WASHINGTON -- Later this summer, the American Book Publishing Group will make available for sale to the public a novel that exposes sources of moral and intellectual corruption in our departments of Psychology.

Moved by what he calls the “sheer pointlessness of the profession,” newly christened Ph.D. J. Wyatt Ehrenfels aborts his pursuit of an improbable career and impossible vocation to publicize the evils of the field in Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun. Ehrenfels uses his real experiences as a student or instructor in six psychology programs as evidence for his claim that academics and practitioners in Psychology have created a professional culture that is inhospitable to an adequate exploration of the human psyche. "Thirty years ago I would have said that the business model that evolved within this field prohibits its members from using the full range of their skills to fully probe the facts of human experience. Underwriting this model are a set of values that affect the most vital functions of the field, from the method of psychological inquiry to the selection and training of graduate students and the appointment of tenure-track assistant professors. We as individuals are required to surrender our wits and our basic freedoms in favor of a uniform set of rules imposed by central agencies, from the department at the local level to the university at an intermediate level and ultimately to the American Psychological Association. Over the course of this professional evolution, the first generations of us grudgingly but willingly sacrificed its wits and freedoms for the greater good, basically answering a call for greater integration and communication within the field. At first the rules were largely confined to the way we presented the results of our research. Over the generations however the underlying values implicit in the business rules spread to every aspect of our business, infecting our method of psychological inquiry, our teaching, and most perniciously, the criteria for the selection of graduate students and the appointment of tenure-track assistant professors. Unlike most industries in the private sector, where the job market fluctuates with the economy, the university department is relatively fixed and never has enough vacancies to absorb the hundreds of new PhDs a year. Under these conditions, admissions and search committees can afford to admit or appoint those applicants who most embody the values of the field. I think these conditions favor those whose personalities have no inherent ties to the subject matter -- those with no vision or vocation -- those who are driven primarily by career interests rather than callings -- basically the mindless, psychologically unsophisticated, existentially timid, and intellectually lazy sponges with a congenital propensity for seeking out and towing the company line. Over generations of selection and training, the membership has gradually evolved into a group of academics increasingly willing to surrender its freedoms and wits until, eventually, we became a collection of tin men with no wits or freedoms to cede."

