Answering the Critics:

Psychology Critic Wyatt Ehrenfels Deflects Absurdity, Hostility in Those Defending Psychology Professors

Challenging a community of self-styled standard-bearers like academics and practitioners, Wyatt Ehrenfels naturally meets with resistance. His opponents are concerned that unlike your run-of-the-mill crank, a social psychologist who knows their system well and speaks their language will make inroads with the body politic, general public, and student community. With a published book, a popular Psychology news web site, and a speaking itinerary that includes public libraries and community access television programs, Wyatt Ehrenfels knows that people are listening. So do psychologists.

Wyatt Ehrenfels surveyed the landscape of responses from students, academics, and professionals, representative samples of which can be found on the response page. "As a child, I knew that I was born to dream...as an adolescent, I knew I was destined to study dreams, and as an adult...to promote and defend the study of dreams." And in discussion with local residents here in politically savvy Washington, D.C., private citizens defend Wyatt Ehrenfels, pointing out that the measure of his work is clearly marked by the benefits to the phenomenon of dreaming -- receiving the invitation to review the social psychologist's web site with open arms -- appreciating the risks and sacrifices tied to his campaign. Psychology's elders have thanked Ehrenfels for his efforts to reclaim classical scholarship from the jaws of modern 'professionalism.' Many students have credited Ehrenfels for their admission to graduate school or for helping them find a more prosperous major.

This overwhelmingly positive reaction from the community contrasts sharply with strident protest from fierce professionals and members of underground communities with ties to web psychology. The volume of replies from academics and practitioners subsided significantly once they realized Ehrenfels was posting their responses to his web site. Comparing the practice to entrapment in posts to professional listservs, academics called on one another to ignore Ehrenfels altogether. Ehrenfels nostalgiacly remembers the original waves of reactions: "When I surface now and again to post an announcement to a psychology listserv or message board, I find myself in hostile territory. Even I was surprised by the lack of intellectual substance in the replies to my issue-driven criticisms. Designed to dismiss rather than refute, the replies from the self-styled standard bearers consisted largely of counterassertions or, worse, vulgar inferences about the author's personality or demeaning assumptions about the credibility of any individual or service who helped take my message public. Refusing to engage Ehrenfels on logical grounds, the replies served a purely expressive function. When Ehrenfels featured the critical mass of replies on his own web site, the professionals realized how poorly they came off, and they admonished one another not to reply to his bulletin-board messages. After all, they have a reputation to protect, and counterproductive efforts to defend the reputation of their community as a whole (their science and services) came at too great a cost to their reputations as individuals.

The job of defusing Wyatt Ehrenfels moved underground, passing from surface-dwelling professionals with a public face to a self-described "cabal of anonymous kook-ologists" who resorted to extraordinary measures to police the Internet of "kookery, arrogance, and deception." These gangbangers needed a command-and-control stronghold, a cyber-Fallujah that offered them a safe haven from the law, technological anonymity, and a network of forums from which they could recruit like-minded vulgarians bent on eradicating all traces of individualism and ideology. Answer: Usenet. Concealed by forged headers and remailers, those academics and professionals operating on the ethical fringes of their profession took to the unmoderated news group sci.psychology.psychotherapy. There, they issued threats, posted illicitly obtained financial and personal address information, solicited aggression, and passed off lies as facts and innuendos as educated speculation. The most remarkable lies from their anthology include: (a) Ehrenfels's book does not really exist, is a vanity project, or is self-published, (b) Ehrenfels has not worked in years and solicited donations to fund a vanity project, (c) Ehrenfels engaged in infidelity during his book tour, (d) Ehrenfels has no Ph.D. or was handed a Ph.D. by professors who just wanted to get rid of him, (e) Ehrenfels consorts with, or pulls the strings of, other individuals deemed 'kooks' (by stalwarts squatting in sci.psychology.psychotherapy), (f) Ehrenfels's motivation for writing the book is revenge and only revenge, (g) Ehrenfels failed in every bid to earn a tenure-track position with a department of Psychology, (h) Ehrenfels is an alias for persons named Evan Lavery, Gerald Giarmo, or Brad Jesness, (i) Ehrenfels has been diagnosed with Schizophrenia or Narcissistic Personality Disorder, (j) supporters of Ehrenfels consist largely of Ehrenfels operating under other aliases, and (k) Ehrenfels's Yahoo discussion groups are populated or bolstered by e-mail addresses created by Ehrenfels.

