Originally a requiem for a career, Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun (www.fireflySun.com) was intended to confer some therapeutic benefit on the author and provide closure to an enduring childhood dream rudely cut short by a form of "professional abortion." By age 16, this introvert and intellectual had read half the original works of CG Jung, hoping to find service and sanctuary in the university as a pioneer. (What attracted me to the field of Psychology was its youth as a science, that there was still room for pioneering in this field).

Midway through the writing of Fireflies, I realized I had as much a right to change the field as it had to change me. I decided to use the book to spearhead a campaign dubbed “Operation Firefly.” Its mantra, “Reclaim the Psyche from the Professional Culture of Psychology.” I was asked by friends and family in the field to assume a pseudonym for their protection, for they are well aware that academics seeking reprisal cunningly resort to indirect methods of inflicting indignity. One professor will often lash out at another by failing or slandering his or her protégé, research, or teaching assistant. Where couples go through graduate programs together, a professor may fail or slander the spouse of the intended target. A professor may embattle the spouse of a disabled student to avenge a complaint about his or her failure to comply with requests for accommodations. In these cases, the professors know how to avoid the appearance of violating a social norm, so that the beleaguered victim, if he or she dares, is forced to file a complaint with no more than circumstantial evidence. When this occurs, it is usually at the victim’s career peril, for slandering a professor with or without compelling evidence risks reprisal from faculty colleagues. The book I now present protests not only a prejudice among psychologists against phenomena at the heart of the human psyche, but also protests a similar inhumanity in their attitudes toward students and people in general. They are driven by issues of power and personal insecurity (by a need to protect their fragile social and financial base) to maintain unflattering views of their students, “lay persons” (i.e., the “man in the street”), and the psyche itself.

Caught up in the social and material context of their work, psychology personnel behave like antibodies that attack any and all “purities” that approach their fortifications or, God for bid, enter their kingdom. I regret that even while I have given up everything to write this book, so that I would have nothing to lose, a decision was made to distance myself from my own work to save my spouse and supporters incalculable suffering. And on March 23, 2001, the shadow of modern Psychology—"J. Wyatt Ehrenfels"—was born—the personification and champion of all of its incompatible and repressed material—expatriated social psychologist, scorned pioneer turned agitation propagandist and major pain-in-the-ass. In this new incarnation, my vocation would survive the death of my career as I turn my eye from the psyche and fix it firmly on those to whom the psyche is entrusted.

So yes, this is admittedly the work of a disgruntled and disaffected expatriate), in part. But it is just like my critics, who reduce the diversity and richness of phenomenological life to the brain, to see my work as nothing but a roman a clef, to categorically dismiss my critique as “motivated.” If there were room in their minds for more than one thought, they would be able to understand that a work like Fireflies could be both testy and truthful. My novel serves as a courtroom in which professionals stand trial for multiple counts of moral and intellectual corruption—of fraud and abuse—and my title leaves little doubt as to my belief about what is at stake here: human nature itself. I present this book not in the hopes that Psychology could be reclaimed for human nature or for the public interest. I am a pessimist. While I believe the most fundamental principle violated by Psychology, human nature, will re-assert itself like an earth abused by tenants bent on altering it to their will, I do not believe this adjustment will occur in my lifetime. And so I offer up my novel as a post-apocalyptic retrospective on what has already been lost—on the human nature eroded by psychologists in their students and in their subject matter.

At the heart of the novel's inspiration is my own fate. My career ended when the Student Ethics & Evaluation committee, which convenes as part of the faculty at the end of every semester to discuss student progress, placed him on probation. I remember exactly how my advisor summarized the decision; he told me that while there was no evidence for misconduct as a teaching assistant, some of my choices were clearly unconventional and the faculty decided that to be unconventional is to be unprofessional. Suddenly, I realized how hard I would have to fight for my doctorate and that no matter what happens—Ph.D. or no Ph.D.—my career is essentially finished. I grieved for more than just the end to a career. I did not understand what had just happened to me. Where did I go wrong? I know this sounds aristocratic, but I was born with a special symbiosis to my subject matter, as if at birth there was an inherent connection between my personality and the phenomenon of dreams. I was born to study them. I remembered my dreams vividly as a child, and started to read many books about dreams. Starting at age 10 with those ridiculous astrology dictionaries and pop trash self-help books, I quickly ramped up to a dull and vapid college textbook until I ultimately settled at age thirteen in the original works of CG Jung. Inspired by the hope I could spend my days researching dreams, I worked hard academically, raising all vital statistics—my grade school 2.5 GPA to a high school 4.0—tepid 1100 on the PSAT to a 1290 on the GRE. I spent $2300 applying to 40 graduate schools over the course of two years, competing with hundreds of other applicants for a paltry five positions per school. Once in a program, I matriculated faster toward my master’s thesis than any other student, presenting to my committee advisor the first draft of my proposal before the first day of the first semester. I was one of a handful of students to finish my thesis 2 years after enrollment as specified in the program handbook, all the while maintaining a 3.90 GPA. And then, at the same faculty meeting at which my advisor announced I had successfully defended my thesis, a small group of faculty led by the stalwart department head dropped the bombshell.

It would seem that I did everything I needed to do, until I was given an opportunity as a graduate student to do what I had always wanted—to work on my masters and to teach a General Psychology class, where I apparently made some choices that revealed my teaching philosophy and theoretical orientation to the faculty. Just as I realized I had deviated from the one-size-fits-all professional identity issued by the department, it was too late. It took me a few months to realize the gravity of what I had done—of what I am—but I never did understand why the faculty reacted the way it did to my choices. This pantheon of professors essentially equated my unconventional decisions with a pernicious non-professionalism and, even more surprising, they seemed to take it personally. This led me to toy with the idea of a new diagnostic category specifically for pathology in professionals. Unfortunately, the category would not be very useful simply because you’d have to put about 99 percent of the faculty in it. Professors lack an intrinsic interest in the subject matter of Psychology, usually ending up in the field by default or due to an interest in scientific methodology that could have just as easily landed them in Sociology, Biology, or Actuarial Science. I mean—where is the psyche in psychology? The only knowledge psychologists choose to acknowledge as valid is one in which human behavior is reduced to neurons or social influence. A fellow expatriate, Connie Vaughn, composed a brilliant piece on this subject for my web site entitled “Why I Am Not a Psychologist” in which she makes her case that “there is nothing at stake in Psychology.” Professors have no intercourse with the world outside the university let alone any measurable implications for lives. Seldom is an academic or even a clinical psychologist consulted by a corporate or government agency. They have to promote—to proactively insinuate themselves—into the world by advertising their services as consultants. Even within the university itself, there is little sake for which professors perform their jobs. If on top of a fundamental disinterest in your work you pile a low salary and no advancement structure, what is there? What happens when you do not know why you do what you do from day to day? Some of that uncertainty is dissolved by the fabrication of factitious reasons (one symptom of which is the acute hypersensitivity with which their choices are defended) and the remainder of the uncertainty translates into a more chronic, low-grade irritability.