When asked to describe the consequences of this "evolution," Ehrenfels identified two major losses as "theory" and "phenomenology." "This is a tree that lost both its crown and its roots. And we don't understand how the two parts of this tree are actually related. We want our trees tall and leafy so they can harness its source of energy in the sun. Naturally, we also expect some depth and breadth to its roots so it can find its sustenance, its water and minerals, in the soil. In brief, deeper roots mean taller trees and vice-versa. The roots of Psychology is its ability to attend closely to the subject matter of the field (i.e., psychological phenomena or the facts of human experience), and its crown is its capacity for conceptualization (i.e., the propensity for contemplation and reflection). Theory and phenomenology. Both are vital to the fulfillment of our mission, which I define as the 'study of the human psyche' and yet both have atrophied substantially over the past few decades, in part due to limited resources and logistical constraints. I mean, there is only so much space in our journals. But unfortunately, an increasingly larger proportion of the problem can be attributed to the attitudes of the psychologists themselves, who view these limits not as necessary evils but as ideals to be embraced, enforced, and proliferated. They have elevated their business rules to the level of supreme principles and, consequently the mission has shifted from the 'pursuit of truth about the nature of the psyche' to the 'pursuit of excellence in the professional culture of Psychology.' The world of Psychology has been thrown off its axis. Once a fertile environment for the study of Personality, which I believe is not just any branch of the tree, but its trunk, Psychology has evolved into the study of brain and behavior and eventually disintegrated into a hodge podge of psychological issues. As greater integration, or should I say 'uniformity,' was imposed through arbitrary social mechanisms, the more the work itself disintegrated into a loose collection of topical, technical, and utilitarian projects and mini-theories. What we have in Psychology today is the equivalent of a whore. A whore with cancer. This is how we sustain the use of sexual props and positions through a series of one-night stands. We sell out our own virtues -- not to mention the soul of our subject matter -- for the prosperity of the profession. Alternatively, we behave like vampires, selling our humanity and our freedom for the sake of membership in a fraternal and carnal brotherhood. In exchange for perpetuating and promoting the persona of Psychology, we receive an identity and sense of belongingness. I thought this was illustrated by one of my dreams, in which a commercial airliner crashed after being appropriated by the military to tow some large metal barrier. What is being compared here is the military, a highly disciplined and specialized function, with the broader culture and the freedoms that it is designed to protect. Military life bares no resemblance to civilian life, but it is what is required to ultimately defend and advance that life. While we need a military in Psychology, a highly differentiated and specialized set of research tools, the tools should advance the broader wits and faculties from which they were created. Unfortunately, we have adopted a set of business practices that subverted our broader wits and faculties to the greater glory of the tools. We have become a garrison state. Quite a coup. Thus while good research, for example, calls for a confluence of methods both descriptive and inferential, exploratory and confirmatory, qualitative and quantitative, and idiographic and nomothetic, we have developed a system that favors the latter of each pair at the expense of the former. Does the evil to which I refer have a name? Sure, I call it 'nomothetic null-hypothesis testing.' Yesterday one of my readers wrote in to say the following: 'I don't know why you are such a hateful and bitter person. Under the guise of helping people or, as you seem to think, 'enlightening' them, you have found a soapbox for yourself. I think that if you truly cared about anyone's experience other than your own, you would not spew these hateful messages out to unsuspecting individuals who are merely checking their e-mail. On top of which, perhaps you have had a negative experience in life. Welcome to the world, my friend, bad things happen to all of us. You, however, have chosen to take your experience and harm others who may have benefitted from the experience of psychology. Just because you do not hold the field of psychology in high regard does not mean that it is as evil as you make it out to be.' This is fairly representative of my critics and, 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. This statement reflects an attitude that is common among members of the field which, if true, bodes well for this person's chances of finding a career in Psychology. Academics in psychology do not regard anecdotal evidence very highly and I suspect from this statement that this person would like 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 indepth. I believe that quality data and quality conclusions depend on preserving the integrity and dignity of the individual case. Most research mines a minute aspect of 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. Anyway, that response addresses the 'nomothetic' in 'nomothetic null hypothesis testing system.' Academics formulate these tiny little hypotheses that barely resemble a meaningful question (a human-sized question or one worth asking). The hypotheses may have once resembled a question that has been broken down (liquidated garage- sale style, if you will) so small, you need a microscope and All the King's Horses to glean the question. Hypothesis-testing amounts to no more than resolving an answer to a dichotomous (or binary) question (reject/do not reject); in fact, the choice is between rejecting or not rejecting the null hypotheses (H0 vs. not-H0) rather than between the hypotheses and some alternative (H0 vs. H1). Under these game rules, no exploration is required and none made. Therefore, it comes as no surprise to me that the data gathered to test a hypothesis is usually very poor, and the inferences drawn from the data are also constrained (which explains why so many Discussion sections amount to little more than restatements of the Results in non-statistical prose. If this the GAME, what do we need from our players? What kind of players do we need to scout and recruit? Certainly no one with any keen predisposition to think or explore. Such qualities could not be accommodated by the publication timetable. Academics are expected to publish at least once a year (and address a few conferences). We won't scrap the null hypothesis testing system because it is conducive to quick-and-dirty research projects that take up little space in the journals and that can be mindlessly absorbed by the author's peers. And since positive results is one precondition for publication, academics usually choose 'safe hypotheses' (those likely to be supported given the prior literature or common sense). Too much research is of the variety where the only difference between the current study and a previous one is that a variable is varied, a control condition re-defined, a dosage increased, or a hypotheses generalized to a particular ethnic population (e.g., does the effect we call cognitive dissonance hold up in a sample of female Kurds?)."

