Counterfeit Freedom:

Psychology Professors Front Superficial Diversity in Exchange for Oppression of Ideas

Could this be the same psych profs who clamor for racial and ethnic diversity? Believe it or not, it is. I suppose it is in keeping with their hive mentality that psychology professors should want to (a) credit a person for having a diverse shade of skin but (b) subject the sources of real uniqueness in the applicant materials (quality and nature of interests and backgrounds) to a thorough neglect. (Perhaps these psych profs mis-read Freud, who'd stated that repression is the cornerstone of the psyche [not psychology]). Even when reviewing applicants for tenure-track assistant professorships do they browse CVs for actuarial features like number of publications and the reputation of the journals in which the publications reside. Of course, there is one exception. They will credit an applicant for socially popular research, which may explain why so many of us manikins keep our careers inertly afloat in a sea of derivative drivel that is the literature on prejudice. Not a thousand psych profs baring ten thousand light bulbs feel they have shed nearly enough light on this subject, making prejudice the biggest money pit since (and prior to) the Millennium Dome. Okay, so this is a bit of hyperbole. But I have your attention! And my use of excess to make a point about the swelling ranks of psychologists interested in prejudice is a perfect marriage of message and medium. Now if only, with all this personnel, we could understand prejudice enough to see it for more than just an underrepresentation of persons of certain races (and by that I don't mean sexual orientation or paraphilia). If only we could understand that we promote a race consciousness that is likely to perpetuate rather than cure divisiveness. If only we could understand that the psych profs are themselves prejudiced against many alternate forms of personality and professionalism (or more, accurately, any form of personality and any conceptualization of research that does not slavishly imitate convention. And to correct for their own misguidedness, psych profs will remain faithfully devoted to developing ways of balancing inequities across races rather than building a foundation of true freedom (consistent with a broad definition of freedom).

At the cost of intellectual freedom and the pursuit of truth is this imperative to preserve group harmony and to maintain and extend norms that suppress or conceal a diversity of research interests and pet theories. While psychology professors are quick to call attention to the fact that they study a variety of topics, they are unable to defend themselves against two key criticisms: (1) that compliance with unessential and stultifying elements of their scientific paradigm is non-negotiable and (2) that these norms have particularly adverse (i.e. discriminatory) effects on students of phenomena closest to the heart of the human condition (e.g., dreams), phenomena that do not lend themselves as readily to the one-size-fits-all knowledge production combine. In addition to a systemic prejudice by norms, there is a visceral prejudice carried in the individual members themselves in the form of a para-skeptical contempt for phenomena which does not facilitate the unified but stringent framework of expectations and which does not facilitate the management of the pseudo-scientific persona of the profession that defines their personal identities.

Mastering a pro-diversity rhetoric distracts their students from recognizing the polymorphously perverse forms of oppression that stunt real progress in critical areas of psychological knowledge. And it does not end there. Laced throughout their rhetoric also are terms for the sake of which they claim to defend their status quo, terms like 'scientific standards,''mental hygiene,''public welfare,''professionalism,' 'appropriateness,' 'willingness to adjust,' and 'perfect fit.' These terms are often invoked ritualistically like magic incantations to ward off scrutiny and to condemn students and phenomena that make it more difficult for them to pursue their real goals:

membership in a reputable community of professionals who can communicate with a minimum of effort (i.e. mindlessly)


Let's dissect this statement to flesh out the meaning of its components


membership


Membership is key. Individual achievement requires effort. Most psychology professors and professionals lack the confidence that what they are doing is right and many of them suspect that what they are doing is not worthwhile. As members of a profession governed by norms, they receive more than just guidance. They receive a prescription for research or therapy guaranteed to be valued by other members of the profession. In exchange for following the rules and modeling the behaviors, they receive a career, an identity, and a form of validation that alleviates their personal insecurities. Once the clinical psychology professors internalizes the APA standards for the accreditation of their institution, they become hypervigilant and hypersensitive officers who enforce among the public and their own student community the prevailing view of mental hygiene. A violence and irascibility surrounds this process, and many students feel their personalities are constantly under the microscope.


