"Those wistfully alleging that this campaign amounts to little more than sour grapes suffer from a touch of conversion myopia. The very same mechanisms I criticize for placing a disproportionate number of hurdles between me and my place in Psychology are also criticized for shaping the population of Psychology's academics and professionals into a community remarkably homogeneous with respect to characteristics that adversely impact knowledge production and mental health delivery. Once I left academia behind, my sociological analysis and evolutionary perspective on the development of this field ceased to be about me. I was born to recall vivid dream experiences, born to study dreams, and born to promote and defend the study of dreams. I was disturbed to witness Psychology's policies and procedures evolve into a system of prejudices inhospitable to the study of dreams, and to witness criteria for faculty selection repopulate the field with human incarnations of these prejudices. I feel sorry for those in the field of Psychology whose life did not nurture as deep a relationship to Psychology as to permit them to comprehend such service to a phenomenon (as mine to dreams)."

What It Means to Attack Psychology's Professional Culture

Wyatt Ehrenfels, social psychologist and author of Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, is not allowing adversaries to misrepresent his characterization of a "fierce professionalism" in Psychology. In recent weeks, Ehrenfels staved off a vitriolic salvo from representatives of Psychology's academic and professional communities. By decontextualizing his comments on professionalism, these administrative savants and serviceable standard-bearers maliciously misrepresented his critique as an absurd endangerment for their captive audience of students.

As part of a systematic accounting of psychology's defensiveness and intolerance to critique, Ehrenfels maintains a dossier to whjich he refers as a "Hydra of Red Herrings." This document exposes an elaborate structure of pretexts, pretenses, and diversionary tactics designed by the all-too-common psych prof to fan the flame of fear and ignorance in impressionable undergraduates. "Because there is no social mandate or natural imperative for the psychology major, and colleges survived quite awhile before establishing this major as part of a movement toward curricular diversification, their jobs depend on students willing to declare psychology as a major," remarked Ehrenfels.

Ehrenfels mounted a counteroffensive to prevent those claiming to represent or defend Psychology (i.e. its administrative savants and serviceable standard-bearers) from portraying him as unprofessional, clearing the air by offering fine distinctions that clarify what he is and is not questioning. "There are professors out there telling their students that if J. Wyatt Ehrenfels had his way, the safety of our drinking water and the training of our fire departments would be imperiled," charged Ehrenfels. "But this isn't aeronautics. It isn't drug testing or beef inspection. This is psychological research aimed at broadening our understanding of the human condition. The general public understands that. The general public also understands that I am not calling on citizens to avoid Psychology like a condemned building. The public understands that I am faulting Psychology's serviceable standard-bearers not for what they do wrong but for what they fail to do right, and in the spirit of such reform, I aim to work on making Psychology a more hospitable climate for the kind of detectives and explorers who wish to address themselves to phenomena like dreams. I am not aiming to steal anyone's job, though their policies and procedures that ration publication and faculty selection may set my critique up that way by creating a zero sum game. The public also understands that I am not criticizing science, though it may serve the avaricious psych prof to misrepresent me as anti-science to shield them from every hint of imperfection. Science is, after all, a relatively open-ended framework that gives each scientist considerable latitude in bringing his or her own wits to bear on the unique requirements of a particular curiosity. What I am criticizing is an ever-widening nucleus of arbitary and superfluous policies & procedures with less standing in real science than in institutional management. Less standing in real science than in personal career development. Less standing in real science than in the facilitation of shared expectations that bring a sedated mindlessness and slavish uniformity to our day-to-day operations. Less standing in real science than in social necessity, social expediency, and social control. The policies and procedures of which I speak behave like prejudices within an inhospitable community, adversely affecting the research and development of ideas related to certain classes of phenomena the public associates with the heart of the human condition (e.g. dreams). I think there are people out there whose careers, day-to-day grinds, or security & self-esteem depend on a metastases of necrotic norms. I am here to tell you their motives are indifferent and, in many cases counterproductive, to the purpose for which the norms were putatively developed.

So my critics should be somewhat more circumspect in the assignment of crude motive for my actions, just as they should be careful about urging those with whose education they are entrusted to dismiss my logic as a mere secretion of these motives. At the center of this hypersensitivity and compulsiveness is a neurosis of sorts, which may or may not have been nurtured by their training and socialization into professional culture, that predisposes the all-too-common psych prof to feel clinically uncomfortable with unconventional thoughts and behaviors, disagreement and diversity, and all other departures from the consensus that reassures them.