In early 2001, well ahead of the release of my book, I took the reins of its broader campaign, spreading word across professional listserves and college student e-mail directories and adding responses to the web site (fireflySun.com). But it was not until September of the following year that I undertook in earnest efforts to metabolize sympathy into support and recruit the first of my lieutenants. Into my "officer ranks" I recruited a small group of professionals who collaborate on strategies for eroding the social and financial base of the field. Into my "enlisted ranks" I recruited psychology majors willing to serve either publicly as evangelists or covertly as operatives at their local college or university. I like to think Operation Firefly is performing a public service to psychology majors as well as to the human psyche. I like to think that we can take a bit of the sting out of the disillusionment that awaits the true student of the psyche. I believe we can deliver the goods we are unlikely to see from the token critical tradition inside the field. But we have a long way to go before we achieve any measurable goals, and we need your help.

At the heart of the problem is the lack of a scholarly motive. My novel depicts the trials of four graduate students whose calling to pursue a psychologistic education runs afoul of aspiring “scientists" and "professionals.” I am frequently hounded by adversaries who exhort me to provide some quantitative estimate of how many psychologists fit my description of malfeasance. These are often the same critics who think it a simple matter to discredit me by pointing to my barbaric over-generalizations. I am constantly required to defend my position against the belief that any statement not based on empirical research of a representative and random sample of programs and that does not contain a number is libelous and easily debunked by pointing to a single exception:

“In this statement there is a clear indication that I am supposed to treat my own experiences (which incidentally span nine different colleges and universities) skeptically…Academics in psychology do not regard anecdotal evidence very highly and I suspect from your statement that you wish me to treat my life experiences as anecdotal evidence. But I regard a type of anecdotal evidence as the most powerful evidence, treating my individual research participants as a series of n = 1 replications. This does not mean that I generalize from one case to the universal. (When I say I prefer idiographic over nomothetic research, people erroneously assume I want to study one and only one person). I generalize from a reasonable number of cases explored in-depth. I believe that quality data and quality conclusions depend on preserving the integrity and dignity of the individual case. Most research panhandle a minute aspect from the participant (i.e., a reaction under a manipulation; an opinion in a survey) and conclusions are generated by subjecting a large quantity of these inanimate and de-contextualized data to a common statistical analysis. (By inanimate, I am making a metaphor. A cell, the most fundamental unit of life, can be broken down into chemical or subatomic particles. At these levels, there is no life. I believe that most nomothetic research dismantles the psychological organism beyond the point from which any meaningful conclusions can be drawn). As an enterprise, the process of drawing inferences from statistically partitioned variance among psychological particles is qualitatively distinct from the practice of intellectually gleaning commonalities among conclusions first drawn within separate psychological organisms. For one thing, you avoid the "meat grinder effect," which often results in a finding (i.e., a universal) that can be seldom corroborated in individual experience (all the subjects are exceptions to the rules generated by partitioning their variance). Such a finding (and thus the reasoning behind the process that generates the finding) qualifies as metaphysics. Surprise surprise (personal communication, 2002).”

So how many of them are corrupt? The only real answer is “too many.” Any more precision would effectively disembowel the real issue. How many? Enough. Enough to keep me out of every university. Enough to sabotage the covenant of the field so that Psychology is counterproductive to an adequate, authentic, and accurate exploration of human nature. But hey, sure, the wealth of my experiences and observations, my knowledge and training in what is touted as the (i.e., universal) norms for research and education, and my capacity for reason is not enough to save my argument from being dismissed as “delusional,” “narcissistic,” “disgruntled,” and even “schizophrenic.”

"Too many"—how many is that again?—oh yes, too many—of us borrow this one-size-fits-all identity from our profession. I suspect we would have basked in the reflected glory of any community if not this one, which we defend against the academic freedom and wits of its rare ascetics. I suspect this is why we take it so personally when a colleague or student steps one inch to either side of the white line. We mumble something about maintaining scientific or professional "standards" and trail off with a supporting cast of terms like "mental hygiene," "public welfare," "perfect fit," “appropriate match,” “willingness to adjust,” etc. The words themselves are like incantations, ritualistically invoked to ward off scrutiny. We must know these so-called standards have less to do with quality assurance than with impression management and group harmony. Yes, speaking of dubious motives, I am not the only one whose argument can be construed as “motivated” (it would seem I am just the only person who does not think that a motivated argument cannot also be a disciplined or accurate argument, but I am over-generalizing). I have even seen psychology personnel selectively apply these terms as one-word, stand-alone arguments against students/applicants they do not like. “Excellence” is another buzzword. Everyone is committed to it. I may not be able to tell you what “it” is, but I can tell you that a “commitment to excellence” in the professional culture of Psychology seems to have replaced the “pursuit of truth” about the “nature of the psyche.” The pursuit of truth and the pursuit of excellence as phrases reflect underlying attitudes that do not mix as well as some bottles of oil and vinegar. Just like their "standards," the term refers to business rules which serve only to standardize in ways that are actually counterproductive to the constitution of Psychology as the study of the psyche, sabotaging an adequate, authentic, and accurate exploration of its objective (i.e., natural) products and frontiers. These terms are also passwords used to guard the gates of this closed society and protect its biases. If you use the lingo and shop-talk enough, your professors will come to believe that their norms (the force a la Star Wars) are strong in you. In the name of competence and psychological community hygiene, clinical professors who moonlight as therapists attempt to select or weed out students who exhibit personalities or idiosyncrasies. Skeptics in research shrink from the direct study of dreams and, in their fear of meaning itself, have unleashed a campaign for rationality so extreme as to dwarf the irrationality, bankruptcy, and fraudulence of the 19th Century spiritual mediums they continue to treat as public health risks. Blinded by their crusade, the professors look at the world around them and see in statistically unique personalities only a potential for maladaptiveness and in phenomena beyond rational explanation only a potential for fraud. If there are two things professors fear, it is being fooled and not fitting in.

