Many people have misunderstood my situation by assuming this 'nom de plume with a roman a clef' cannot be trusted because his plight is nothing more than the work of a single bad apple. My plight is attributable to more than even a few bad apples and can never be dismissed as the sort of politics inherent to every field of endeavour.

Like an unwanted pregnancy, my budding career was aborted by the vast majority of academics/practitioners complicit with the norms that make up their academic or professional culture. So while politics do play a role as a delivery device for my destruction, the source of the aggression is more institutional, more pervasive, more covert. It resides in the very structure of the profession, and it is there where I shall begin.

Experimental psychologists want to be scientists, and their norms for research, teaching, and publication in universities make it impossible for me to build a competitive vita while exploring dreams in the way consistent with the substance of science. They are too busy being rigorous to be scientific, too busy being parsimonious to be adequate, to busy being opportunistic to be worthwhile. Behind their semblance and self-serving gloss is an inattention to the raw phenomena and a failure to collect data that is worthy of an inspired scholar or detective. And let us not forget that their own thinking, which should play a prominent role in science, is constrained by intellectual laziness, existential timidity, and longing for publication-friendly results and the negative reinforcement of their fears of an irrational or alternative order. There's the science of vita-building. It is also a source of personal therapy.

Now clinical psychology is more diverse. The jobs available to licensed psychologists are as diverse as their pathology. Clinical psychology students want to be anything from Mother Theresa to Tony Robbins to Surgeon General. But please don't allow the diversity to distract you from the underlying pathology. Indeed the problems hide in the diversity. The best I can do to both communicate and control the diversity is to break it down into two traditions. But whichever the tradition, I quickly learned while attempting to respecialize in Clinical Psychology after my research PhD that their norms for training, their business rules, and their so-called ethics make it impossible for me to earn a degree that would provide me with access to their diverse and customizable range of employment.

Tradition 1: The Dogmatic Clique

In programs built around one particular theory or model of therapy (one school of thought where everyone is "psychodynamic" or "CBT" for example), the homogeneity is very real and the faculty is heavy-handed in insuring its students are "perfect fits" ideologically. Usually, in such programs, there is a near-pathological evaluation of student mental health, the psychological equivalent of a complete rectal examination. Student progress is often held up by factors which are arbitrary and difficult to understand or mediate such as (1) when faculty evaluate student comprehension or mastery of a theory or therapy like psychoanalysis. The founders of psychoanalysis and neo-psychoanalytic thought are often so abstruse that each program faculty member can have a different slant on the theory without ever really knowing it. And when a faculty member holds up a student for failing to meet the standards for comprehension in a thesis or on practicum, it is often difficult for the student to recover (to understand the basis of the evaluation) and, should the student challenge a professor, it is just as difficult for third parties to mediate between a faculty criticism and student complaint. Some psychologists will be forgiven for admitting that to understand psychoanalysis, for example, someone has to be Freud himself or have a very similar disposition. This is why it is difficult to find a manual for Jungian psychotherapy, for example. On the one hand, the absence of a manual is very good if not vital for personal and professional development, but on the other hand, it can make training difficult. For good or bad, programs like these centered around a formal theory are the exception today. (2) And then there are situations in which faculty hold up a student because they making the student explore some personal issue. The student is informed his or her competence as a therapist depends on exploring this issue and the faculty member acts as a therapist or refers the student for therapy.

Tradition 2: The False Norm

These programs are populated by faculty with diverse theoretical orientations or who abandon theory altogether in favor of a loose collection of skills and techniques. They understand that the divesrity is both an embarrassing threat to solidarity across schools and a potential source of tension between colleagues within their own walls. Their inability to tolerate dissonance and their longing for sources of external validation (i.e., a professional persona in which to basque) motivates them to conceal and compensate for the differences by creating artificial norms or elevating current policies to a metaphysical status. They may not be able to discuss human nature around the water cooler, but they can certainly agree on which student failed to comply with which rule. Noncompliance is not always obvious or indisputable, and for that reason, they work continually to over-develop their rules and to discuss a student's possible un-professionalism amongst themselves. These schools often load the curriculum with redundant and frivolous assignments designed to increase their ability to communicate with one another and to increase the reliability of their behaviors (the likelihood behaviors across students will be very similar or standardized). There is little time for formal theory and little tolerance for casual reflection. The differences are also concealed by by imbuing over-developed ethical codes with criterial merit (enforced as if they can be used to predict competence as a therapist), and co-opting for their compass the theory-free DSM of psychiatrists. Usually, in such schools, there is a misguided hyper-evaluation of student competence in a range of core skills and attitudes. Like their counterparts in tradition 1, they subscribe to a perverted view of mental hygiene, but in this case, mental health is viewed as synonymous with an absence of ideas and personality. The program sterilizes its Psychology of both formal theory and casual reflection, and students disposed to think, question, or improvise usually run the risk of being referred to some formal hearing or committee discussed during orientation and outlined in a program handbook which reads like a Department of Defense operations manual.

In between experimental and clinical psychology is this huge void. No one is attending to the nature of the psyche.