To most persons who have never been a victim of discrimination or harassment, rules, fair or unfair, clear or ambiguous, are rules. However, to a small coalition of critics seeking broad reform of Psychology's academic and professional communities, rules are meant to be broken.

"One of the insights to come out talks with allied critics of Psychology," recounts Ehrenfels, "is how psychologists inconsistently and arbitrarily apply rule-like mechanisms -- be they standards, policies, norms -- for the sake of screening or weeding out those students or applicants they do not like. It makes for a slick group of people who can harness ambiguity to discriminate against or harass individuals while avoiding the appearance of discrimination and insulating themselves from charges of discrimination. The rules is the perfect anti-personnel device, and by that I mean it is Psychology's greatest weapon against the individual and the individual factor. Fellow expatriate Brad Jesness called my attention to the psychotherapy UseNet groups, where he alleges the sppm moderators are filtering out all posts that include links or references to his web site critical of psychology. It did not take me long to learn that posts including links to those pages of my web site that address his material are also being filtered. Now when it is absolutely necessary, and no sooner mind you, the moderators will refer to 'rules' justifying this level of censorship, rules which claim to treat everyone equally. But while the rules treat everyone equally, those empowered by the rules do not apply them equally to all individuals. If you studied their actions you would see there is one set of rules for those individuals favorable to the moderators and another set of rules for those not so favorable. But we see this sort of irregularity all the time from psychology professor. Let me favor you with one extended anecdote from my own journal.

Hostile Themes & Inappropriate Self-Disclosure

As a graduate student I was referred by a professor to a series of meetings followed by a student ethics & evaluation committee for an inappropriate self-disclosure and for unpleasant content while role playing a client for a classroom exercise. The professor was acting on a tip from one of my fellow classmates, who happened to have a M.A. and who approached the professor privately with a concern about my mental health after listening to me role play this fictitious client I claimed was fabricated from references to my own life. Over the course of a series of meetings, I defused the misunderstanding by informing my professors that I fabricated my client from a formulaic exaggeration of the severity, frequency, and duration of what were normal symptoms. During this debriefing, I opted not to voice my objections to their characterization of the role play content as 'inappropriate' and 'hostile.' As therapists, I expected they dealt with far greater pathology in clients with DSM (i.e., psychiatric) disorders. The animal phobia and vampire nightmares of my 'client' belong to the realm of normal psychopathology and did not even distress my 'client.' Furthermore, I was role playing a 19-year-old client, so even if the 'client' I created has significant ties to my own history, the role play suggests the material is a decade old. Finally, I presented this client because at this stage in our training, we had not yet been introduced to enough of the DSM to select and role-model a DSM disorder. I was actually thanked after the role play for my complex and interesting case, which I presented as a break from the 'scripted' vignettes lifted from the DSM Casebook. As for that part of my client who recalled venting his frustrations with women by deriving enjoyment from causing unintended injury to larger men in gym class, well, that's just normal male psychology and should not have prompted an interrogation of my real life intentions to harming men and raping women. What man doesn't show some adrenaline in school yard football or floor hockey? Emotions are high, and there is always risk of normal wear and tear on the bodies. Given my below-average height, I had to play hard to avoid injury myself, and if someone happened to limp off the floor after tangling with me or walk off with a bloody nose after a hacking at my crotch with a hockey stick, well, so be it. I never intended to cause injury even if the events raised my adrenaline and induced genuine excitement. But no matter how or how much I explained myself, and I was put through so many meetings, my explantions were always greeted with skepticism. They thought I might be lying to them, and they would much rather err in the direction of conviction than acquittal. This whole series of meetings, and the referral to the student ethics committee long after the process had run its course and the matter reputedly settled, was instigated by a professor who just didn't like me. I was tipped off that it was unwise for me to introduce myself as a 'Jungian' and a 'dream researcher' during student orientation even though the students were all encouraged to list their interests and theoretical orientations. I figured, they amditted me and they recently had a Jungian on staff. What harm could possibly come of it? Well, apparently, the Jungian staff member, who disappeared in the middle of the night sometime during my application to the school, did not get along with the professor who quietly put me through the wringer. The professor taught the Clinical Interviewing course, and I was not aware prior to the course that her speciality consisted of family therapy in the behaviorist tradition. What bugs me is that I never thought there was any reason why a Jungian and a behaviorist can not get along. Anyone familiar with Jung knows that while he addresses aspects of psychological functioning in which behaviorists take no interest, when you cut through all the language in which the theories are couched, there is some overlap, some points on which they would uniquely converge. The professor in question either acted out of a misplaced hostility to Jung (not an uninteresting thought considering her objection to 'hostile themes' in my role play), or she succuumbed to the common urge among academics to use something petty like a student's appreciation for a certain approach as a basis for questionning that student's level of fit and professionalism. In that professor's mind, I was not like her, and she would not everything in her power to persuade her peers I was not 'one of them' and to insure I would not 'become of them' and join their ranks one day. It is difficult for me to understand whether she genuinely considered my training as a therapist as a gathering threat to the public welfare, or whether there were other factors involved. She was never required to be anything other than completely vague in her charges against me. It's not like I ever expressed any discontentment with her or her theories. This could have been a simple matter of one professor unilaterally working up our perceived (i.e., assumed) differences into a personality conflict, working up the personality conflict into a charge of non-professionalism against me, and then beginning to build a case against me centered on 'concerns' she conveyed to the faculty at large. Every time I met with her, there was this stench, like she's just emerged from behind closed doors. I am giving my adversaries ample time here to wistfully fuel their speculation about my paranoia and narcissism, just before I close the door by mentioning that it was not uncommon for me to subsequently learn that she had initiated a clandestine meeting about me. In any event, there always rules for her to cite in her defense. Or standards. Or norms. The preferred modus operandi is a policy, because this is more or less the coup de gras. In this case, there is an unwritten policy which holds that is unprofessional for someone to 'inappropriately self-disclose.' When I announced that the role play was in any way based on my life, correct or incorrect, I was engaging in 'inappropriate self-disclosure.' Interesting, that as I was in the first month of the doctoral program, none of my course material or professors had as much as alluded to this policy, and one professor informed me in a private discussion that as an experiential therapist, he demanded self-disclosure of his students for their role play exercises. It is just as interesting that the professor did not raise this point in the committee meeting. Even more interesting is that once I had sufficiently defused the 'inappropriate self-diclosure' charge, the professor suddenly made the charge of 'hostile (role play) content' the central tenet of her covert operation against me. Neither charge ever completely dissipated. A perception had been created and instilled in the minds of faculty at large in what amounts to legalized slander. My days were numbered. When the faculty was prompted as to who, if anyone, might have witnessed similar behavior from me, a young professor, could not be more than a year older than me, came forward with a complaint of how months earlier I had made her uncomfortable by disclosing to her that she appeared in one of my dreams. Without knowing the details of our exchange, and without an understanding of our broader relationship, one might assume that I either regaled her with a sexual dream or that I had made a terse, vague, 'drive-by' comment that allowed her imagination to run wild. In actuality, I disclosed the entire dream in which she emerged to ask me questions about a row of french fries she placed on my desk, as well as my reasons for sharing the dream with her (i.e., I thought it was bizarre and coincidental given we had not crossed paths in some time). A third professor, the school's training director, came forward with some comment about how I'd asked an inappropriate question of a practicum supervisor. Either she had me confused with someone else (because as a first-year student, I was not scheduled to begin practicum for another 11 months), or she was recalling an occasion in which she attempted to arrange for me to serve a local practicum site in a volunteer capacity (at her suggestion so she could increase the likelihood of placing me in a practicum the following fall and avoid tarnishing the school's student placement rate). She provided me with a telephone number of a practicum supervisor and requested I phone him to follow up on a discussion she had with him. During the conversation, he informed me he did not have any work for me, at which point I asked him if he thought any work might be available in the coming months and to keep me in mind. Is the 'inappropriate question' among these questions? If so, how did she learn of the 'inappropriate question'?