I have been a victim of a profession composed of chicanery designed to deflect the academics and practitioners from professional forms of DSM pathology. So if you ask me to define Psychology, I will have to say it is a red herring in the mouth of an albatross. Behind a fetishistic rhapsodizing about multiculturalism/diversity—behind a paternalistic regard for the welfare of their students and the public—is a hatred for a diversity of ideas/interests—a campaign against individual talent and freedom. In the end what they have is nothing more than a social artifice divorced from human nature, a glass house of cards with clay feet built on a foundation of sand. They are proud that their science operates at a pace that transcends the individual and they pride themselves on their devotion to something greater than themselves and in their discipline to be a part of something that won’t produce results in their lifetime. To this I say “come on”; if they believed—I mean really believed—anyone will ever reap the rewards of their science, would they really be in this field? I say yes, because just like praise, blame also transcends individual lifetimes, and they won’t live long enough to hear future generations clamor for the end of this ill-gotten field.

Psychology professors live in fear that someone will pull back that curtain and show the world that they have amassed an eminently unimpressive body of wisdom about the human being. If for no other reason, psychologists have created this language and methodology to fill the void in their real knowledge of human nature. Oh, and here is the other reason. In order to call themselves experts in human nature, these professors have to convince ordinary people, who have access to their own psychology, that they are not qualified to claim expertise. I mean, I cannot wander into any physics lab and wander off with Uranium-238, but I can reflect on my life and, in so doing, I threaten to encroach on the jurisdiction of the psychology professor. Professors maintain the illusion of professional superiority in two ways: (1) Use science to portray human beings in a way that they no longer resemble themselves. Case in point: a statement by my own General Psychology instructor, who once remarked, "if you want to study human nature, read Ann Landers; we study psychological law." Research has all but bowed out of the real business of self-knowledge, replacing the study of individuals with a statistical analysis of behavior samples to produce averages that are thought to be universal laws. But universal laws that are not established on the basis of the study of exceptions (i.e. individuals) cannot claim status as rules. Consequently, most our research findings have no better than a fictional status even worse than the so-called popular or folk myths psychologists love to mock. (2) Invent a secret trade code (i.e., jargon, style, and format) so that people will attribute intelligence to works they can neither find nor understand without comparable training.

The code itself serves within the field as a replacement for real knowledge about human beings. In short, if you don’t have any knowledge, invent it. No one will know you have replaced nature with fiction. And while psychology faculty are busy alienating humans from the enterprise that studies their humanity, they figure they might as well play a little God and surgically remove those parts of human nature they find troublesome or perplexing. No, I am not talking about violence or avarice, I am talking for example about the skeptical abuse of dreams, whereby physiological psychologists—under white cloak and EEG dagger—announce in support of their predilection that dreams have no meaning or that they have no function greater than that revealed in their highly circumscribed study.

While it is generally believed that science responsibly though imperceptibly secretes progress through gilded, microscopic units of research, All the Kings Horses and All the Kings Men will not be able to do much with a concatenation of trade papers based on poor quality research and disengaged thinking. I will pardon those in the psychology department who want to build a better cockpit on a grant from the FAA or slice up rats they've intoxicated with your tax dollars. But those of us who need none of your money to study the heart of psychology itself (i.e., the human psyche), armed only with our own wits and curiosities, are forced to toil as adjunct instructors in university sweatshops. I know I pick a lot on research, when in fact the octopus has enough tentacles to be everywhere: we’re talking textbooks, test banks, the DSM, APA style, and the policing of classroom instructors by those "possessed" by metaphysical interpretations of multimedia, demonstration experiments, multiculturalism, and learning styles. I even see this malfeasance at work in practitioners. Over the years, their clinical training in psychopathology has been increasingly geared toward the DSM (published by the American PSYCHIATRIC Association), a manual of disorders that likely have an organic basis because of the typicality with which their symptoms cluster within the general population. Since third party reimbursement often depends on psychiatric diagnoses, psychologists co-opted the DSM to make a living. In recent history, psychologists have allowed the DSM to take over, and are now the mindless practitioners of a metaphysical DSM. It is difficult to obtain funding for clinical research without using DSM diagnostic categories as subject variables. The implicit medical model of the DSM meshes well with the materialism of psychologists, who have a stake in treating mind and brain as interchangeable, failing to understand how evolving mental processes can gain a functional autonomy with respect to the organic basis from which they originally sprung. The reliance on the brain as an explanatory principle and on pharmacology as treatment homogenized the intrinsic value of psychological life. Is it any wonder that psychologists would lobby for prescription privileges? And then there is the matter of that modern-day Frankenstein known as the “professional school.” These profit-driven DeVry-style behemoths advertise to the career ambitions of the “every man” (or “every woman”) making it clear no manualized training lies beyond reach of the masses, metastasizing campuses at the rate of cancer, diluting the intellectual capital of the field and flooding its market.

Consequently, our university psychology departments have deteriorated into trade schools where students are indoctrinated into a political system by narrow and inflexible professors who use education as an instrument of cloning. They act like those parents who want their children to live out their dreams for them. This makes sense when you consider that the Game of Science is stacked in such a way as to preclude answers within the individual lifespan. This is a place of (1) anti-intellectual prejudice, (2) self-serving career ambitions, and (3) arbitrary social conventions without equal in this nation. Sadly, our professors and students are in the business of building vitas and public personas—but not knowledge. Professionalism has replaced—and become confused for—scholarship—careers replace vocations—and vapid texts and trade publications replace books.

While this educational conundrum seems “academic” in that the private sector and the public relies little—if at all—upon psychological research, I should remind my readers that our mental health practitioners are trained in the university environment. If the system continues to undermine individual responsibility and freedom—not to mention intelligence—the members of future generations of academics and mental health professionals will become increasingly reliant on the policies and procedures of some central authority like the American Psychological Association. At stake here is mental health, but more importantly, human nature itself. While from time to time, some research is published with limited utilitarian value, by and large there is no place in this profession to survey the structure, dynamics, and development of the psyche—not in clinical psychology and not in research psychology.

An analysis of the inflections with which this statement is uttered by psychologists actually reveals two additional meanings: “You Do Not Think, Therefore I Am” and “I Do Not Think, Therefore I Am a Psychology Professor.”

In complying with our perceived duty to represent our field, we conceal (or compensate for) our diversity (e.g., interests, pet theories, theoretical orientations) by identifying with an ever-widening platform of norms that govern everything from research to education to mental health delivery.

Hang around a psychology department, and you’ll soon realize that you do not hear much discussion of human nature around the water cooler. This fact is a joint function of two things: (1) psychology professors vary widely in their pet theories and theoretical orientations and (2) psychology professors have remarkably (if not clinically) low tolerance for tension and uncertainty. For this reason, they built an ever-widening platform of norms that govern everything from research to education to mental health delivery. How often have I heard a psychology professor refer to this thing they call the “methodology” as the “glue that holds the field together”? The problem is that they are all about the glue. They should rename their field “The Association for Adhesive Manufacturing and Advocacy.” They have lost in the glue what it is they are supposed to hold together. They may not be able to discuss human nature around the water cooler, but they sure can discuss which student stepped to which side of which white line. I am reminded now of having been smitten by the first frog I ever saw. I thought it was cute and I wanted to keep it. I wanted to know where it was at all times and to call it my own. I must have carried that baby frog around in my hand all day. When I opened my fist to show my mother and to relieve tension in my knuckles, I noticed that what I had been toting around for the past three or four hours was a dead frog.