But make no mistake about it. I am not here for revenge. I am not here to humiliate any of Psychology's serviceable standard-bearers. I am not here to make loads of money off a book. I am here to restore dignity to a class of phenomena and freedom to the would-be scholars who love them. It's about a rightful claim to legitimacy. And if Psychology behaves as though it is threatened by me, it is only because they have made phenomena like dreams, and scholars like myself, losers in a zero sum game wherein equality is impractical and freedom (a free market of ideas) a threat to the degrees of consensus, conformity, and conventionality that serve as basic units of currency in a token intellectual economy. I would have expected academics to rally behind the campaign that would not only liberate them but spare them the burden of coming up with these ideas and with assuming the risks associated with their authorship. But alas, their careers depend on their willing servitude to a system of reinforcement and superfluous rules. To play by these rules, they need not sacrifice quite as much of their own freedom, quite as much of their own wits, or quite as much of their phenomenon's integrity, that is, not as much as a dream researcher would have to sacrifice. And thus have demonstrated more of a willingness than dream researchers to become slaves to the advantages given to them as rewards for their imprimatur. And with the all-too-common psych prof and the undomesticated explorer on opposite sides of the fence, the former recognizes the benefits in sacrificing the careers of the latter.

I am simply trying to call attention to the distinction between the minimum scientific requirements and the institutional requirements deployed for wholly other purposes: (1) a cosmetic scientific sheen, (2) a semblance of solidarity through standardization, and (3) enhanced communication and integration (among researchers) to compensate for deficiencies in the quality of individual researchers and research products (or alternatively, clinicians and case conceptualizations). I would like to restate for the record that rules do serve a purpose, even within psychology, where our ethical code reminds us not to kill or physically love our clients and where minimum standards for diagnostic and therapeutic competence insure that we do not wrongfully commit or exacerbate the distress and impairment of our clients. I agree that a minimum structure is absolutely necessary in every field of endeavour, and in every individual life. Like breathing...automatic, inevitable, beneficial. There are people out there, to extend my analogy, who are hyperventilating, polluting the air with a toxic parochialism that is making us all asthmatic.

I am told these so-called standards (opinions masquerading as standards) guard our organized body of knowledge like Fort Knox and protect the public interest from incompetent or unethical professionals. Yet with these minimum standards and guidelines firmly in place, how do you explain the certification of students who diagnose patients with hallucinations for confiding in their intern that they see patterns in clouds? How do you explain all the professors who abuse the performance of student academic performance to assassinate the character of students they do not like and build empires of like-minded professionals? How do you explain the discrimination by Veterans Hospital psychologists against intern-applicants with disabilities? And how do you explain the participation of mental health professionals in a cyberstalking ring based in the unmoderated sci.psychology.psychotherapy "news group"? We sacrifice a great deal of our own freedom, much of which is vital to progress and pioneering, and yet we still have our share of the rotten apples that our asphyxiating ethics and standards are supposed to prevent. Many of the beleaguered students slandered by unsubstantiated characterological inferences in end-of-semester evaluation meetings maintain an excellent record of academic achievement and meet the minimum 'ethical' standards outlined by their profession.

Two-Pronged Case: Dispassionate Sociological Analysis of (1) Systemic Prejudices (Adverse Policies & Procedures) Give Rise to (2) Individual Faculty with Abusive Attitudes

"You have to defeat me on both fronts," warns Wyatt Ehrenfels in what amounts to a chilling reminder of his two-pronged case against a dually-disordered Psychology. "Celebrating and promoting these policies and procedures are one thing," he remarked. "They adversely impact exploration of much of the phenomena generally regarded as synonymous with the human condition, most illustratively dreaming. And in this way they adversely impact the careers of those who claim these phenomena as a research interest, leading in turn to more discouragement and punishment. You can approach this form of institutional discrimination as a system of reinforcement. You can also approach it from the perspective of natural selection. But clearly there is a vicious cycle of managed neglect and distortion at play here, and over a number of training generations, the criteria for publication, student evaluation, and degree conferment binds with criteria for faculty selection, graduate student admission, and tenure, resulting in the incarnation of systemic biases in the individual members of this academic and professional community. Students are socialized into this culture, and once they take their place within it, they in turn select among applicants for graduate training, faculty appointment, and immortality (publication & tenure) those people and papers who best embody the policies and procedures [systemic biases]. This would explain why I can accurately proffer certain generalizations about Psychology's communities. As they evolved, selection pressures, socialization pressures, and a system of reinforcement combined to shape policy and procedure which, in turn, shapes the population of academics and professionals into a homogeneous community of like-minded creatures of imprimatur captive to those SOPs. And many of them have a personal bias, what I call a para-skeptical contempt, for phenomena like dreams.

