[4] Other than his graduate study at Harvard, Cohler spent his career at the University of Chicago and affiliated institutions, where he was repeatedly recognized as an educator and a builder of bridges across disciplines.
[6] From the age of 10 to 17 years old, he was a student at the Orthogenic School, a residential treatment center for children with emotional disturbances run by Bruno Bettelheim; Bert Cohler lived in the Pirates Dormitory with seven other boys.
Dean Robert Hess Koff PhD of Washington University in St. Louis was in the Pirates dorm when Bert arrived.
In 1964-5 he served as a teaching fellow with Gordon Allport for the course, Theories of Personality, and in 1967-9 was a lecturer in clinical psychology and shared responsibility for instruction of psychiatric residents in social psychiatry with Elliot G. Mishler.
His dissertation was titled "Character, Psychopathology, and Child Rearing Attitudes in Hospitalized and Non-Hospitalized Mothers of Young Children" (committee members: Justin L. Weiss, chair; Arthur S. Couch, Beatrice B. Whiting).
In 1969, Cohler became an assistant professor at the University of Chicago and began working at the Sonia Shankman Orthogenic School.
During the course of his prolific teaching career Cohler taught in the departments of Human Development, Psychology, Psychiatry and Education, in the Graham School, and in the undergraduate College.
For most of his career he taught in and served as chairman of the year-long Social Sciences core sequence of courses, Self, Culture and Society, in the college.
In his research, Cohler attended to the evolution of identity and experience of self over the life span, with insights from psychoanalysis, particularly Heinz Kohut, and the psychological study of development including the work of Lev Vygotsky.
[15] Cohler made significant contributions across social science disciplines, bringing together ideas from life-course perspectives on human development (influenced especially by the work of Bernice Neugarten and Glen Elder) with psychoanalytic theory and narrative psychology and the personological study of lives.
He worked extensively on narrative analysis, informed by psychoanalytic insights, of the memoirs of men and women who were internees in the extermination camps of the Third Reich, and written at some point in the post-war period.