We see in the professorial psyche both a private pathology (i.e., low self-esteem) and a public persona (i.e., professionalism). Their white-knuckle grasp of their ethics, professionalism, and scientific principles is intended to convey to the public a set of high standards with a social conscience. But in the name of progress and the public good—in the name of science and ethics—in the name of competence and community hygiene—these academics and therapists alike disqualify as unscientific those aspects of human nature which do not readily lend themselves to their methodology much in the same way they disqualify students who do not readily lend themselves to training. There is much that professors fear; they see nothing short of chaos outside nothing less than perfect consensus. But in their own viewpoint—which may differ from that of their peers, they see a point on which the profession will ultimately converge. This means they can be schmoozed. It is this viewpoint that a student needs to massage with sexually sycophantic strokes. Seldom outside these conditions will a professor choose to defend a student against an attack from his peers. And judging from reactions to my own conformity campaign (an eleventh hour shift in strategy to which I owe my Ph.D.), the professors did not permit the transparent insincerity to spoil their flattery by my imitation and my modeling of appropriate or prescribed behaviors. To the question, "what is your Ph.D. in?" I often answer that I have a Ph.D. in “Obsequiousness” rather than in Psychology.

The guild and its professional culture constrain creativity and require its members cede their freedoms and faculties to central agencies (e.g., the university department at the local level to the APA at the national level). These practices advance political and public relations objectives, polishing the field’s persona and creating an illusion of solidarity and legitimacy. The sheer number of colleagues engaged in similar activities also confers a therapeutic effect on those who demand from themselves some certainty that what they are doing is right and demand from others evidence to the same effect. In a field as young and unique as this one, one inextricably bound up with the human nature of its members, the only potential source of comfort is the slavish compliance of colleagues and students, and we demand it.

I maintain that as long as faculty self-esteem requires a movement toward consensus, professors need evidence of the conformity of their peers and students about as much as they need oxygen. This may manifest itself acutely as a need for the attention and adoration of undergraduate students, particularly with the older male professors needing to feel loved by their 18-year-old female students and with the younger female professors needing to feel in control of their male graduate assistants. But love-starved and power-hungry professors aside, you can always count on this chronic need to see the consensus reflected in their own work, the work of their peers, and the work of their graduate students. My novel recounts the histrionic and hyperbolic reactions of professors to students who step one inch to either side of the putative white line. I describe how these overt expressions are needed to fortify a fragile self-esteem rooted in a façade. Without a well-differentiated self or purpose in the profession, professors vacillate in the most schizoid way between overbearing confidence and irascible insecurity—each taking turns concealing (and compensating for) the other. To obtain the Ph.D., a student can simply hide a doubt or harbor an unconventional point of view, but for the student to accumulate the credentials (i.e., publications, teaching assignments, letters of recommendation) necessary to procure postdoctoral employment, he or she must observe departmental policy and proactively pander to faculty opinion. I believe this trait to be congenital in effective graduate students. If a student has to learn to pander to their professors' insecurities, chances are the student will not survive. You do not want to give the faculty an opportunity to sell you and your future out to preserve the precious group norms that maintain harmony within the department. Each professor lives for that opportunity to be the key player in the maintenance of consensus. Strangely enough, since the mid-1970s we social psychologists actually have had a name for our own degeneracy—we call it groupthink. We just seldom apply this principle to ourselves.

I think it is a modern manifestation of the VAMPIRE myth, whereby we sell our souls for immortality (tenure/licensure) and for the social/material amenities associated with membership in a “community.” This would be benign if our survival and security did not depend on sucking the life—the soul—out of our students and subject matter. We are even passing these burdens along to our undergraduates, favoring for graduate admission those who present their 2 x 2 ANOVAs at regional poster sessions where they are just hell bent on talking about their “main effects” and “interactions.”

Our social context contaminates the integrity and dignity of the true scholar and the purity of ideas. We value consistency across members (i.e., standardization, like-mindedness) more than we value internal consistency in the individual member and logical consistency among his or her ideas. This is consistent with our notion of “reliability” in research, in which the quality of the individual research project takes a back seat to the replication of conclusions drawn across multiple studies. Vampirism also rears its head in end-of-semester evaluation meetings, where mentors find it more important to maintain harmony with colleagues than to defend a 4.0 protégé against vague, unscrupulous, and unsubstantiated inferences violently drawn about his or her classroom “attitudes.” All this in a world where the values of "ethics," "evidence," and "empathy" are paraded like so many floats in the Tournament of Roses. So many beneficent and disciplined terms used to disguise disruptive and demoralizing acts. Well, I have a few words of my own. How about paternalism, pedantry, passive aggressiveness, sophistry, vanity? I suspect this covert aggression—one more word—is fueled by insecurities, which faculty conceal beneath an equal and opposite arrogance built around their norms, finding a category of conduct probation for students whose idiosyncratic choice threatens to rekindle their self-doubts. When we look to external authority for validation, direction, and resources—be it the APA or other faculty within the same department—our students and subject get hurt.

Hence my title, Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun. The Sun refers to the community norms and the fireflies to the humanity and integrity of the individual scholar and to the nature of the human psyche. The title also alludes to the absurd search for an Archimedean third point outside the psyche and to the unsuitability of the Copernican Revolution within Psychology, where it is just as true that the sun revolves around the earth as it is that the earth revolves around the sun.

It is my contention that the mission of psychology has itself been remade in the image of the professional culture. The fact the "psych-" has been abandoned for the "-ology" is evidenced in the changing face of psychology departments. I/O and Human Factors are growing while no one knows enough about Personality to notice its disappearance. The academic equivalent of the practitioner’s DSM, the Big 5 is just about the only Personality subject light enough to carry in the professional winds, a theory-free personality taxonomy distilled statistically from self-ratings along trait-dimensions developed from the mother of all manuals, the dictionary. The taxonomy is an attempt to prove that a science of Psychology can exist without concern for the facts of individual psychology and without contributions from the mind of the individual researcher. But I can see why the Big 5 appeals to them. Considering the fertility of the modern academic mind, it is the only thing they can grow from desert sand. Small group dynamics, once a staple of Social Psychology, was exported to the highly specialized I/O branch—reducing Social Psychology to the "talk-show," with its Chinese menu of topics like racial prejudice, self-esteem, and gender identity.