When career-driven students are required to sacrifice their freedoms and wits in exchange for membership in a professional community and for access to its one-size-fits-all sources of validation, guidance, and identity (or when students are selected from among applicants based on characteristics associated with a propensity for these sacrifices and adjustments), these students stunt what is true professional development. Their development as mature adults is also stunted, especially when these students become professors and have the power to demand the kind of consensus, conformity, and compliance that negatively reinforces their narrow worldview and therapeutically allows them to avoid tripping over Heaven & Earth's supply of alternative views and possibilities, all of which would rekindle their self-doubt that what they are doing is right. A little uncertainty would be quite normal and healthy in such a field as Psychology, where so little is known, but for some reason, psychology professors have an unusually low threshold of tolerance for dissonance and doubt. I have witnessed clinical levels of sensitivity and compulsion (hallmarks of classic neurosis) among the psychology professors living in their 'roach motels' (closed and relatively static university communities), and I have witnessed them harshly recriminate students stepping one inch to either side of that white line. While the group hearing mechanism (i.e. end-of-academic-term student evaluation meeting) confers an air of proceduralism and formality, the process masks a pathological reaction in the individual source of the referral (i.e. professor) and the process itself relies heavily on a form of groupthink that subverts the goal of accuracy to the goal of group harmony, slandering the student and creating a fact-free vaccuum in which the original complaint and perception take on a life of their own. (See Student Ethics & Evaluation: How They Wear You Down & Weed You Out of Graduate School for analysis of this process).

Survival. Who Is the Fittest?

When students are encouraged to identify with the profession, which is to say, to fashion a personal identity from the professional material, and when this material is overbuilt, you could end up with trigger-happy diagnosticians, incarnations of the DSM-IV running around with a perceived duty to police mental hygiene and with a penchant for finding pathology in personality. Similarly, in experimental psychology programs, you end up with misfired statisticians and biologists who use science as a tool of skepticism rather than a tool of exploration, who see fraudulence in all phenomena, but who, in a twist of irony, manage a neglect of life's most fundamental data, the facts of human experience, to mass produce hypothesis-friendly inferential statistics on a career timetable. Meanwhile, good students who are devoted to the fundamentals of essential science and to a congenital and credible love for a phenomena (e.g., dreaming) are impugned for not proactively prostrating to the unnecessary elements of the professional paradigm, for not pandering to the professors' need for constant reassurance, and for not contributing to the cosmetic appearance of science and solidarity that is in essence the field's public and political persona. All this posing and posturing, as much as it has precluded me from realizing my vocation, could ne forgiven if they did not betray their own mantras of ethics, evidence, and empathy in the way illustrated in the following events. Bare in mind that the following events, while true, is only one of many instances in which I brought into contention with psychology professors.

The absolute worst instance of this of which I am aware is having been accused of something called 'inappropriate self-disclosure' during a class room role play exercise during my first semester of graduate study. I was not familiar with this ethical principle, but when I violated it by admitting to having imputed personal but exaggerated elements of my own experience into a fictitious client, I set in motion a series of meetings mandated by policy, relished by professors and administrators, and ultimately culminating in my referral to a student ethics and evaluation committee even after I had supposedly settled the matter to their satisfaction. No one seemed to care that none of the students had yet been introduced to this ethical principle. No one seemed to care that my client role play produced a rich and refreshing discussion that could not have otherwise been stimulated by a scripted reading of symptoms from among the dry, dull, and denuded categories in the DSM. No one seemed to care that I claimed to have used a formula for exaggerating the frequency, severity, and duration of the symptoms I manifested, nor did anyone care when I brought it to their attention that the age of the client I modeled in the role play (nineteen) would have made the client a much younger version of myself (I was close to 29 at the time). And no one seemed to care that what I exhibited in the role play was quite normal and included vampire nightmares, a common animal phobia, and a high school resentment of the opposite sex. No one seemed to care that I denied there was any distress in my life and that I simply trying to engage my fellow classmates in an interesting discussion, at least one that would have interested me. No one seemed to care that someone like this could walk at any time into their therapy offices. I was accused of 'inappropriate self-disclosure' and 'hostile and pathological role play content.' I was befuddled by my inability to cleave my professors of their notions, and I was ultimately asked to seek therapy. Throughout this whole affair, I could hardly count all the references to the terms 'community,' 'competence,' 'hygiene,' 'professionalism,' 'fit,' and the most egregious of terms, 'appropriate.' With these terms, you could build or defend just about anything, and you can attack and destroy just about anything. These non-specific, valuative terms were often invoked as magical incantations or chants to ward off anyone or anything they did not like or could not handle because it did not fit neatly within their culture.

Let's consider cancer a moment. What is a tumor? A tumor consists of once normal cells that have outlived and outgrown their usefulness and infect/overwhelm everything by simply refusing to die. Similarly, many norms in the field do not know their limits and suffer from a problem akin not only to cancer but to an ethical violation known within therapeutic circles as 'lack of boundaries.' We end up with these bureaucratic one-size-fits-all expectations that end up getting labeled 'standards,' when they really having nothing to do with quality assurance but more with impression management, crowd control, solidarity, blissful mindlessness, and publicity. I have withheld specific examples here because I could literally list dozens so my list is scattered throughout my web site. Not even my 16-points memo tackles most of them, though the problems are clearly depicted in my novel.