Remarkably, I was not the only student to inappropriately self-disclose during that series of role play exercises. There was a student who, and I imagine she was attempting to top me and all the buzz surrounding my complex and interesting case, regaled the class with a tale of a suicidal and homocidal client who like to fantasize about stripper her neighbor of her skin. And then, if that were not enough, she impressed the class by disclosing that this client was actually her own therapy client. You see, this student was the M.A. who referred me to the professor with concerns. She had provided enough details about her client's bizarre psychopathology, including demographic data, that if I was within this client's circle of acquintances, a neighbor or relative, I would be able to identify her. So this student disclosed something far more vital and violated the most coveted ethic in the book: confidentiality. You will not find 'inappropriate self-disclosure' in the APA Ethics Code. But you will see confidentiality. But was this student censured and harassed for her hostile themes or inappropriate disclosure? Nope. Not before I referred her to the professor. And not after.

Psychology professors love the unwritten rule, rules with an ambiguous status, because these rules can be selectively enforced where and when it suits their needs. Occasionally, a psychology professor, to chip away a student's standing in the program will emphasize the word 'rule' in 'unwritten rule' and elevate it to the status of a supreme principle for as long as it benefits them to do so. Ordinarily, they will behave in ways consistent with an emphasis on the word 'unwritten.' Take for example attendance at faculty colloquia. Some departments will not communicate to students that attendance is mandatory. And yet many faculty closely keep tabs on students who do not attend and use that as evidence for their lack of fitness and some professors use attendance at a certain colloquium in which they are personally invested as a 'litmus test' for professionalism. Had attendance been mandatory, every student would regularly attend, and none of the professors would know how to divide the student body into good and bad. When an embattled student raises the point that the colloquia are not mandatory, the faculty respond with some statement to the effect that the student should not require a rule to demonstrate his or her level of commitment to the department. Still sounds like entrapment to me. If professors truly valued freedom, they would not require a scientific paardigm so bloated with superfluous and arbitrary rules, and would not have this love affair with the manual.