Psychology has been chopped up piecemeal into cosmetic fiefdoms of expertise that resemble less the study of the psyche than Sociology, Engineering, Actuarial Science, Biology, and Statistics. These fiefdoms represent tiny fractions of human nature over which any psychologist can profess expertise. Unfortunately this hubris has made a soup strainer of Psychology. By that I mean we are forced to sift our graduate applicants through a soup strainer, passing over those who make the effort to see the horizon for those who can hardly see to the edge of their own sandbox. The division of Psychology into fiefdoms (e.g., Social, Developmental, Cognitive) is an arbitrary one with catastrophic consequences for holistic research, which cannot survive if applicants to graduate schools can not earn admission because their interests are too large to be a prototypical leaf on one of their branches.

I have sought an overarching framework for an analysis of the unhealthy orientation of faculty toward their subject. In these professionals, four functions that comprise human perception according to CG Jung (sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition) are perverted into pathological forms (Materialism, Doctrinarism, Credentialism, and Careerism, respectively). These -isms form the foundation of the professional culture and the cardinal points of its mental and moral compass. As a badly miscast actress attempting to pull off the role of scientist, Psychology lacks both elegance and stage presence, it's scientism and professionalism are behaviors emblematic of over-acting. Perhaps in attempting to imitate science, it has adopted some practices that are just not appropriate for the study of human nature, most notably the belief that its members have to help one another work toward the same version of the truth (i.e., the same ideas spoken in the same tongue). I approach the psyche as if multiple conceptualizations were possible, and thus believe that the glimpse of the psyche afforded us by the truth on which we foreclose at any point in time, regardless of how 'validating' the evidence, may be a limited if not distorted view. Unfortunately, critics of the DSM have restricted themselves to the argument that DSM diagnostic categories lack experimental evidence, failing to note that in using the DSM to organize our research, clinicians limit the fruits of experimentation to the evaluation of this classification scheme. By virtue of its role in organizing research, the DSM is promoted from its pragmatic role facilitating communication with managed care companies to one of theory. The recriprocal determinism here may mean we have a two-way street, but it also means we have restricted access to all crossroads. I recall an advocate of the DSM balking at my statement: "the problem with beginning with a classification scheme based on superficial clusters of symptoms is that once the classification becomes part of a professional canon, it gets stuck at that level of depth. Change can only occur in baby steps." My adversary thought he had delivered the coup de gras to my argument when he cited massive deletions and additions across the second and third editions of the DSM, to which I replied in saying that the perceived magnitude of these distances proved only that he were living in a DSM universe. No amount of evidence that points to the reliability and validity of the DSM diagnostic categories could discourage me from seeking more adequate, accurate, aesthetic, and authentic conceptualizations of psychopathology.

The Quadratic Structure of a Healthy Psychology

I learned I could also use the same underlying model of perception to develop a blueprint for a healthy science of psychology. Such a science would represent a confluence of exploratory data analyses and phenomenology (Sensation), confirmatory research (Thinking), clinical considerations (Feeling), and theory (Intuition). Like the functions in normal perception, these approaches within a science of psychology can exhibit biases and compensations in ways that make it as analyzable in terms of health as the human psyche itself. Thus the science of Psychology itself can be said to slip into one of many different categories of illness and such a deficiency can be analyzed psychodynamically. I find such a tool personally gratifying because it allows me to turn the tables on trigger-happy diagnosticians and clinical faculty who like to pathologize their students. To them I say, "you have your own unique disorder, a professional analogue of Borderline Personality Disorder." This disorder is the architect of modern Psychology. As the "shadow" of modern Psychology, it is my responsibility—or should I say that of my persona, J. Wyatt Ehrenfels—to compensate for its excesses and deficiencies.

This quadratic structure would also be used to organize the social structure of the field. A division of labor grounded in nature, it capitalizes on a bifurcation in the disposition/talent of our membership. As divergent thinkers, exploratory researchers would utilize their natural interests in exploratory and descriptive data analyses and qualitative methodologies to create broad-based and original methodologies to address or raise the big questions (or questions worth asking). As convergent thinkers committed to the non-negotiable application of technical, scientific, and statistical standards and techniques, confirmatory researchers would break up these conclusions of exploratory research for more controlled and rigorous evaluation. The benefit of this system I am proposing is that knowledge is represented in “drafts.” Exploratory research is performed and if it does not culminate in a positive result in the confirmatory venue, it remains on file for consultation or re-adaptation. As it stands right now, research that is not conclusive and not positive does not get published, which spells career death to the researcher in spite of its untapped potential.

In what amounts to the industrialization and bureaucratization of knowledge, behavioral fragments are mined like coal from the walls of General Psychology classrooms and dumped en masse into a furnace where it is melted and forged into conclusions by sloppy, biased, and opportunistic thinking. I can see the impurities in our “metal.” Our knowledge is intimately bound up with its institutional context, lending weight to the mission of social constructionists who argue that there is no transcendental rationality, no universal principles, no “truth.” It seems absurd, and in my opinion it IS. Unfortunately, it is accurate within the walls in which it is inspired, in Psychology. One absurdity elicits an equal and opposite absurdity, a compensatory cog in that machine known as the historical dialectic. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that each side appears to be right because the other is absurdly wrong. Each lends justification to the other. Neither side seems interested in addressing themselves to the lack of an emic tradition in our field, and by that I mean, our disregard for the facts of individual psychology.

Each person is a potentially rich source of data about his or her own psyche, and if the psyche were truly our concern, the breadth and depth of our interest in the individual research participant would be exponentially greater than what it is now. If I were successful somehow in turning psychological researchers on to the street, I fear they would make terrible panhandlers. I would have to advise them that the phrase “could you spare any change?” is more effective than “could you spare a quarter?” They are reluctant to survey relationships within the landscape of phenomena because they fear such a study would require too much of an intellectual contribution and more time than what is available to litter the journals with as many publications as are required to manage their impression on the tenure review committee. Relationships, in their view, are not their responsibility. The attitude is “I am relating these two levels of this independent variable with this dependent variable. As for other variables, let someone else do it.” In effect, each unit of psychological research ends up being not about a phenomenon per se, but about a particular “variable.” In order to glean something from a comparison of studies relating different “variables” to a phenomena of interest, norms have been established for methodology (i.e., one cannot compare apples and oranges). Unfortunately, the norms for methodology have resulted in a cookie cutter or recipe mentality, promoting mindless research and limiting the true explorers and detectives who need to exercise flexibility or originality. I feel compelled to present the liabilities of a science that prides itself on having “facilitated communication and integration” among “members” of its “community.” Perhaps the most glaring and undeniable flaw is that psychology has less to do with psyches than rat brains, pigeon droppings, and canine saliva. If I wanted to teach a gorilla how to work a Viewfinder, I would have become an anthropologist. There’s one field with the decency to hide the word “apology” in its title.