But I will say that we do end up creating areas where competence and regulation is clearly needed and this contributes to the illusion that professionalism is a savior for public safety and scientific standard. We instill in our clients, in our students, and in ourselves this false dependency.

Once we require all professionals to do x, whether x is necessary or not, we have to write a manual to teach professionals how to meet the standards for doing x, we need a method by which to evaluate competence in doing x, and we need mechanisms for remediating or censuring those who cannot deploy x according to guidelines outlined in the manual, many of which are themselves arbitrary, superfluous, and based on one possible interpretation of x.

Psychology is one of those fields that is overrun with unnecessary norms. Let's face it. We want to feel more important or influential than we really are. But we're not building rockets, inspecting beef, nor developing pharmaceuticals. So we can afford to give ourselves a little breathing room, especially in areas where latitude is absolutely necessary to bring about the best of someone's unique or inherent scientific or clinical talents -- especially in a field where so little is known about the human psyche and where free-wheeling exploration is needed. This is the true path to importance. It also happens to be the hard one.

Some of my adversaries are confused by my analogy of professionalism to a virus, which can be linked in that both spread with adverse consequences. There are important points to be made here:

• Less professional entities increase their level of professionalism so as to participate in, communicate with, or remain compliant with more professional entities (which are usually the governing bodies of a system). Once it is determined that a particular method is more expedient, efficient, or convenient, it is elevated to the status of a mandatory standard. Those individuals or individual entities that choose not to adopt the new convention are deemed outsiders and are either censured for their noncompliance (punishment) or excluded from reward (penalty). Young clinical programs which do not wish to abide by all the requirements of the American Psychological Association, for example, will not be accredited. Consequently, its graduates, knowing it would not receive a degree from an accredited institution, choose not to attend this institution. The institution closes down or comes into "compliance." Why are the students compelled to disregard non APA acredited programs, as appealing as its curriculum or faculty may be? Because state licensing boards decided the APA should be the sole agency that speaks for the profession and thus defers to its accreditation as the major criterion for determining whether any degreed individual should be qualified to take the licensing exam.
  

• Professionalism offers paths of least resistance. It is simpler for everyone to work with the same framework of expectations and speak the same language. It gives everyone a simple means of comparing apples and oranges not to mention a mandate and method for disqualifying vegetables. Paths of least resistance are in and of themselves contagious. But when you sweeten the pot by attaching a label like professional on them and tell someone, 'it is your duty (to take the easier path),' they will be all the more happy to do what they're told is the right and responsible thing.
  

• Professionalism is good for democracy, not like that aristocratic notion that someone born to study dreams should be accorded any career advantage. We can't measure birthrites, and if we ever learn to, it would be the death of true callings for sure, as people would learn to teach to and conversely study for any test. When you arrive at a set of standard (professional) criteria, those criteria become codified and communicated to everyone, making all careers accessible to the Everyman or the Everywoman who wants to be a doctor or lawyer. (In fact, one consortium of professional schools in Psychology, which is metastasizing campuses at the rate of cancer, is now directly marketing their programs to this audience, by placing the faces of racially diverse youth on posters alongside phrases or questions designed to appeal to the motives of philistines: 'Want to be called a doctor?' Not much separates this marketing plan from that of the roadside entrepreneur who posts along the parkway median fliers that read anything from 'I lost 40 lounds in two months' to 'earn up to $5,000 a month working at home.'
  

Such programs let everyone in the door but do a heavy weed out along the way. One adversary once attributed my critique to the work of someone who could not 'cut it in the field.' In my reply, I mentioned that 'cutting it in the field' is just about the easiest thing. Any Tom, Dick, or Harry with no distinguishing calling or vision can follow the training guidelines and imitate the behaviors on route to certification. Now this does not mean everyone will be a PhD psychologist or that every PhD psychologist will find work. A surprisingly large number of us do not. The reason for this is that the field is quickly saturated with applicants and candidates, all who 'can do.' How do we decide who to hire or admit or keep in the graduate program? Answer: professionalism. Who best models the epistemology of the field? Who tows the company line? In whom do the party values and ethics appear most instilled? Who devoted the least time and resources to their own independent thoughts and interests? Who put the field first? Who was the easiest to socialize? Who has the least of an independent vision that had to be broken down and re-worked in graduate training? Who performed best during the dress rehearsal (graduate school), acquiring by graduation, more of the credentials (publications, grants, teaching experiences) we once expected only of professors? You can see here how professionalism spreads to contaminate the criteria for selection and admission itself, thus DIRECTLY shaping the population of the field. I may have to remind my adversaries from time to time about the consequences of these things, as no doubt they are reading this thinking, 'so? and what's your point? isn't this grand?'

Two misconceptions become the redoubt for optimists and entrenched defenders of psychology. Supporters of institutionalized psychology cling to the misconceptions as the last line of defense against charges that practitioners, academics, and administrators violate meritocracy in the training and selection of faculty, staff, and student-apprentices:

• The Standards and Safeguards Fallacy
  

  The policies and procedures governing day-to-day operations in the Psychology World and establishing criteria for faculty and staff appointment ultimately promote quality assurance, public safeguards, and scientific standards.
  