They recruited a militia of non-degree holding supplicants, cybersleuthing and hacking-capable belligerents with criminal and/or psychiatric histories who continued to cross Usenet's porous borders into sci.psychology.psychotherapy from other news groups even months after Ehrenfels vacated the premises. In a bizarre twist, persons who were not indigenous to sci.psychology.psychotherapy, persons with whom Ehrenfels never communicated, and persons who were not present anywhere near the time Ehrenfels tacked one of his issue-driven messages to the 'Church door', materialized in the group 'armed' and 'ready to battle' an author by whom they pretended to be personally insulted.

"Here I thought my campaign would be perceived as one aimed to restore freedoms to academics and professionals; however, it became clear to me that I was seeking to give freedom to those [who have] a vested interest in minimizing freedom and diversity. I am speaking of professors who managed to survive and flourish in an excessively, gratuitously, and precipitously rule-bound and zero sum game that rewards players for imitating colleagues and following instructions. And the winners get to choose who plays the game and presides over changes to the rules. They would be lost in a free market of ideas, which is to say, one that is more attuned to the reality of science rather than to its cosmetic persona. In light of this, it makes perfect sense that the replies to my posts from those who would surrender their wits and freedoms in exchange for membership in a community and access to its one-size-fits-all sources of guidance, validation, and identity, would be so rancorous and so conscious of an audience wider than the recipient. I suspect these replies are offered primarily to preserve the harmony and morale among this captive audience of like-minded persons, where the responses do not appear so out of place. But outside this community, such as when viewed on my web site, these responses do not command the same authority and are actually vulnerable to criticism. That disparity did not escape their attention. They present their anger in such a way as to lead me to believe they are distressed by the fact I did not seek their permission first, but I suspect that the real reason at the root of their distress is the fact they do not like the way they come off on my web site. And I can hardly blame them. When viewed on my web site, these same replies look bad, and their knee-jerk reaction is to complain that I am taking their post 'out of context.' But it's not so much 'out of context' as simply 'out of friendly territory.' They behave as if they are protecting their turf, without any need to address themselves to the logic of my argument. And while they are fully aware that I have omitted their names and any potentially identifying information, many of them appear angry that I have done this, as some 'individuals' want to burn me, oddly enough, for both publicizing their replies and concealing their sources.

"So on my web site, it appears I am able to rather easily pick them apart. I think this surprises them. I think they are surprised to find their responses lacking this luster, and so they accuse me of 'taking their responses out of context.' I assure you their responses are quite intact. I have not edited them in any way except to exclude identifying information. In my opinion, their perception of their response was originally bolstered by the friendliness of the forum, the company of others who shared their views, and the expectation that their gist would pass tacitly to their like-minded peers and be well-received. This created a halo around their post, a halo that is lost when the post is viewed somewhere other than in its indigenous environment.

On a related note, this is also an illustration of how the individual is unknowingly compromised by an environment in which community is valued and where the business practices strengthen between-persons transactions and interactions at the expense of the individual's self-development and self-expression. This same argument applies to their brand of 'science.' I believe that scientific research could be considerably better, but it too loses its luster when viewed outside the body of knowledge in which it is said to be organized. Our field deviates from human experience in that the individual ceases to be the vehicle of life and unit of analysis; similarly, the individual researcher and individual research project ceases to be the indivisible building block. They are all anonymous and interchangeable bricks in a wall in which the strength of the cement is expected to compensate for shoddy bricks.

But the responses of professionals are an entirely different animal from some of the hate mail I have been receiving recently from the non-degree holding supplicants who seek the therapeutic and self-aggrandizing benefits of ingratiating themselves upon "ethically fringe" PhDs and professionals on an unmoderated psychotherapy "news group." When I entered the Usenet news groups innocently through "Google Groups," I had no idea I entered a world to which Usenet.com refers proudly as the "Internet Undergound" (consult the films Eyes Wide Shut and Rosemary's Baby for an understanding of this cyberstalking ring composed of anti-establishment iconoclasts [criminals, hackers, evangelical satanists and other Orc-like creatures supplicating a small nucleus of professionals] who resort to violations of criminal and civil law to defend the status quo in Psychology, including its public perception. See my report Criminal Abuse of the Sci.Psychology.Psychotherapy "News Group"

Up until the illegal and menacing behaviors, I had privately enjoyed all the vague and unsupported references to my "obvious flaws and irrationality" and to the fact I "am easily dismissed," because that served to paradoxically build me up by making it obvious to a group of increasingly anxious bystanders the problem with using repression as a political strategem: anyone and anything can be easily dismissed, especially those things [e.g. the Moon Landing] that cannot be easily refuted. If you want to avoid something, just "dismiss it."

The Periodic Table of the Criticisms