MOYER: “Hello – and we’re back with JW Ehrenfels, author of FIREFLIES IN THE SHADOW OF THE SUN – who has returned to offer some comments on what is perhaps the most critical training tool in this field or any other -- the curriculum. Hello, Julian. It’s good to see you again. I am pleased you agreed to do another interview with me.”

EHRENFELS: “The pleasure is all mine, Kate. It takes some time for an interviewer and interviewee to develop the kind of rapport I think could really benefit the audience. Now that I think we have reached that point, it would be a shame to waste it.”

MOYER: “I couldn’t agree more. It is rare to have such productive conversations. I understand you have prepared some comments on the coursework.”

EHRENFELS: “Yes – you know we talk a lot about research tools and the publication process and the importance of this kind of training to the CAREER of the student. This kind of knowledge has become so important in fact as to eclipse the curriculum itself, which has become kind of a sidekick or second class citizen – a Barney Rubble to Fred Flintstone. And that is a shame because the curriculum is the only possible source of a real EDUCATION. And if anyone paid any attention to it – or cared one at all about it – we would know that the curriculum has failed as an instrument of education in Psychology.”

MOYER: “How so?”

EHRENFELS: “I already discussed elements of the Clinical program curriculum, so I want to focus here on the Research – or Experimental – program curriculum. The problem I have with this curriculum – and the departments in general for that matter – is the artificial division. In all my travels, I have never seen a whole SO destroyed by its division into parts as I have in the case of Research Psychology, which chose divisions that have no mental life – no dynamic system properties – no integrity. If the field were a surgical patient and organ donor, the academics would have removed the pancreas, the liver, the heart, and maybe BOTH kidneys. You have Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, Physiological Psychology, Sensation and Perception Psychology, and perhaps the one division that SHOULD be broken down FURTHER, Social-Personality Psychology. Now Social-Personality psychology is a mongrel indeed.

Each of these divisions invites a lifeless and skewed caricature of the human condition. Now some professors are truly specialists. They couldn’t care less about the whole person – they just want to answer a few very circumscribed questions about how we process information in long-term memory for example, or whether we are vulnerable to this or that kind of error in reasoning. But I think there are others whose hope it is to integrate findings across these divisions to build our understanding of the human being. But I am incredulous for two reasons. The first of which is that our research will seldom target holistic entities, phenomena like dreams for example. This is largely because applicants to graduate programs who declare whole phenomena as research interests are perceived as falling between the cracks. The cognitive faculty member will think the research interest is more appropriate for personality, but had the applicant applied to the personality division, he or she would have been informed the research interest is more appropriate for clinical and so on in round robin fashion. I felt like I was the last tortilla being circling the table on a lazy susan. No wanted the last tortilla. They just wanted to spin the wheel. The fact of the matter is that the applicant with a whole phenomena as a research interest will never be perceived as a prototypical leaf on any one branch. And as long as we carve the tree up this way, prototypicality will remain a requirement. If you have any doubts about this, just ask a graduate admission committee or a faculty search committee to speak about the requirements for a position and measure the frequency and inflection with which they utter the words "perfect fit." I am sure they haven't the slightest clue how hypocritical they are being when they speak of academic freedom in such a fussy system. Our tenured professors may have the freedom to work the will of the department against the wishes of Senator McCarthy, but that is just about all that means. And that freedom is peceived as such a prize that it comes at the highest price. To earn it, you must demonstrate that you are not disposed to require it. Who among our tenured ranks actually needs this job security? Is anyone really in danger of losing it? They are conducting research of social import and commercial value designed to bring grant money into the university. Yeah, real mavericks. Now there is another reason why we'll never meet the requirements for a holistic science of the psyche. I do not believe you can put the human back together after breaking him down into a million pieces. Elements lost in the original division – particularly stuff like motivation and emotion -- will be lost and will have to be explained as some consequence or combination of cognition, physiology, sensation and perception, or personality. And the elements lost in the division are almost always – as a rule – what those Gestalt psychologists called the emergent properties that make the whole greater than the sum of its parts – the important stuff that draws people’s interest to the field in the first place. If we ever even address emotion or motivation – and so few of us do -- what we typically end up with is a cognitive theory of emotion or a physiological theory of motivation. This is what we call ‘reductionism’ and while these theories pique no one’s interest, I do fear that it fools people who do not understand the division-specific jargon or methodology that perhaps these eggheads are onto something. In fact, I think many in the public assume that any great explanation will be difficult to understand or they would have thought of it. So they acquiesce and defer to the experts. But I am here to tell you that you do not have to buy into this façade. When I applied to graduate school to work in dreams – and this was my second year of applications in 1993 – I have been routed and re-routed around the nation in my search for a university that would take my research interest seriously. ‘We’re cognitive here,’ someone would say, ‘you’re interests sound clinical. Try university X’ to which university X would respond ‘we’re clinical here, you’re interests sound personality-oriented. Try university Y or Z.’ University Y of course would tell me that my research interests were Cognitive and University Z would direct me to the sleep lab, which would inquire into how much experience I had working an EEG and whether I would be interested in studying insomnia or erectile dysfunction. So I know what it is like to fall in between the cracks.”