Ehrenfels spends hours every day defending his mission, primarily to a younger audience of college undergraduates. "The most common complaint is that I am 'over-generalizing.' They act as though my argument has no validity if every single one of my criticisms does not apply to every single academic in the field. I can usually take the pejorative sting out of this charge by characterizing the sociological and historical forces that shape the realities worthy of my generalizations. I have been able to show many critics how the business rules shaped a population of psychologists who are homogeneous with respect to certain values that affect psychological inquiry. There is a natural selection at work here, a set of systemic biases that weed out (or select out) certain values and interests that are not conducive to surviving the requirements for tenure. One argument that resonates with my undergraduate audience is the one in which I actually name the 4-7 obstacles they need to overcome to achieve tenure as a professor (or licensure as a therapist). These are gatekeeping exercises in which they have to survive both a daunting competition and an arbitrary and mostly cryptic set of requirements. First, you have to achieve admission to graduate school. Then you have to make it through graduate school, which amounts to more than just academic excellence in a system in which a "C" (and in some schools a "B-") means failure and academic probation. You also have to survive your socialization into the professional culture of Psychology. This is a process of indoctrination in which your classroom attitudes and behaviors are subject to review by student ethics & evaluation committees at the end of each academic term. I have encountered many straight A students who were placed on conduct probation for unconventional tendencies. Then after you receive your PhD, you have to win an appointment to a university as a tenure-track assistant professor. Most PhDs have to settle for part-time adjunct teaching, as hundreds of new PhDs compete nationally each year for just dozens of vacancies. Then, if you are fortunate enough to procure that coveted assistant professorship, you have to comply with -- no, embody -- the business rules as you manage your impression on the tenure review committee. Essentially, tenure is wasted on tenured people. By the time you are even considered for tenure, you have been so thoroughly vetted, that it is unlikely you have any views or ideas of an unconventional nature that require any job protection. In short, professional and technical developments within the field have undermined the adequacy, accuracy, and authenticity of our inquiry into the facts of human nature.

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 his 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.” Brilliantly written to show us the heart of what is at stake, Fireflies details the consequences of the practices by which academics and therapists alike erode the humanity in their students and in their subject matter with a form of professionalism that stifles true callings and true scholarship.

        At the heart of the novel's inspiration is the fate of JW Ehrenfels himself, whose 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,” conveyed Ehrenfels. “He told me that while there was no evidence for misconduct as a teaching assistant, I was 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.”  Ehrenfels 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 personality 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.”  

        I interviewed J.W. Ehrenfels extensively for fireflysun.com, at which time he attempted to make sense of what had happened to him, attempting a formal diagnosis of what he called the professorial pathology.  “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.”  Ehrenfels refers me to an article written for his book’s website by co-expatriate Connie Vaughn, who brilliantly noted, “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,” continued Ehrenfels, “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?  Why do they do what they do?” 

        The heart of the Ehrenfels critique is his contention that professors place special conditions on their self-esteem -- that they need to participate in a consensus to feel valid.  Part of this "contribution" is a Hippocratic-like promise to the public of a unified theory of psychology and, while this remains a work-in-progress, professors work on an appearance of science and solidarity, constructing a common ethics and methodology intended to conceal and constrain their diversity of theories.  It is hyper-technical observance of this consensus to which they refer when they speak of "professionalism." These points are illustrated on a daily basis in psychology departments where professors never speak about psychology or therapy. They are entirely unfamiliar with one another's views, and choose to remain so because they are aware of all the points on which they are likely to disagree. But they know they can always agree on whether a student has violated some point of ethics or has failed to grasp some aspect of the methodology. Thus for the sake of faculty harmony and solidarity, many students are brow-beaten and a select few are sacrificed.

Thus 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 they fear,” claims Ehrenfels.  “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 almost sycophantically sexual strokes.  Seldom outside these conditions will a professor choose to defend a student against an attack from his peers.”

        To readers for whom this depravity seems far-fetched, Ehrenfels provides the grounding in some common sense psychology.  Ehrenfels maintains that as long as their 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 students.  But loved-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.  The book, hereafter known as “Fireflies,” recounts verbatim the histrionic and hyperbolic reactions of professors to students who step one inch to either side of the putative white line.  Ehrenfels describes how these overt expressions are needed to fortify a fragile self-esteem rooted in a façade, a “glass house of cards with clay feet built on a foundation of sand.”  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 while 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.  Ehrenfels believes 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 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.’"

        Fireflies is not only a relentless indictment of professors, but on the effects of their pathology on the study of human nature.  “They 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 his inclinations -- indeed J.W. Ehrenfels himself -- as antithetical to science, but Ehrenfels contends 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,” he called 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, Ehrenfels unleashed his insatiable curiosity upon the professors themselves, seeking in the plot of his book human motives for their most inhuman science.