When I entered the field, I expected to find students and professors drawing constructively from their own experiences and imagination and bringing their intelligence to bare on human-sized questions about phenomena like phobias and fetishes and frontiers like dreams. Instead, I find clerks and clerks-in-training who look outside themselves and even outside the psyche itself for issues more suited to sociologists, neurologists, engineers, actuarial scientists, and pollsters than to psychologists—questions like "Where should we put the altitude meter in a cockpit?"; "Can we design computer software to reproduce a human facial expression on a CGI model?"; "How do we adjust our statistical analyses to accommodate missing questionnaire data?" and "Is post-abortion stress greater within the Chicano than African American subculture?"

My novel makes a number of arguments. First, it will be clear to my readers that Psychology is not what it claims to be in its very word: it is not the study of the psyche, nor does it make any pretense to being the study of human nature or the study of human experience. In fact, many professionals in the field reject these definitions because they sanction the study of phenomena that does not lend itself readily to research that meets the highest standards of scientific rigor. Dreams are one such example of a phenomena psychologists love to either ignore or debunk as meaningless because they cannot be measured or gathered with the same sophistication and precision with which they collect pigeon droppings, poll voters, and intoxicate rats. Once a useful tool in service of the human psyche, science now serves primarily a social purpose as a tool in service of the professional persona and the individual career. When there are 100 applicants for every one tenure track assistant professorship, and 100 submissions for every 1 slot in a trade journal, faculty and editors respectively can afford to select only the most sophisticated of the candidates, and unfortunately, sophistication today is defined technically rather than conceptually. Partly, this is the result of an emphasis on science as a tool to promote the legitimacy of the field in the eyes of the public and in the eyes of other disciplines. Partly, this is the result of small group dynamics, as it is much more likely a committee of five editors will agree on the technical merits of a submission or candidate than it is to agree on the merits of intelligence or originality. Partly, this is the result of the way evolution of the faculty itself over the years that these principles and values have been permitted to prosper, populating journals and psychology departments with faculty who are not only less intelligent or original, but who are less disposed to contemplation and reflection and who are less disposed to present perspectives that oppose the mainstream. We end up with psychologists who operate purely on the professional plane of their science, social creatures who not only discriminate systemically against certain phenomena but who are actually divorced from nature itself. Virtually extinct are those who are “called” to study the psyche, who have a true—and by that I mean intrinsic—connection to the phenomena of interest to them. Virtually extinct are those who can comprehend or appreciate the difference between a career and a vocation, professionalism and scholarship, method and theory, psychological law and human nature. Psychologists are now a race of custodians for whom a Humpty Dumpty of a psyche has fallen into shards of misfired Sociology, Actuarial Science, and Neurology.

In our rush to controlled and confirmatory research, we have minimized those aspects of the scientific process that benefit from a theoretical, intellectual, or phenomenological contribution. I distinguish here between theoretical and intellectual because I think our valid criticism of the dogmatic and reified aspects of theories like psychoanalysis is used as justification for an unwillingness to put any serious thinking into our research. And our data suffers for it. We are kidding ourselves if we think we can treat rationalism and empiricism as two distinct enterprises. The data's quality, scope, versatility, and relevance live and die by our willingness and ability to contemplate, reflect, and reason. The tree of Science has been "truncated," having lost both its crown (theory) and its roots (phenomenology). Our membership neither has its heads in the clouds nor its feet on the ground.

At twenty-nine years of age, I sacrificed a career in Psychology to publicize the evils of the field in a one-of-a-kind novel. I was moved by the sheer pointlessness of the profession to surrender my struggle for an improbable career and impossible vocation. When I was a Ph.D. student, I found myself troubled by circumstances my advisor attributed to the personal insecurities of a professorial pantheon that found nothing short of chaos outside nothing less than perfect consensus. After only four years of graduate school my skin has learned to crawl in response to such terms as "fit," "normal," "adjusted," "appropriate," and especially "professional," for these are the terms used as incantations to root out any student or faculty member who does not have 100 percent of the field's epistemology in his or her bloodstream. Frequent use of these terms are symptomatic of a pathology inherent in the professional culture and deserves as much attention as symptoms of any disorder listed in the chapters and verses of the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. These terms are unquestionably invoked and received as evidence that a student falls short of what is required ethically or scientifically to belong in the consulting room or in the university, and many students are harassed throughout their training by repeated referrals to some student ethics and evaluation committee for reasons related not to their academic performance but to something called a "classroom attitude and behavior." Unfortunately, the students, applicants, or assistant professors whose careers are mortally wounded by this type of harassment are those whose motives are scholarly and genuine, that is, those whose independent research or thinking represents an adequate exploration of authentic psychological phenomena. In an era where Psychology demands nothing less than psychometrically sound evaluation of statistical constructs and experimental manipulation and measurement of physiological or observable variables with precision equipment, independent thinking and authentic phenomena stand most to lose. In what passes for the sleep laboratory, lines of ink on paper output from the EEG is scrutinized to adjudicate support or rejection of a highly circumscribed "null hypothesis," but descriptive and thorough forays into meaningful, human-sized questions about the content and characteristics of actual dreams are not undertaken. We poke at brains in an effort to understand dreaming without an interest in what the person has dreamed. In essence, we have forsaken the very foundation of our field and violated its constitution as the study of psychological phenomena.

But more important is the disproportionately adverse (i.e., discriminatory) effect on the real detectives, explorers, and intellectuals in this field, whose disposition to theory and phenomenology is necessary to pursue the mysteries and frontiers at the heart of the human condition. In the lives of these pioneers we find ground zero for the struggle between the nature of the psyche and the culture of Psychology. Their research depends on an observance of good social science, a confluence of exploratory AND confirmatory data analyses, qualitative AND quantitative data, and descriptive AND inferential statistics. But in our rush to formality (and to compete in a market saturated with submissions/applications), we have abandoned the former in each pair…ostensibly in favor of the latter except, in a sabotage emblematic of the Jungian shadow, the repression of the former will ultimately undermine the quality and efficacy of the latter.