MOYER: “And so would it be fair to say that this is one of the reasons why you feel there is no ‘psyche’ in ‘psychology’?”

EHRENFELS: “Yes. Psychology should be re-named so that we can all realize what is missing.”

MOYER: “What would you call it?”

EHRENFELS: “I don’t know. Popular Mechanics. Actuarial Engineering. Look at what we have become – what kind of research we have reduced ourselves to. We study cockpit design so that we can create better cockpits for pilots who fly under severe weather conditions. This is valuable research, but it is not psychology. It does not stem from – nor does it contribute to – an understanding of the human psyche. As a third-year student, I delivered an oral presentation in a Cognitive Psychology class on connectionism, the most intellectual and philosophical topic within Cognitive Psychology. Two of my male classmates – both first years -- laid their heads on the desk and fell asleep. I was never so insulted. Two weeks later, these same two students collaborated on a presentation about cockpit design. I was mature enough not to pretend to fall asleep, but I suppose I was always a little disappointed the professor didn’t speak out against their behavior. Sadly, it is I – not either of them -- who am out of place – who is at a disadvantage – in the field today. It is a sad state of affairs where people like myself and people like those two students cannot even hold a conversation.”

MOYER: “Wow. I would have expected disagreement, plurality of opinions, but it sounds to me like you psychologists aren’t even in the same – ”

EHRENFELS: “The field of Psychology has become like America itself – a melting pot for people of different orientations who couldn’t cut it somewhere else – misfired statisticians, biologists, computer scientists, philosophers, sociologists, and now engineers. WHY – let me say that again – WHY – aren’t these people in these other disciplines? Probably for the same reason most of the clinical students I meet aren’t secretaries, telemarketers, interior decorators, or fashion consultants. But the engineers really broke my back, and by that I mean my faith in this field. I found in the American Psychologist – a publication I hadn’t looked at in quite some time – an article on the FBI investigation into the medicaid billing fraud of clinicians and another article on the technology we developed that would allow manikins to mimic an even greater range of human facial gestures. Give me a break. Just try to tell me a field that mainstreams engineers but not humanists or dream researchers isn’t completely dead.”

MOYER: “We really got off topic here.”

EHRENFELS: “Not so much. The curriculum is symptomatic of the trend – and may even reinforce it. Without a psyche itself, psychology is free to mutate or degenerate into any other field. I understand the practical necessity of compartmentalization up to a point, but the consistency of not near-consensus of these compartments means that certain phenomena that are invisible in such a system are invisible everywhere. We either need some flexibility or variability or we need to invest certain of the most psychological phenomena with a kind of constitutional authority. And by that I mean emotion, motivation, and dreams. Dreams are objective products of human nature that encapsulate the human condition as a whole – and should be the last phenomena to be marginalized. The expendable personnel are the I/O, Human Factors, Psycholinguistic, Quantitative, Experimental – and by that I mean Behavioral -- and Physiological psychologists – either because they are so bastardized or because they deal in some peripheral, narrow, or tangential aspect of psychology. Right now – I’d say these people are running the field. One possible solution is to divide Psychology into Human Nature and Psychological Law. Each of these names encapsulates the purposes of the professors who would work within it. The study of Human Nature would employ systematic elements like empirical methodology, but it would be more original, flexible, and open to collaboration with other methods. The Human Nature field would see more studies that resemble a series of in-depth n = 1 studies, where we speak not so much of laws, but of systems akin to climates or economies that operate within each individual or phenomenon, commonalities among which are summarized quantitatively only after the integrity of the individual case is preserved. The Human Nature would work to capture what Aristotle referred to as the formal and final causations. It would assume an introspective approach – and by that I mean that a natural empiricism inherent within the individual is sought rather than applied to the individual from without. The study of Psychological Law would more resemble contemporary psychology – in its search for the statistical factors and main effects that characterize laws to which all individual persons and phenomena are variations or exceptions. It would continue to sample a few behaviors extensively across a large number of individuals, harnessing data from individuals like milk from cows, which it would then homogenize and pasteurize within its Statistical formulae in search of a lifeless thing called a ‘law’ that best characterizes the points of stability or regularity in the world. You see – my problem with modern psychology is that it seeks to affirm the regularities AT THE EXPENSE OF the variability. This means that the laws themselves – or the process of pursuing them – overlook or distort the uniqueness of the individual, the variability among individuals, and most importantly, the world WITHIN the individual. Some of this stuff is addressed by clinical theories but remains practical speculation for purposes of helping therapy clients. No one is serious is about pursuing a systematic study of the world within the person.”
MOYER: “I like the weather and economy analogies.”

EHRENFELS: “I do too. I think if Psychology should be anything other than Psychology, it should be Meteorology and Economics, because these fields grapple with the same issues we do – the need to understand the distribution of processes and values within a closed system. If you read my Experiography theory, I think you will find that this is my attempt at such a theory.”