        Swiss Psychiatrist CG Jung, of whom Ehrenfels believes himself to be somewhat of an atavism, developed a personality typology based on four components to a normal perceptual process: sensation (establish that x exists), thinking (determine what x is), feeling (is x agreeable or disagreeable?), and intuition (what are its implications and where does it go from here?).  Ehrenfels uses this theory to contrast persons of human proportions from a perverse professoriate, for whom Materialism is sensation, Doctrinarism is thinking, Credentialism is feeling, and Careerism is intuition.  In other words, when the psyche becomes the subject matter for a profession, it is formulated and manualized to the point where it ceases to function and appear as it does in nature, becoming a caricature.  Clinical professors who moonlight as therapists 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.

        And yet readers of Fireflies will come to believe that it is the faculty itself that is fraudulent.  While this is just a dry and pale introduction to the book, I believe the book will take readers into a world where they enjoy the horror of every painful realization about this institution.  Using scripted dialogue and description, Ehrenfels brings to life a world that is dead to us in a post-apocalyptic retrospective that compels us to consider whether we are indeed too late to change an institution.  “I believe in the psyche.  I believe if mistreated, that it will reassert itself at some point, but regrettably not in my lifetime.  I am too late to save my career, but perhaps I can warn future generations of Carl Jungs so that while they are subjected to the professional equivalent of abortion, they can at least understand why.”

        Why indeed?  Ehrenfels believes that Psychology departments have elevated to the level of supreme principle professional requirements that are entirely irrelevant to scholarship and education.  For the mere appearance of science and professionalism – and for the sake of a career within that profession – academics adopt methodologies for teaching and research that constrain independent thinking and limit real productivity.  While the field bends over backwards to admit students of diverse race and ethnicity, with an extreme prejudice do professors select out -- or weed out -- students with diverse ideas.  Psychology departments effect fundamental changes in the character of students willing to sacrifice their personal standards and intellectual freedom for membership in a profession.  This is the vampirism of the times, when student acquiescence to professorial preferences and penchants for the sake of tenure is the nonliterary equivalent of the manner in which a vampire sells its soul for immortality and carnal membership in a fraternal brotherhood.  Ehrenfels recalls the likeness of his department head to a head vampire, who once remarked that it was a student’s duty to represent your department -- a department which in turn is required to represent the broader field of Psychology – which in turn is required to represent science.”  I personally am amazed that universities can preserve the illusion of academic freedom.  What is academic freedom worth in a place where tenure is needed to guarantee the right to speak freely?  In a place where the professors work overtime to ensure that certain people never receive tenure?

        Once monuments to academic freedom and havens for intellectuals and introverts, our State university system now fosters conformity that values science and professionalism for their own sake.  This technico-professional “knowledge” is most evident where it is most misplaced, i.e. in the instruction of undergraduates.  18-year-old students who have never been exposed to Freud's theory are instructed to summarily dismiss Freud as a charlatan and chauvinist, with nary a clue that their professor's familiarity with Freud extends no further than second-hand hearsay and innuendo.  This minimization and belittlement of psychology's forefathers betokens a field at odds with its own constitution.  Even undergraduates are required to read and comply with APA writing manuals and professional research methods -- which often includes mainframe statistical software -- and encouraged to publish to bolster their candidacy for admission to graduate school.

        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.  Professors maintain the illusion of professional superiority in two ways akin to Piaget’s mechanisms of (1) assimilation and (2) accommodation.  (1) Use your 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 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 they 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.  “What beauty or value – indeed what purpose – can dreams appear to have once we reduce them to lines of ink on paper roll.”  Ehrenfels is particularly protective of dreams, which he views as the most objective products of human nature, and he seems to excel at pointing out the intellectual impotence of physiological psychologists.  “I wouldn’t say they’re stupid.  It’s just that they don’t know how to think so they hide behind precision equipment and methodology.”  As impeccable as their canned methods are in self-containment, the veracity of their conclusions also depends on the formulation of theory, hypotheses, and the interpretation of data.  Ehrenfels maintains that these academics use their labs as a pulpit from which to voice their aversion to dreams.  “Using readings of brain activity to adjudicate intentionality in dreams is the modern equivalent of phrenology.  We’re reading neurotransmitters like tealeaves.  The only difference is that they interpret for the sake of opposing interpretation.  Or it’s like using a microscope to understand a tornado.  In its streamlined form, Science cannot settle the matter of meaning.  But that does not stop us from going through the motions and drawing our preconceived conclusions.  Surely, if we limit Science, we limit the purpose to which it can ultimately ascribe dreams. ”  He reminds us that psychologists cannot throw human experience out the window and then call themselves “empiricists.”  At some point in the history of Psychology, the rules for observation and data recording have become so severe as to ensure rigor at the expense of relevance -- precision and parsimony at the price of authenticity – unassailability at the expense of substance -- efficiency at the price of sufficiency.  And Ehrenfels is quite sure that when the public reads Fireflies, it will understand how these oppressive scientific imperatives originated not in nature or on Mount Sinai, but in the dubious psyche of scientists.

