Psychology's reluctance to remain faithful to its covenant as the study of the human condition (i.e., psyche). Psychology is behaving much like a petulant child, defying the name given him (or her) by his (or her) parents. Psychologists want to be generic scientists and professionals first, and students of human nature second, if at all. This manifests itself in three forms of infidelity:
- unfaithful to the Big Questions (e.g., personality)
- unfaithful to "the little things" that make up our unexamined life (Who cares why we grow sad or even why we cry? Wake us when someone meets five of the nine criteria for Dysthymia. Help us out of bed when someone presents with Major Depressive Disorder).
- unfaithful to the individual as the unit of analysis. (Psychological researchers treat their students like community property, and this attitude toward the individual suffuses their research as well, in their treatment of individual research participants, milking the individual when it collects its data and grinding the individual in its sausage press when it analyzes its data. Read in my report ADHD Science. Science could maintain its claim to science even while preserving the integrity of the individual research participant. Psychology would not even have to sacrifice its statistical analyses. But they have taken their own formalisms to heart, and all their stodgy talk about "variables" and "hypotheses" is symptomatic of how they fail to build a science on a foundation faithful to the individual. In fact, in psychological research, there is no "individual." Throw away your pennies. Virtually all psychological research depends on partitioning variance, where the indivisible unit of analysis is the feature or characteristic around which all individual research participants quantitatively vary).
- unfaithful to psychologistic phenomena. (Dreaming is a perfect illustration of this. Dreaming is by and large neglected by both psychological researchers and practitioners alike. But as many laboratory excursions into the biological construct of REM sleep can attest, force-fitting the phenomenon called "dreaming" into our cosmetic, ADHD, autistic, socially-constructed, Martha-Stewart science warps the phenomenon into some caricature.
Psychology shares a bed with many mistresses, betraying psychologistic phenomena as it "fools around" with issues of technical, utilitarian, or political import. Those of you who know who you are, know what I mean. Intoxicating rats on foundation grants. Engaging in politically motivated analysis of public policy or opinion (e.g., affirmative action, conservative bashing at Berkeley, and evangelical atheism). Filling your social psychology departments with the same old stock of racial paraphiliacs (now called "multicultural specialists") interested in studying one thing: prejudice. Letting personality psychology programs vanish while you create programs (e.g., Human Factors, Engineering Psychology) to house professors with FAA grants to design cockpits.
Psychology counts Science and Professionalism among its bordello regulars, adding gloss to a scientific sheen to inflate its "market share" (i.e., public image and political influence). Psychology has been busy disarming its own membership of the doubts and divergent opinions that can threaten the solidarity important to both harmony and perceived legitimacy. Toward this end, it
- gilds a massive framework of arbitrary and superfluous expectations to facilitate communication and integration
- gerrymanders its "counties" (so to speak) to affect a posture of scientific decorum (i.e., the structural soundness and statistical neatness) necessary to increase its representation within the ranks of both the U.S. Congress (literally) and the scientific community. I'll never know why Personality Psychology was forced to "share a congressman" with Social Psychology while the representation for I/O Psychology was doubled and while we developed virgin territory for Health Psychology, Cognitive Science, Human Factors, Psychometrics, and Engineering & Simulation.
- combines selection and reinforcement (i.e., socialization) pressures to deny the most deserving students a rightful place in the field and to insure that Psychology evolves into a community of like-minded administrative savants (and their army of aids). See report titled D-Volution. Psychology may claim to want scholars, but all it really wants is clerks. Over history, a population of young explorers were domesticated like wolves into dogs. At any given point in history, applicant pools are sifted for signs of trainability. The student with a pioneering glint in his eye is tossed on the stoop like some skanky barn cat, while those cute puppies who've shown nothing but signs of conformity and imitation are house-broken and subjected to an advanced, professional-grade weaning.
In brief, Psychology has built an institution. It's all about the lines. The gratuitous lines it draws in the sand. The company line it expects its students to tow. Then it gets hypocritical, blurring and even crossing its own lines when it feels like passing off its "Institution" as "Science."
- The propensity of psychologists for menacing their students.