• The Creme Rises to the Top Fallacy
  

  The sociological norms and pressures represented by the competition, training pressures, and accreditation delivery system results in a profession populated by the best possible professionals.
  

Responses to the fireflySun web site are often riddled with these misconceptions. Take for example the following statement by a young undergraduate:

"As you effectively point out in your article, psychology departments in academic institutions in the United States are very competitive. These departments want the finest students entering into their programs. This is a good thing because of the quality it creates in the industry."

Separating Fact, Artifact, and Fiction. Making an EXAMPLE of the DSM

Tragic necessity. The DSM provides a common language for psychologists operating from various theoretical perspectives and also allows psychologists to communicate and negotiate with third party reimbursement. The problem is that clinical faculty and staff are increasingly hired on the strength of grants which, incidentally, are in the vast majority of cases offered only to those researchers who use DSM disorders as variables. That collection of tin men at NIMH is particularly guilty of this. The DSM is thus driving clinical research, and yet the disorders are just diagnostic categories agreed on socially in committee meetings. They have no inherent scientific merit. We have to be very careful about canonizing such superficial constructs based on epidemiological surveys of symptom organization. Once the structure is in place, the process of revising it is slowed by institutional trappings, and so we are stuck with it for longer than anyone would ever expect even in the case where the categories are flawed and where professionals are open-minded with respect to the prospect of flaws. And flaws become the criterion for revision. Even if the DSM did have scientific merit, it does not preclude alternative modes of conceptualizing psychopathology. And yet I fear these modes are destined for a form of professional abortion, along with the careers of those pioneers bold enough to indulge them.

The second problem with the DSM is that it is increasingly driving student training in psychopathology. In many programs it is the primary text in the signature course in psychopathology, and the disorder nomenclature (rather than approaches) is used to organize the units and chapters of the Abnormal Psychology textbooks assigned to undergraduates. Consequently, I have seen practicum students, interns, and even practicing MAs and beyond treating clients like instantiations of DSM diagnostic codes. The process of case conceptualization is an art that is increasingly lost to professionals who struggle to fit their clients into the DSM. The DSM is a language. It is not the only language, nor is it anywhere near a perfect language, and so the richness and complexity of many clients are lost in translation. And now we are developing manualized therapies specific to this or that DSM disorder so some of these students are born into the profession learning cognitive-behavioral therapy for panic disorder with agoraphobia and it becomes their whole universe. Incidentally, this reminds me of another issue. Our field is increasingly turning out young professionals who retreat from the vast Psychology universe, coping with their professional agoraphobia by becoming specialists in the use of this or that manualized therapy for this or that disorder. And there is evidence to suggest that the mental health community is rewarding this tendency by favoring or calling for applicants with specialized experiences over generalists. How often do I find ads who attempt to restrict the applicant pool only to those who have extensive experience working with PTSD? This is fairly acceptable if it is a Veterans Hospital, but I see it all too often from university counseling centers. And then of course there are those ads that call for a background in transgender issues and workshops (or in the language of the DSM, Gender Identity Disorder).

It would seem that now that we have these categories dominating our discourse and day-to-day operations, we feel we need to defend them so as to validate our livelihood. It is arguably a collective manifestation of cognitive dissonance. We were pressured by various sociological forces into adopting a canon like the DSM, and we are pressured as individuals into learning the ins and outs of this 928 page behemoth, and now that it has become the universal language of Psychology, it would seem we have lost both the time and the tendency to express ourselves in other languages. In this process, many subcultures and traditions are being eroded, let alone independent thinking.

And now that they are proficient in the DSM, possibly even more so than many psychiatrists from whom they co-opted the DSM (which is published by the American Psychiatric Association, psychologists are attempting to cash in on it by lobbying for prescription privileges. But what is lost in the debate about psychologists' lack of medical background to prescribe medication is the lack of a psychologistic education. They know as little about their own front yard as they do about the greener grass on the other side of the fence, which explains their reliance on medication as a crutch for an increasingly denuded education into the human condition.

What Hypocrisy Reveals about the True Status of the So-called 'Standards' and the True Motives of its Practitioners

Ehrenfels also points to hypocrisy in the "standard and safeguard defense" of psychology. "All I have to do to scuttle this argument is to point to army of practicing 24-year-old MAs. Since when is two years of coursework and one practicum really sufficient? We also have practicing EdDs.