        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 the 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, Ehrenfels reminds us 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.

     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 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.  “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 website, 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.  We have breathed the life and worth out of our thoughts and feelings to create ‘cognition’ and ‘affect’; we attempt to understand their causes but not their purposes; and we seek to solve these sources in a test tube we call the brain.”  Ehrenfels recalls a statement from a former professor: “if it is not neurological, I cannot imagine what it is.”  But Ehrenfels believes 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 which 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 Ehrenfels gives us a glimpse of an order to life that is beauty, and he does this in the same stroke in which he reveals how the professionals profane it.  “If JW Ehrenfels is unprofessional, then so is the psyche.  Where he be condemned as unprofessional, his condemners be profane.  Psychology is bankruptcy – it is fraudulence – it is blasphemy.”  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, Ehrenfels 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.  Instead, the psychologists attempt to destroy it, 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.  What are the hallways of academe but a smoke-filled labyrinth of mirrors?  What is Psychology to human nature but a red herring in the mouth of an albatross?”

        But will Ehrenfels be able to prove it?  In a country desensitized by scandal – in a country that has sensationalized the smoking gun – how can he prove bankruptcy without billing statements and fraudulence without forensics? – where murder is committed without weapon and pollution without chemical.  When I discussed the standard to which his testimony will be held, he smiled sardonically, and I just knew he was remembering the evidence his professors needed to place him on probation.  “Academics love to preach evidence, and the clinicians love to preach ethics, and yet having slandered me in faculty evaluation meetings on flimsy and whimsy evidence, they will demand of me now nothing less than a noisy Geiger counter to trace even the faintest doubt.”  His evidence is his traumatic experience, and when they move to dismiss his life as anecdotal, he will remind them that their disdain for human life disqualifies their claim to psychology. 

        So join Ehrenfels as he remembers the innocence of four graduate students whose names have been changed to protect those who destroyed it: (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 and for his symbiosis with his subject matter; and (4) Angela Jewell, for requesting accommodations for her visual disability.  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, Ehrenfels wanted his message to meet each member of his audience on a broader front.  For this reason, he incorporated into the making of Fireflies devices that appeal to each of Jung's phases of perception.  For the sensation-oriented readers, Ehrenfels delivers the dramatic facts of his embattlement.  For the intuition-oriented readers, there is symbol – and by that I mean the dreams and synchronistic events -- tools by which Ehrenfels makes plain to his readers the 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, Ehrenfels offers 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.  He invites you to wander the halls of academe and to make a choice: “who is the public health risk here – JW Ehrenfels or psychology?”

         “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.”  As an apostate from academia, Ehrenfels hopes the book will be an apocryphal blight on Textbook Psychology.  Ehrenfels does not view the book as a career change, because he does not consider himself a professional author.  And while more elegant and polished writers than Ehrenfels can be found, I doubt that there exists a vision as spiritually fulfilling and intellectually titillating as the one that unfolds in Fireflies.  An extension of the purpose for which he believes he was put on this earth, Fireflies subsumes under his singular vision no less than all the superlative dreams, experiences, wisdom, and imagination across his thirty-year career as a human being.  Ehrenfels seems to have realized in writing this book how much his life originated in Something outside itself – in Something to which it will one day return greater than the mass of its material.  Ehrenfels tells me -- and I quote – “I have failed if I did not help you -- my reader -- to seize an obscure glimpse of this transcendental contribution to your life.  Welcome to the tension between scholarship and professionalism -- calling and career -- human nature and scientific law.  Welcome to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun.”

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