Herb was active in the early days of the College of Chaplains (Now the Association of Professional Chaplains), serving as its President in 1964. In that year, the College published its first booklet identifying the importance of chaplain certification and hospital staffing resources.

Herb did his CPE training in the days when primary relationships and personal mentoring of students was paramount. Herb told me he had three units of CPE training in Washington, DC. In two of those units, he was the only student, writing 5 verbatims a day for presentation to his supervisor. In the third unit, he had three other peers. One day, after completing his third unit, he met with several other Council on Clinical Training Supervisors and was certified that evening while sitting at the bar. They told him: “Since you already have a hospital position, we think we should certify you a CPE Supervisor.” After supervising a couple of units of CPE, he realized he had no idea what he was doing. From there, he attended the Washington School of Psychiatry, founded by Harry Stack Sullivan, MD. He was a student of the Interpersonal Theory of Psychotherapy which was his basis for understanding the dynamics of his students for the rest of his career. In fact, Herb admitted that in the 1940’s through the 1970’s, he did mostly 20 hours a week of group psychotherapy with his CPE students.
One story Herb told me occurred in 1947. He attended the Council on Clinical Training annual meeting in Washington, DC where an out-of-state hospital administrator asked the Council to remove the certification of a Supervisor who was using the Orgone Box Accumulator in treating his patients and CPE students. The theory of Orgone Energy came from psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich. MD, who associated it with Freud’s libido. Reich’s early work, such as Character Analysis was very respected but later, his work fell into disrepute for a number of reasons, one being him touching his patients, asking them to undress during therapy sessions, etc. The Orgone Box Accumulators were never approved for medical use and in fact, were ordered destroyed by the Food and Drug Administration in the mid-1950’s. In response to the administrator’s request, the Council removed the Supervisor’s credentials and decided they needed to write some standards covering the certification and practice of Clinical Pastoral Education.

I have no way of confirming this story, told to me by Herb in the mid 1980’s. It’s interesting to note that there may be a link between Orgone Therapy and the creation of the earliest set of CPE standards.