So the social constructionists are valid, not in their perspective on the human psyche but on their criticism of the field of Psychology. I would go as far as to say that what we have in effect is social Darwinism (i.e., evolution as the natural selection of the fittest). The fittest are those whose research interests (1) “fit” manageably on that knowledge production line I call the NOMOTHETIC NULL HYPOTHESIS TESTING SYSTEM, (2) appeal to the lowest common denominator of our journals' review committees, or (3) attract external sources of funding. Among the “survivors” is research that addresses utilitarian, pragmatic, and technical issues with highly circumscribed and non-psychologistic hypotheses, unsaddled by the needs for theory and phenomenology. The detrimental effects on the quality of this research by the lack of theory and phenomenology, where present, are less conspicuous because the subject and object of the research is barely psychologistic. In other words, Psychology as a human science barely has a pulse. Having said this, I should add that psychology professors are not averse to killing to pulling the plug on patients with a weak pulse. The literature is replete with attempts to fit our fast-food research model to a psychologistic phenomenon like dreams. I have already implied that psychology has become too “Washingtonian” in its political agendas but I have not yet thoroughly defamed the field by linking it metaphorically to a town named “Hollywood.” Our research is like a large budget film production. The beatnik script would be obvious if not for the Hollywood set (i.e., laboratory) and props (i.e., white coats and electroencephalograph). Most Hollywood sets do not require real flushing toilets or back doors. By this I mean that our psychology professors conceal their vapid and disorganized thinking beneath dense and over-organized text. Intellectually lazy, existentially timid, and sloppy logic is concealed beneath seamless, gleaming metal technology and a design that marches in perfect step with the textbook. Impeccable—formally unassailable—it makes no official mistakes and is paraded with drill & ceremony into the APA Monitor or discovery.com (not to mention the dusty shelves and jaundiced pages of the university library annex, where it is as far removed from the public as it is from the reality of the psyche). But what does this sound and fury signify, with its lack of meaningful questions, and its dull and denuded data? Its conclusions may be correct within the confines of its wheelhouse, but what happens when you take them “outside” into the “light of day,” where they can be subsumed and recast within the scope of broader, less myopic research whose predilections do not reduce dreams to cognitive filing cabinets or brain secretions. After the play-dough is pushed through their square stencil, congratulations abound when a square is exactly what they find. But what if dreaming is a tetrahedron, as presumed by those who have no lab to command legitimacy, only wits? Just imagine if the only form the sculptor could liberate from the hunk of marble was that of his or her own chisel. I am speaking here of caricatures, products that bear too much of an imprint of the methodology and its constraints. I would like us all to critically examine the violence done to our most interesting questions when we worship at the altar of what I call "methodolatry." We pare down an interesting question (and a universe of information) to a dichotomous (yes/no, either/or) proposition as to whether we reject or fail-to-reject. The breadth and depth of the information gathering process is restricted to what is necessary to produce an inferential statistic on our career timetable, one that is either likely to be positive and publication-friendly or that is likely to negatively reinforce our own fears of an irrational order. What passes today for the organized body of knowledge in Psychology is at best inbred and derivative dribble, sacrificing adequacy for parsimony, sufficiency for expediency, and worth for opportunity. To borrow a phrase from musician Peter Gabriel, I cannot help but feel Psychology is a collection of "games without frontiers."

Any question or theory larger than a breadbox (hypothesis) is treated as metaphysical. Take for example the dream, which is treated as subjective fiction despite the fact its spontaneity and indifference to our (arbitrary) will clearly places it among the objective products of nature. We ridicule curiosity and encourage para-skepticism (contempt) for those mysteries that lend themselves LEAST readily to the business rules and that require a large contribution from our own musings, introspection, or anecdotal knowledge. I have to laugh at the way in which the phenomenon itself is dismissed as metaphysical in the same breath in which a metaphysical interpretation of “probability” (i.e., chance/coincidence) is invoked to dismiss it. Those who claim these phenomena as their interests carry a terrible burden and become primary targets for the faculty gatekeepers. If they do not permit the professional culture to wear them down, the political embattlement will weed them out. Somewhere along the many checkpoints in their professional training, they have to choose between compromising their careers or their integrity, proving that tenure is wasted on tenured people. Those who make it into the tenured ranks have survived so many layers of vetting as to have proven themselves unable to formulate or appreciate an original idea. We have weeded out the best with the bad and hang that ribbon on the peak of that bell-shaped curve, surrendering for the cosmetic appearance of science much of its substance.

Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun is not only a relentless indictment of professors, but on the effects of their pathology on the study of human nature. Psychology professors may not fly our planes or inspect our beef, but they are trusted to present the public with a view of its own humanity. Clearly, the faculty viewed my inclinations—indeed J.W. Ehrenfels himself—as antithetical to science, but I contend it was they who created a science so severe and so stingy as to be antithetical to its own mission—counterproductive to the basic constitution of Psychology as the study of human nature. Methodolatry—I call it. As if to compensate for the spiritual function they repress in their own psyches, professors exhibit an almost religious adoration for—and liturgical observance of—the experimental method and philosophy of science. In an attempt to understand this, I unleashed my insatiable curiosity upon the professors themselves, seeking in the plot of his book human motives for their most inhuman science.

The field's tools were originally developed to serve the wits of individual academics. Eventually the cart outran the horse and it was the academics that ceded their freedoms and faculties in service of the tools (or of policy instantiations or apotheosis of the tools). The first of the professors abrogated grudgingly. But over history, the criteria for faculty selection favored those who willingly abrogated their basic human functions until we reached an era in which academics have neither the wits to cede nor the freedom to choose their abrogation. A competitive CV demonstrates either a propensity for abrogation or, better yet, evidences pre-abrogation. Just whom do we reward? (1) "Heavy-hitters," seasoned veterans (currently employed at other universities) whose hiring confers an instant gratification on the university in the form of grant appeal. Also, the appeal of the heavy-hitter for the faculty selection committee is another illustration of their penchant (and eternal search) for the “no-brainer.” (2) Applicants whose CVs boast the most textual sound and fury, signifying a lack of quality, originality, and reflection. (3) Applicants who will do just about anything to add a line of ink to that vita, serving as the sixth author of a four-page publication—delaying progress through graduate school to teach multiple sections of undergraduate courses—manning the overhead for an advisor at the national convention. These applicants understand search committee members lack time and tendency to read the CVs, browsing them for actuarial features (e.g., thickness, number of publications) with rare regard for the quality or nature of the work.