reputation


The more reputable the community to which they belong, the more valuable the reputation they receive by association. Members of a professon must discourage or extinguish deviations from norms and must constantly widen the jurisdiction of norms to control for originality. The less any one of its members or member-candidates are free to vary, the less likely he or she is to raise doubts about the professional platform they represent. Bare in mind that without this platform, they would be flooded with basic existential questions most people take for granted such as 'who am I?' and 'what do I do next?'


community


This is a dangerous cycle. The more professionals invest their community with strength, thereby atrophying the wits and freedoms of its individual members, the more they are forced to rely on relationships among members for the field's production and services. This prompts an ever-spiraling flurry of norm creation and clarification, because undeveloped individuals can only relate to one another vis-a-vis norms. Training to become a member of psychology is like moving to a planned community, or like the dawn of the day after you've been bitten by the vampire but before you make the irreversible albeit inexorable transition to immortality. Essentially, members surrender their souls (and the collective psyche of those human beings they claim to serve) for the sake of eternal membership (tenure, licensure) in a carnal brotherhood. The only difference between the professionals and the vampires is that while the latter survives off the blood of the unconverted, the former survives off the taking of blood from the unconverted. Draining every last ounce of life from this subject matter is what they're all about.


mindlessness


The justification for the APA style manual and other norms governing research, case formulation, diagnosis, and presentation is that it facilitates communication and integration. But these manuals are far more stingy than those governing other fields of endeavour, even the medical field. Somewhere along the line the manuals were developed for the purpose of guaranteeing mutual understanding with a minimum of effort. This will result in the exclusion or distortion of complex or orginal ideas which lend themselves less readily to the rules or which sacrifice elegance or precision for compliance. Not until I retitled my critique with a number (16) and a short-hand designation for the clerical term 'memorandum' (memo) and bulleted a laundry list of arguments did my critique receive any attention.


So while they may say they are 'full of ideas,' do not allow them to confuse their norms for ideas and their procedural rules for a genuine knowledge about the content they claim to study. Do not allow them to trick you with all their self-serving gloss into confusing their arbitrary committee-ordained fiction for truth or imperatives grounded in nature. Most of that formatting and jargon you do not understand has no inherent value and is designed to project an image and designed to exclude certain people from the club. Don't let this collection of tin men trick you into mistaking their racially diverse community of like-minded and interchangeable philistines for a dynamic network of free-thinking, nimble-witted, and well-developed servants of human nature.


In the end what is Psychology but a red herring in the mouth of an albatross? 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 (the same pace that measures the movement of tectonic plates on a geologic scale) 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. Ironic, though how they are chafing at the bit to dismiss all phenomena as byproducts or misunderstandings of the mundane (i.e., brain secretions and probability) and to disabuse the much-maligned "masses" (comprising so many "men-in-the-street") of its faith and folklore (e.g., Daniel Dennett names God in the same list as the Easter Bunny). Like progress, neglect also transcends individual lifetimes, so if I were them I wouldn't mistake for pride the deeper sense of relief they must be feeling to know they won’t live long enough to hear future generations clamor for the end of this ill-gotten field.


Group-thinking inside & outside the Box: Pandering to the Lowest Common Denominator of Committees




One of the common threads running through my 16-points-memo is the idea that applicants, students, and colleagues are always peer reviewed, that their professional survival depends on the ability to manage the right impression for an endless parade of committees (graduate admission, ethics & evaluation, editorial review, faculty selection, tenure review), hereafter known as the "Tournament of Poses." Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of the whole process is that no social or clinical psychologist has broached the implications of pandering to the lowest common denominator of committee members. It is practically a given that anything unique (e.g., ideas, persons, methods, phenomena) is unlikely to win unanimous or even majority support and that the very best is likely to be cast out alongside the very bad. I have called attention to this sociological principle but among professional listserv members this idea hardly scares up even a few concessions or scraps of qualified support. The professionals will not allow much grey area to fester here. The posting of this principle draws only a bitter backlash from those who feel compelled to defend their practices against potential threats to science and public welfare.


