Two-Pronged Case against a Dually-Disordered Psychology

"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. Wyatt Ehrenfels's critique consists of both a macroscopic and microscopic component. At the macro level is a dispassionate sociological analysis of the field's policies and procedures. At the micro level is an anecdotal (and very passionate) accounting of the adverse impact of these SOPs on specific subject matter (e.g. dreams) and individual students/scholars. At the macro level is an analysis of the manner in which the policies and procedures behave like systemic biases. At the micro level is a discussion of the attitudes of individual psych profs who were born and/or bred for membership in this community and who have become bearers of false standards and human incarnations of the gears in the idiot machine (i.e. systemic biases).

"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.

It's no secret Wyatt Ehrenfels did not pursue a permanent home in a department of Psychology. Conditions were just not suitable, the climate inhospitable to productive thinking. While psych profs work for the sake of appearing rigorous and professional, Wyatt remained steadfastly loyal to the fundamentals of science, finding room within science's minimalist framework for what original theories and methods were necessary to probe the mysteries of dreaming. To understand the failure of imagination within Psychology's academic communities, we need only point to the adjustments of American and European space administrations to the requirements of studying Mars and Titan. We knew enough about Mars to deploy rovers Spirit and Opportunity in an effort to address technical questions about the planet. While Titan is one of many satellites orbiting a ringed and distant planet, Mars is our neighbor and in the summer of 2004 enjoyed a rare proximity to Earth. Unlike the prohibitively murky cover of methane clouds on Titan, the relatively thin atmosphere on Mars made the planet's surface relatively available to our telescopes. And we've been there before. Remember Viking. Sojourner. Armed with clear photos of the Martian surface, NASA scientists are already drawing comparisons between Martian planes and some deserts here on earth. We're closer to Mars. We know more about Mars. And in the end, we've learned Mars is more like Earth. And yet multi-tasking NASA officials were unwilling to suspend an exploration of the nether reaches of our solar system pending a complete accounting of our rust-colored neighbor. Space officials poached a probe in the intense heat of Jupiter's stratosphere, directed a probe through dense traffic in Saturn's rings, and slipped Huygens beneath the methane veil of Titan. NASA is even planning a mission to Pluto.

Ann while Psychology's standard bearers are reinforcing among its scientists behaviors that avoid the mysteries and frontiers (the Titans) within its own system of study. Psychology professors concentrate their own efforts on the biggest and brightest object in their sky and, had they been writing policy for NASA, we'd be venturing no further than that pale imitation of earth we call Mars. We'd be designing large scale, expensive missions ascertain whether ants can sort tiny screws in space, with an occasional jaunt to mine moon rock for commercial paper weights. The policies and practices that govern research, publication, and faculty appointment do not respect the needs of exploratory science. Until we restore a culture of discovery within Psychology (assuming there ever was one), psychology professors will continue to Titan-form the earth with their own asphyxiating brand of policy fog.

"If they don't act like detectives...if they don't act like explorers, free thinkers, or visionaries, then it's reasonable to assume they possess none of these qualities," remarked Ehrenfels, whose comedic take on the truth about psychology professors produced such memorable epithets as "serviceable standard bearer" and "administrative savant" -- decisive improvements upon the common invectives "drone" and "clerk" overdosed by most critics. And despite unctiously high-minded hand-wringing and pseudo-indignation from a few guarded insiders over the negativity of the Wyatt Ehrenfels campaign, Wyatt's dignity and consistency made the attacks on him appear mingy, inaccurate, and anti-intellectual. By most accounts, love factors more into Wyatt's passionate ideology than revenge: love for the phenomenon that is dreaming. With a defiant curiosity and intellectual appetite, Wyatt often remarks that he was "born to dream, born to study dreams, and born to promote and defend the study of dreams against, of all people, psychology professors."

And Wyatt Ehrenfels was unwilling to do what was required of him to prove himself a paragon of zombified procedures that routinize unproductive thinking. "They wanted models, and I didn't like the fashion. And when it came time to model competitively and to fuss over the frills, when it came time to wear what they wanted, I just couldn't put on. I just knew I wouldn't look good in their garbs. But more importantly, I knew how poorly dreaming would come off in their drab rags."