The plot of Fireflies is choreographed in such a way as to raise questions about the structure and dynamics of human experience and about the role of the individual person in the design of the collective psyche. Fireflies weaves real dreams and synchronistic events from the author’s incomparable fifteen-year diary to create a credible thriller and incredible journey. Dream interpretations and dream research allowed me to delve deeply into what it means to be human and into the culture of careerism and consensus that beleaguer the study of human nature. I may be denied my research, but for as long as I am alive, I will enjoy access to the most prolific database available, my life—and the most sophisticated methodology, my wits. I will continue to wonder and to think, and to amass wisdom at a far greater clip than all the academics combined. And in my book and on my web site, I hope to show you how you can too. I hope to prove just what one person with one’s own life—and in one’s lifetime—can accomplish. There is much cause for awe and wonder in this world, but there is no mystery to our scientific literature. While we claim to study “cognition” and “affect,” we hardly address thoughts and feelings. While we have memorized the criteria for Major Depressive Disorder and mastered the administration and scoring of the Beck Depression Inventory, we know little about human sadness. While we search for causes, we do nothing to advance our understanding of purposes, and the mind—well THAT gets dissolved in a test tube called the brain. I am particularly fond of a statement from a former professor: “if it is not neurological, I cannot imagine what it is.” But I believe the mind is to be studied in much the same way it is inferred. I am fascinated by black holes. Here we have events of enormous power and mystery parsecs across the universe—events that by definition cannot be seen—and yet we can learn much about them by studying their visible effects on objects that can be seen. This is the way our founding fathers in psychology thought of the unconscious, and yet while we never really started to study the unconscious in our universities, we are more than willing to abandon it for the brain and behavior. Shows what we can do when we reach deep and hard into our illimitable well of laziness and apathy. We work very hard to stem the current of our natural curiosity in nature so we can create fictional matter for our methods and methods for our fiction. It is almost as if we have become bored with ourselves and with life—that we manufacture this artifice.

In Fireflies, I provide a glimpse of an order to life that is beauty, and I do this in the same stroke in which I reveal how the professionals profane it. If JW Ehrenfels is unprofessional, then so is the psyche. Where I be condemned as unprofessional, my condemners be profane. Psychology is bankruptcy—it is fraudulence—it is blasphemy bordering on abomination. I am almost happy now to be rid of the professionals and their professionalism; my only regret is that the profession is not different than what it is. I also reflect back on all the times I have heard as a child—from parents, teachers, Olympic athletes, politicians—that I could do anything I wanted in America if I just set my mind to it, even study dreams. It would appear that the only dream the career scientists and skeptics have proven fraudulent is the American dream. And we let them. But while I wish to rejoice in my moral victory and spiritual substance, alas I wonder what I would tell my child should he or she want to spend life in service of the human psyche. Suppose I had a daughter? Would I tell her, ‘if you want to study the human psyche, do not become a psychologist?’ Let us hope that should she share my spirit, that she should also share my hardiness—and my interest in black holes. There’s always astronomy.

As a victim of a profession greater than the sum of its chicanery—artificial policies and practices designed to divert the professionals themselves from their own impotence and impurity, I wrote Fireflies to free the human spirit from the ivory dungeon. If the academics refuse to study human nature, they should admit as much and release it into the custody of another class of professionals or, better yet, scholars, detectives, and intellectuals. Instead, the psychologists attempt to destroy human nature, denying and distorting it at every turn, in the fear others may find meaning and value in what they discard. Until such time, their careers will live on like coma patients on life support—in need of apparatus to survive.

But will I be able to prove it? In a country desensitized by scandal—in a country that has sensationalized the smoking gun—how can I prove bankruptcy without billing statements and fraudulence without forensics?—where murder is committed without weapon and pollution without chemical. None of my professors needed substance or substantiation to place me on probation, and yet I sense I will need a noisy Geiger counter to cast even the faintest doubt on their finger pointing. I suppose my experiences will have to do. As dogmatic as our research methodology has become—as technical as the equipment we celebrate—there is, has been, and never will be any substitute for human experience. So join me as I observe a harrowing kind of experience endured by four graduate students whose names have been changed to protect their adversaries: (1) “Anton Mason,” for aligning himself with the name of Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung; (2) “Aniela Mason”, for sharing his name; (3) Matthew Sykes, for thinking independently as his subject matter required; and (4) Angela Jewell --an intractable female intelligence—for requesting accommodations for her visual disability. Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun tells the story of four very human graduate students whose interest in humanity is drowned out in the inhuman light of science and professionalism. The first book of its kind written by an insider, FIREFLIES delves into this dehumanization as it played out in the real-life political embattlement of four graduate students whose inherent interest in the psyche conflict with requirements for a career in Psychology.

More than just a collection of student horror stories, Fireflies illuminates the consequences of professional attitudes on the study of human nature and, more critically, exposes a chilling vision of the field’s impact on humanity itself. Toward this end, Fireflies incorporates real dreams and synchronistic events from the author’s incomparable fifteen-year diary to create a credible thriller and incredible journey. Dream interpretations and dream research allowed Ehrenfels to delve deeply into what it means to be human and into the culture of careerism and consensus that beleaguer the study of human nature.

Fictional elements are incorporated into the last third of the book to entertain readers with a penchant for action and mystery and to provide a suspenseful, fast-paced conclusion. More than wanting to appeal to a diverse audience, I wanted my message to meet each member of my audience on a broader front. For this reason, I incorporated into the making of Fireflies devices that appeal to each of Jung's phases of perception. For the sensation-oriented readers, I deliver the dramatic facts of my embattlement. For the intuition-oriented readers, there is symbol—and by that I mean the dreams and synchronistic events—tools by which I make plain to my readers the broader significance of these facts for humanity and for the study of human nature. For the feeling-oriented readers, there is fiction and drama that underscore the fact in a way the fact cannot underscore itself—expressively, placing the fact on an emotional plane. For the thinking-oriented readers, there is theory, and in his own theories of human nature, I offer explanations for this inhumanity, placing the fact on an intellectual and interpretative level that demonstrates how the student-victims not only understand psychology better than their teachers but how they understand the teachers better than the teachers understand themselves. More than any standard thriller, Fireflies boasts twists in plot that educate readers about the structure, dynamics, and current social context of the human spirit. By its end, the book intertwines fact, symbol, theory, and fiction to capture and expose the forces that profane the inherent beauty of human nature. I invite you to wander the halls of academe and to make a choice: “who is the public health risk here—J. Wyatt Ehrenfels or psychology?”

While the novel seeks to entertain its readers with drama and suspense, the book's website (launch date May 1, 2001), which doubles as a portal for reform in psychology, presents over 100 pages of documentary-style discourse on the inherent flaws of the discipline and the twisted psyche of its practitioners. Fireflysun.com has matured into an instrument of educational reform, mobilizing my cause into a campaign to preserve the most conservative principle in Psychology (i.e. human nature) and to oppose the wholesale abandonment of the “psych-” to the “-ology.”

“In this solid earth do I build the foundation for my house. At present I have no house to show, but if only the professionals would let you into their house would you see it has no foundation. And some day soon, it will wash away or collapse under its own weight. Unlike the academics I have nothing bold to claim, but then I have nothing to hide either.”