Moreover, I have a friend with two doctorates and a master's degree. One of the doctorates is a practitioner's PsyD. We're talking a regimen of 23 courses, a curriculum which sought to split the training atom so to speak. She was rigorously trained in assessment and in therapy modules. She also fulfilled three years (over 2400 hours) of practical experience spanning a military base, a private clinic, and a training facility for persons with severe mental retardation. The other doctorate is a research PhD in social-personality psychology, a clinically relevant area, as is Developmental psychology, in which she holds her masters. Despite having twice the doctorates and having applied to twice the number of internship sites as her peers, she was the only one in her class of 40 not to have procured a match. After accepting an unfunded, unaccredited internship site at a university counseling center (which continued to broaden her experience), she took her credentials on the road again to apply for counseling psychologist positions and post-docs. She managed to land only two interviews, one for a position of which she learned through the director of the counseling program whose acquaintance she made at a convention.

ASIDE: Networking

It is difficult to hear psychologists defend their decisions with references to terms like standards and safeguards when many of their candidates are selected on the basis of sheer affiliation or direct social interaction. When my friend interviewed for a post-doc, for which she is more than qualified, she flew 2800 miles on less than a week's notice to the site in question, where she had an opportunity to observe her competitors (who were interviewed on the same day). The two other finalists included a woman who already occupied a PRE-doctoral position at that institution (an internal candidate of sorts with a home field advantage), and another woman who continually curried the favor of the staff with numerous references to mutual acquaintances. It seemed that she was on a first-name basis with mutual acquaintances for every member of the staff. The staff also seemed to relish the opportunity to discuss her newborn as well as the fact she needed to find work locally, as dictated by a job offered recently to her husband. And we all know that in applying for graduate school, selection committee members favor applicants whose senior thesis was supervised by a member's former co-panelist or co-author. There is a reason that the minimum GPA and GRE scores required for consideration are so low: to avoid disqualifying students with favorable affiliations or students whose compatible research interests make them flattering and effective research assistants (i.e., slave labor and worship). Of course, the academics defend the practice in pointing out correctly that a GPA is not really a measure of anything and that even the most predictive GRE subscale, the Verbal scale, explains only 16% of the variance in its criterion (i.e., graduate school performance). My point here is that they use the 'standard and safeguard argument' selectively and arbitrarily when it serves their personal interests. The superfluous norms also serve their personal interests, transforming a profession into a habitat for career prospects and one hospitable to their ideology and reputation, even while concealing the arbitrary and self-serving pork beneath a thin veneer of pseudo-scientific and pseudo-professional structure.

While the evidence FOR the 'standard and safeguard argument' appears to be in great supply, the fact remains that evidence AGAINST this argument (i.e., evidence of its expense and counterproductivity) is buried with the bodies, so to speak. There are many stories to tell, but these come attached to people the field laid to waste. You will not find them on psychology listserves, university e-mail directories, or classrooms. And while various documentation available on the Internet records the population of active memberships in psychology departments, mental health services, associations, and even listserves, there is simply no organized list of persons expatriated by the field. Even persons forced to live on a series of adjunct teaching positions are difficult to find because their contact information is not posted on the web among regular faculty.

ADDENDUM: More on the Two-Pronged Critique from a Previous Draft

The author's critique is part of a two-pronged approach, combining dispassionate sociological analysis with visceral complaints about incidents in which he was personally victimized by department policy or politics. "I am often criticized for rancor and punditry," claimed Ehrenfels. "I do not deny that I am disgruntled, and my feelings on this matter may have prompted my decision to express my views on Psychology, but they can entirely account for their logic. If you want to defeat me, you have to attend to the logic of the argument and not merely dismiss it on the basis of tenor, venue, or motive. Such things are red herrings intended to repress and divert. They are nothing more than defense mechanisms. The abuse of the term 'inappropriate' by psychologists (frequently applied to Ehrenfels postings) serves an expressive function only and should not be mistaken for a logical argument. It is ritual magic, an incantation invoked in chorus (or chanted) to ward off anything that ill-suits or bedevils them."

I am not here purely to malign, but to reform something about which I care much about. If I could help readers to acknowledge the difference between Psychology and psychologists, they could understand that I am not here to 'destroy the field' but to liberate it from its true detractors. But psychologists make some poor choices in defense of institutionalized Psychology, such as reducing my critique to the 'sour grapes' of someone who 'couldn't cut it in the field.' Unfortunately, this characterization is the choice of many academics and practitioners when approached by students with serious questions about my 16-points memo. In the final analysis, once my critique has been reviwed, it will be apparent that my 'not cutting it in the field' (to put it crudely), is just one of many symptoms of a dysfunctional and arguably defunct field.

