher and friend, described Mim and Bill as a "gathering couple." "They didn't just hang out in the world, they thought about it and engaged in it," he said.
Bill Pew died suddenly in 1978. Mim married Del Ferguson, a deacon at the Basilica of St. Mary, who helped manage her private practice in child and family therapy until he died in 2011.
"She had a beautiful heart, but she had a great mind," said Clark Erickson, a therapist at Pew Ferguson's home-based clinic. "She had an uninhibited quality you see in children. … I used to tell her: When I grow up, I want to be as young as you."
Pew Ferguson also is survived by children Barbara Bottema, of Denver; Bill Pew, of Chaska; and Michael Pew, of Minneapolis; as well as 10 grandchildren and eight great grandchildren.
Services have been held.