Is it any wonder a group of aacdemics and professionals so bent on managing rules would (a) define and measure science in terms of 'rules' and (b) use their slippery management of the rules to maximize control over their 'science' while avoiding all that negative attention associated with being master manipulators. Allow me to introduce you to the 'science' of psychologists.

'The Science of Psychologists'

I have criticized psychology's scientific paradigm for being loaded with social conventions and institutional requirements, arbitrary and superfluous norms that not only have no real standing in science, but which interfere with our efforts to remain faithful to the principles of essential science. Physicists claim that despite appearances, matter consists primarily of empty space. The same is true of the scientific method. The method itself is not inherently or logically proscriptive or prescriptive as much as it sketches a broad outline for empiricism. Within these very basic rules, the individual scientist is relatively free, or could be free in principle depending on the number of social conventions canonized by his or her discipline (i.e., paradigm). Paradigms come and go, but science itself, and the phenomena under study, remain.

So who is responsible for creating this image of science as a rule-bound enterprise in which the true scientists are those who know the rules to which they are bound. Well, to a certain extent, the strict cause-and-effect relationships that make up a phenomena under study contribute to this persona. But that is just the phenomena under study, that is not science itself. And it is true that whatever research tools we choose to deploy in investigating a phenomenon, it has to be deployed correctly. But with respect to methodology and presentation, choices abound and ideally, the individual researcher would avail himself or herself of these choices. Unfortunately, Psychology has settled into certain conventions which constrain independent thinking and favor the researcher whose own disposition and research interest lend itself most readily to the established way of doing things. This would not be so problematic if psychologists did not arbitrarily equate these social conventions as scientific requirements and cast as 'inherently unscientific' those individual researchers and research interests that do not mesh as well with the paradigm. Such people and interests should be cause to broaden our paradigm. Or if not to broaden, to qualify, to except. But instead they rally around their paradigm to feel better about themselves, to exert more regulatory control of their own institution, and to gild their public image as a legitimate scientific enterprise out of a misconception of science. The vast majority of psychologists help buttress this image of science as rule-bound, and in their minds, the greater the number of rules, the more essential the science. This could not be further from the reality of science. Now what interests me is the way the academics respond when I call attention to the uniformity of this paradigm, to the uniformity with which the academics comply with it and to the way the paradigm chips away at those less smoothly-conforming aspects of the academic community until Psychology itself is relatively homogeneous. Basically, some of these individuals respond by citing the diversity of subject matter that is being researched within the purview of Psychology. Some professors hope this mention of diversity will disqualify or distract from those deserving people and phenomena who find themselves disaffected by the paradigm. But my point is that when you seek to criticize psychology on the grounds of uniformity, they divert or defend with references to diversity. Interestingly, the same academics offer support for my uniformity position when defending themselves against other critics reviling what they see as psychology's fractured (i.e., diverse) landscape where there are 400 plus types of psychotherapies and where every academic has a different slant on one of a million different topics. In their defense, the academics will then cite their paradigm as the 'glue that holds their field together.' Here the truth is a little exposed. What is the truth? Truth is...there is a natural diversity of interests, pet theories, and potential methods that needs to be curbed and managed and ideally, supressed at the source. This may account for why human nature is seldom discussed around the water cooler and why the human condition is the 800 pound gorilla in psychology departments. No one can agree on what human nature is, and no one wants to inadvertently wander into that territory in which disagree with a colleague with whom he or she has to spend the rest of his or her professional life. But they need to talk about something. Their jobs and their identities need some structure. It may not ALL come from ONE COMMON source, but it all comes from a respected agency or community of some kind that has as a breathable atmosphere this culture of convergent thinking. And within each department, they may not be able to agree on what human nature is or what questions are even worth asking. After all, within any given department, it is unlikely any two academics study the same phenomenon. But they can talk about what student stepped to which side of which white line. In departments of psychology, they live for that kind of drama and energy. They act like they don't engender it. They act like they don't enjoy it. But without it, they would be relatively isolated. The rules are the source of their relationships.

In the process, some phenomena and people will be marginalized, and those mainstream people that seek to fit in by treating their marginal phenomena paradigmatically often distort the phenomena. As a lifelong student of dreams, this distorted depiction of dreams -- this caricature -- is readily apparent to me and it would be comical if was not so damn consequential.