Progress Depends on the Unreasonable Man

Professors and peers thought Wyatt was throwing away a promising career. The sacrifices required of him seemed quite reasonable to them, but in the end, from the beginning, and at every point in between, Wyatt knew that the phenomenon he loved -- and indeed science itself -- would suffer the brunt of the sacrifice. Wyatt must have seemed utterly unreasonable when he made it clear that his work serves a higher standard and that selling a piece of his soul was out of the question. Fond of quoting George Bernard Shaw, Wyatt Ehrenfels went quietly about his business, his very way of life a testament to the belief that since "the reasonable man adapts himself to the world" and since "the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself," that "all progress depends on the unreasonable man." And it is because psych profs did not allow him to go quietly about his business without relegating him and the phenomenon he loved to second class status -- and made such a public spectacle about revoking his citizenship within academia -- that he decided he would not leave quietly or, as some people have come to think of him, that he would leave quietly only for a time before returning to wake the dead.

"With respect to advancing knowledge about the function and language of dreaming, a professorship would have been unproductive," claimed Ehrenfels. "So in the end it all worked out for the best and I was rewarded for my decision to stay true to my values." Three years later he returned to Psychology to serve his calling in an entirely 'other' capacity: as critic, as compensation, as a natural correction in a free market of ideas broader than Psychology's socialistic science. "If we evaluated governance practices within the field of Psychology the same way we do in business, we'd find plenty to be concerned about as human beings and as Americans. In fact, our counterparts in many areas of Europe put us to shame when it comes to a free market of ideas about human nature." Believing that Psychology could not credibly survive by repressing some basic human freedoms -- and functions -- Ehrenfels rode the wave of anti-Psychology sentiment and cynicism to an iconoclastic crest and crescendo. And in recent months dozens have rejoiced in the resurgence of this formerly damned and left-for-dead dream researcher. The aftershocks can even be felt within the ranks of the professional community, where one young psychologist confessed to Ehrenfels with solemn resignation "you make me wish I had failed out of graduate school." When all the cards are down on the table, it will be plainer to hundreds of students and thousands of much-maligned "men-in-the-street" that Wyatt Ehrenfels is only pointing out the obvious: it's hip to be rejected by the field of Psychology.

Cream Rises and Other Myths

Supporters of institutionalized psychology cling to the myth about the behavior of creams (that it rises to the top) as the last line of defense against Wyatt's charges that practitioners, academics, and administrators violate meritocracy in the training and selection of faculty, staff, and student-apprentices. "There's an assumption -- a tendency if you will -- that psych profs are hoping to play on -- that the competitive pressures, the pressures of training, and pressure from the accreditation delivery system in the form of so-called 'standards' results in a profession populated by the best possible professionals. This is a fallacy. And as a fallacy, a close cousin to the myth that the policies and procedures governing day-to-day operations in the Psychology World ultimately promote quality assurance, public safeguards, and scientific standards. Not only does the cream not rise to the top in Psychology, but it often sinks like a stone."

Ehrenfels was inspired by the following e-mail from an undergraduate to re-design his arguments to tackle this fallacy.

"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."

After releasing V2 of his web site in 2002, this kind of thinking was never heard from again. Responses began depicting Ehrenfels's expatriation not as a tragic necessity, but as an unnecessary tragedy.

"On the surface," reflected Ehrenfels, "it seems like a credible assumption and certainly one we would like to be able to maintain. Right? Relax the standards and you have contaminated beef and space shuttles with faulty booster seals. But this is not rocket science. This is an effort to understand human nature. The APA and departments of psychology are pork-rolling into the so-called minimum safeguard and standard defense (like so many Congressional riders) dozens of social conventions that advance the aims of Psychology as a social institution while blinding us to the fundamentals of its science. While putting our careers and our professionalization at odds with the fundamentals of science, at odds with a greater understanding of many classes of phenomena, and at odds with adult maturation and individuation. With these superfluous, excessive, and gratuitous practices, aimed at making us appear more formal and further along than we are, we appear more naked before those who know the truth about us. For example, the null hypothesis testing system (NHTS) has absolutely no intrinsic scientific merit and yet it is defended as if it were the experimental method itself. The NHTS is a social contract with, admittedly some social benefits in that it is a part of a massive framework of expectations that allow colleagues within the field to readily understand and integrate one another's work. However, taken to an extreme and in tandem with other social contracts like APA style, it promotes mindlessness, but more importantly, it has a disproportionately adverse effect (i.e., discriminatory effect) on those of us whose research interests demand we remain faithful to the essentials of science -- to conceptualization, observation, and fact collection. We like to emphasize the technical and social elements of our work, and our work suffers for it. And we suffer for it. It discourages appreciation for, and rewards intolerance of original ideas, independent thinkers, atypical subject matter, and idiomatic modes of expression. This bureaucratization of clinical training, accreditation, and knowledge production profoundly effects mental health services, the organized body of knowledge, and the livelihoods of many promising young people called to pursue their place in the Psychology World."

Asides

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.

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.