Many psychology majors show their youth and inexperience by rotely and rigidly regurgitating from their faculty when they demand "empirical evidence" and respond skeptically to any observations that even remotely appear anecdotal. My arguments are in actuality consistent with, if not grounded in, what little empirical facts have been gathered on this neglected subject. In other words, the the facts are friendly enough. But this does raise an interesting point regarding the paucity of literature on the issue. Psychology professors know they would be ostracized for publishing any research that reflects poorly on the field or that brings upon the field scrutiny or skepticism. While empiricism in and of itself is relatively value-free, empiricists have to operate within the trappings of their institution, many of whom with strong personal biases. Objective observors of my debate with Psychology tend to settle on the conclusion that there are problems with both sides. While I am not always happy to find my motives under a microscope, I am extraordinarily pleased by the fact that psychologists themselves are being, for the first time as a group, subject to scrutiny and skepticism. In this regard I suppose I am sacrificing myself to rescue the psyche from the field of Psychology. If I can improve psychology this way, then that is enormous. FOR THIS REASON, I CONTEND I HAVE NEVER TRIED TO BRING DOWN PSYCHOLOGY, ONLY TO REFORM IT AND LIBERATE IT FROM THE CURRENT REGIME PRESIDING OVER ITS ACADEMIC AND PROFESSIONAL CULTURE.

In addition to SOME statistics, and again, we need more research in this area, there is also another type of analysis. There is a sociological analysis of the norms that govern the field. This analysis does not even require statistics, only agreement as to what are the field's business practices. It consists of a series of observations educated by my own experiences as a social psychologist required to go through the system. These are a set of experiences that are not unique. I am not referring here to a "collection of bad experiences." (Critics and wishful thinkers like to portray my argument as the reprisal of a rare victim, and thus judge that argument 'inappropriate' for public dissemination and consumption). No, bad experiences are something else entirely. This is not about politics. This is about socialization into a professional or academic culture. This is about a set of training requirements and business guidelines that are actually tauted as fairly universal across programs. These experiences are indisputable. In fact, psychology professors are so proud of these conventions that they do not wish to dispute them. I submit these experiences as "article A" of my evidence.

There are other articles. Such as "article B." These are the collections of bad experiences, the "horror stories" of students and colleagues who were politically embattled on ideological or characterological grounds. Then there is "article C," which is a comparison of the motives and research interests of those who succeed in the field versus those who fail to find a niche in the field or who where possible fly under the radar. There is "article D" which consists of a historical comparison of the field's contemporary vs. pre-contemporary characteristics (i.e., research interests of its membership and the branch structure of the field).

Once these articles are presented and articulated, only logic is required to raise sufficient doubt about the field by arguing how articles B, C, and D are the result of article A. As evidenced by my doctorate, I am familiar with the norms for research, teaching, and mental health delivery and training, and I am capable of determining whether these norms do injustice to individuals and to the human psyche. This is a sociological analysis and it is quite compelling and it demonstrates that there are prejudices in this field, some systemic and endemic and others that reside in the attitudes of individual professors. The effect of the latter is no over-generalization and should not be underestimated. Professors are successful suitors. They were at one point selected from a throng of applicants or candidates for admission to graduate school and, later, for appointment to faculty. They were selected on the basis of characteristics. As in Darwin's species, there are characteristics that are favorable to survival of the fittest and the evolution of the field follows accordingly. In this social evolution, the fittest are simply those whose interests and personalities match or fit those of the faculty search committees, who often invoke the phrase perfect fit to refer to the ideal candidate. Some of these vaunted characteristics are praiseworthy, and some are indifferent to standards of worth and merely reflect the arbitrary, actuarial, and algorithmic properties of the search (i.e., what is expedient and profitable [e.g. grants/number of publications], what is socially desirable [e.g., minority status], what is similar, familiar, and safe). In addition to the criterial characteristics there are also a host of other characteristics that are correlated with the criterial ones, i.e. various attitudes and habits. Consequently, these characteristics work systemically against certain classes of candidates in a way that I contend is conducive to the statement that Psychology itself is prejudiced against applicants with certain personalities and research interests. Why is this important? Well, in addition to calling attention to a systemic prejudice, it also casts doubt on the attitudes of individual psychology professors. Empiricism is only as good as its empiricists, and the empiricism of psychology professors is bound by certain professional trappings, reflects systemic prejudices, and fails to reflect a broad range of freedoms and functions essential to science. This is what I call an autistic empiricism, and it is practiced by psychologists who are savants with respect to technical fidelity to design principles and statistical analysis but whose agendas and poor conceptualization skills alienate the phenomena under study and nullify their products.

But selection is not the only root of this pathology. It is not the only instrument homogenizing this club, bureautizing knowledge production, and creating a dysfunctional set of ethics and evaluation procedures. Once in the system, these suitors become subject to additional layers of vetting but also to a system of reinforcement that, well, 'reinforces' and 'extinguishes' the behaviors that solidify and perpetuate the culture. Psychology is a "club" to the outsider who, once on the inside, finds himself or herself in a "token economy." The primary unit of currency in this "economy" is simply conformity and obedience through which SOME idiosyncratic credits can be earned (e.g., tenure) but which for the most part undermines the essential nature of science and relationships. In the final analysis, tenure is wasted on tenured professors.