Now clinical psychology is more diverse. The jobs available to licensed psychologists are as diverse as their pathology. Clinical psychology students want to be anything from Mother Theresa to Tony Robbins to Surgeon General. But please don't allow the diversity to distract you from the underlying pathology. Indeed the problems hide in the diversity. The best I can do to both communicate and control the diversity is to break it down into two traditions. But whichever the tradition, I quickly learned while attempting to respecialize in Clinical Psychology after my research PhD that their norms for training, their business rules, and their so-called ethics make it impossible for me to earn a degree that would provide me with access to their diverse and customizable range of employment.


Tradition 1: The Dogmatic Clique


In programs built around one particular theory or model of therapy (one school of thought where everyone is "psychodynamic" or "CBT" for example), the homogeneity is very real and the faculty is heavy-handed in insuring its students are "perfect fits" ideologically. Usually, in such programs, there is a near-pathological evaluation of student mental health, the psychological equivalent of a complete rectal examination. Student progress is often held up by factors which are arbitrary and difficult to understand or mediate such as (1) when faculty evaluate student comprehension or mastery of a theory or therapy like psychoanalysis. The founders of psychoanalysis and neo-psychoanalytic thought are often so abstruse that each program faculty member can have a different slant on the theory without ever really knowing it. And when a faculty member holds up a student for failing to meet the standards for comprehension in a thesis or on practicum, it is often difficult for the student to recover (to understand the basis of the evaluation) and, should the student challenge a professor, it is just as difficult for third parties to mediate between a faculty criticism and student complaint. Some psychologists will be forgiven for admitting that to understand psychoanalysis, for example, someone has to be Freud himself or have a very similar disposition. This is why it is difficult to find a manual for Jungian psychotherapy, for example. On the one hand, the absence of a manual is very good if not vital for personal and professional development, but on the other hand, it can make training difficult. For good or bad, programs like these centered around a formal theory are the exception today. (2) And then there are situations in which faculty hold up a student because they making the student explore some personal issue. The student is informed his or her competence as a therapist depends on exploring this issue and the faculty member acts as a therapist or refers the student for therapy.


Tradition 2: The False Norm


These programs are populated by faculty with diverse theoretical orientations or who abandon theory altogether in favor of a loose collection of skills and techniques. They understand that the divesrity is both an embarrassing threat to solidarity across schools and a potential source of tension between colleagues within their own walls. Their inability to tolerate dissonance and their longing for sources of external validation (i.e., a professional persona in which to basque) motivates them to conceal and compensate for the differences by creating artificial norms or elevating current policies to a metaphysical status. They may not be able to discuss human nature around the water cooler, but they can certainly agree on which student failed to comply with which rule. Noncompliance is not always obvious or indisputable, and for that reason, they work continually to over-develop their rules and to discuss a student's possible un-professionalism amongst themselves. These schools often load the curriculum with redundant and frivolous assignments designed to increase their ability to communicate with one another and to increase the reliability of their behaviors (the likelihood behaviors across students will be very similar or standardized). There is little time for formal theory and little tolerance for casual reflection. The differences are also concealed by by imbuing over-developed ethical codes with criterial merit (enforced as if they can be used to predict competence as a therapist), and co-opting for their compass the theory-free DSM of psychiatrists. Usually, in such schools, there is a misguided hyper-evaluation of student competence in a range of core skills and attitudes. Like their counterparts in tradition 1, they subscribe to a perverted view of mental hygiene, but in this case, mental health is viewed as synonymous with an absence of ideas and personality. The program sterilizes its Psychology of both formal theory and casual reflection, and students disposed to think, question, or improvise usually run the risk of being referred to some formal hearing or committee discussed during orientation and outlined in a program handbook which reads like a Department of Defense operations manual.


In between experimental and clinical psychology is this huge void. No one is attending to the nature of the psyche.




But beneath the structure -- the professional culture -- of the field is its politics. It is those individuals who are either complicit with the professional culture or who zealously weed out or wear down those students or colleagues who do not in their minds fit as perfectly into the mold. It usually takes two things to destroy a career. Professional culture and politics. My problem is not that I ran into a single individual but a throng of them, many of whom came on high horse brandishing the pseudo-scientific and professional standards like the crucifix. Others just watched the professional culture exert its pressure and prejudice or watched as their peers destroyed the careers of the only psychologistic students in the name of Psychology.













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