The "Other" Evidence

It is always preferable to supplement universal with unique sources of information. This is the difference between vehicular and discriminant validity utilized in statistical analysis itself, and their tandem is more powerful and more sensitive than either one alone. Thus for anyone in the field to hold my individual cases against me as 'anecdotal' shows an ignorance of effective evidence. And I will not allow my adversaries to characterize my campaign as a roman a clef, I will not be bullied into silence about some rather egregious actions that have befallen me while a graduate student at one of four different institutions. While my intentions may be difficult to guage because my presentation is often muddled by my outrage, I do ask my readers to tolerate if not accept my feelings, as my perspective on this field was not forged in an experiential vaccuum.

My graduate training was polymorphously political, and I was often embattled. While I am only an anecdote, my anecdote speaks volumes about what happens to "a person like me." The anecdote allows me to make very specific statements, but in their limitations lies their power. (Incidentally, because I received similar treatment across a variety of institutions, while I am anecdotal, the institutions of which I speak are not. They become appropriate targets for generalizations). I am the exception (or belong to an exceptional class) because the rules of psychology professors made me one. They point to me and say, "this is what we do not want in a colleague." This speaks volumes about them. Once we ascertain the set of characteristics the academics do not want, and the procedures they used to identify you, censure you, and remediate you, then we can make certain generalizations concerning what is underrepresented in the field and concerning the instruments of discrimination.

Ultimately, it comes down to legitimacy. The phenomena in which I take interest and my methods for exploring them are depicted as less scientific because they do not comply with all the unessential elements of the current scientific paradigm in psychology. But it is my belief that in refusing to be bound by all these superfluous constraints, I have freed myself up for an authentic and adequate science, for a science that is quintessential, a science that is comprehensive in its exploration and scrupulous in its detectivework, that retains its roots in the facts of human experience as well as its crown in the free-wheeling intellectual wits of the investigator. And I refuse to be branded as a non-professional simply because my curiosity, my appetite for intellectual freedom and creative control of my products, is insatiable. And I refuse to be branded as a non-professional because I think independently or because I am willing to allow my research to be informed by the best thinking of classical scholars like CG Jung, who represent an age in which professionals were both disposed and permitted to think.

The self, as an individual, is not only a legitimate measure of the worth of an enterprise, but the dutiful one. Clearly if you take away my sociological critique, which is to say, if psychology were properly oriented toward its subject, then it would not matter as much what had happened to me as an individual. But they are indifferent to, and ill-equipped to explore, phenomena like dreams, like personality, and as someone who's devoted his own efforts to these phenomena, I am a telling victim. Moreover, the prejudice against person's like myself is related to the limitations of the field as a science of psychological phenomenon. Because I, and people like myself, are not in the mix, certain phenomena, like dreams, have suffered. So while I could have settled for a statement like, "what happened to me as an individual is analogous to what happened to phenomena like dreaming and personality," the prejudice against persons like myself are likely to have caused the current impoverishment.

As I mentioned, I am not the only individual with these interests whose careers have suffered the professional equivalent of abortion. But even if I were, or if I were the only person to scream at the top of my lungs, for those in the field to trivialize this, and to leverage this for their advantage, is not only disingenuous but it is typical of the kind of perverted thinking that governs this field today. It is the thinking that the individual doesn't matter. Even in our science, where we rely exclusively on the partitioning of variance among large numbers of research subjects, the individual is just an anonymous, interchangeable, and expendable brick in the wall. We do not know how to learn anything from the individual person or from the individual experience, preserving the integrity of the individual, surveying the landscape within each individual, before, or in conjunction with the practice of, extracting commonalties among individuals. Consequently, our body of knowledge is both fragile and fake. I liken it to erecting a skyscraper with no foundation. You can't really work within it and you can kind of just push it over. Or like a Redwood with no roots that grew in one direction. The pressure to comply with the field's over-rated and over-differentiated norms keep this stilted vegetable growing in one direction. Though of all my flora metaphors, my favorite would be the likeness of Psychology to a tree that had been trunc-ated, over-pruning both its roots (phenomenology) and its crown (theory) and bearing branches that are far too numerous and twisted for the width of its trunk.

So this is a two-pronged critique. I am attacking their attitudes toward their students but also their approach to their subject matter. I suspect that if you wish to defeat my argument, you have to defeat me on both fronts. The two arguments intersect in my contention that psychology consists of a system of prejudices that precludes an adequate exploration of the psychologistic phenomena at the heart of the human condition. This prejudice is systemic in that it is governed by norms and policies that were given the power to perpetuate and proliferate themselves, but the prejudice is also supported by the attitudes of individual academics and practitioners. The prejudice claims as its victims certain phenomena as well as those students who align themselves with these phenomena."

NOTE
Barnes & Noble sells out of book while Amazon replenishes stock. As Ehrenfels works to boost supplies to Barnes & Noble and works out a better price at Amazon in the next few days, Ehrenfels (for now) recommends PublisherDirect (click here) for speed.

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