Psychologists abuse end-of-academic-term performance evaluation meetings where an assessment of classroom attitudes and behaviors lapses into a form of character assassination in which vague, unscrupulous, and unsubstantiated accusations of unconventional conduct fuel violent inferences or speculation about the student's competence, fit, or professionalism. Not infrequently, the victims are first-year students whose transgression violates a policy or procedure to which they have not yet been introduced or one that is unwritten, ambiguous, or open to interpretation (as when it runs afoul of a professor's stylized interpretation of, or personal addendum to, the APA ethics code). Not infrequently, an unsuspecting student with an excellent record of academic achievement is placed on some category of conduct probation for what ultimately amounts to an idiosyncratic decision that offended a professor, who begins building a case in which the student is portrayed as an imperfect fit for their program and/or profession. Examples of triggers include:
- A professor subscribing to behaviorist theory remembers that the first-year student introduced himself during orientation as a Jungian dream researcher.
- A student opts to enroll in a rare seminar offered by his major advisor rather than the core methodology course, which is available Spring of every academic year. Another professor then presents as evidence of unprofessionalism the student's failure to enroll with the rest of his first-year cohorts in the core methodology course at his first opportunity.
- During a classroom role play exercise, a student volunteers to role play a client opposite his professor, who is role playing a therapist. When questioned after the role play about the source of the client's interesting nightmares, phobias, and stressors, the student implies that at least some of the material is in some way 'based on' his or her own life. The student is subsequently referred to the student ethics and evaluation committee for 'inappropriate self-disclosure' and 'hostile or indecent content.'
- A professor urges monitoring a student whose use of hedges and qualifiers in her classroom questions and answers gets her branded as 'too deprecating.' Conversely, a student who asks or answers 'too many questions' is monitored for 'arrogance.'
The list is endless. Why do they do it? The motives for recommending a student for this kind of professional gatekeeping include but are not limited to self-aggrandizement (i.e., a young professor wants to make a contribution to the discussion) and to an intolerance for deviation or dissent owing to self-doubt that what one is doing is right. In the latter instance, the professor relies on the therapeutic and evidentiary value of mass conformity to conventions (i.e., if everyone else is doing it, it must be right and I feel better about what I am doing) and, by extension, a student who steps one inch to either side of the white is, well, not appreciated for triggering those repressed self-doubts. And then you have professors who fashions themselves officers of a psychological CDC of sorts, protecting the public interest against all threats to mental hygiene. Regardless of primary motivation, knowing that broad faculty support for expelling a student requires x number of complaints across y number of meetings, faculty are quick to begin building a case against a student until 'a pattern of misjudgments' becomes the basis for dismissal or a recommendation to seek therapy. The monitoring, defamation, and criticism feels like harassment to students, many of whom voluntarily withdraw to salvage what is left of a significantly strafed self-esteem.
Professors know that the concerns they raise about a student they do not like in such a public venue will follow that student throughout follow-on semesters. The student is effectively slandered among faculty with which he or she has not yet been introduced, and the student is marked as "old business" to be revisited in future evaluation meetings, when the original charge becomes a magnet for frivolous complaints or observations (e.g. "Does anyone else have something to report on [student]"?). The negative perception takes on a life of its own, owing to the fact professors are timid about expressing disagreement with one another and would rather sacrifice a student's career then risk disharmony with lifelong colleagues. Professors are also remiss about presenting in future meetings evidence that the student corrected (or behaved in ways contrary to) the behavior impugned in the original meeting.
While students are often dismayed by the circumstances of their embattlement, they need to understand that their punishment does not violate all sense of proportion. As students, some professors entered the field as vapid drones looking for someone to tell them exactly what to do and think. But other professors had to relinquish their freedom, their wits, and identities for membership in this community and for access to its (external source of) guidance, validation, and persona. Having stunted their own self-development, they will under NO circumstances allow some student to suggest they may have sacrificed so much for so little. Such is the life of a vampire, whose sole source of sustenance is someone else's life blood, someone else's soul. It is the groupthink and the slander that makes these meetings agents of professional control rather than performance evaluation. Expectations are established among faculty who have not yet made a student's acquaintance, and these prophecies are subsequently self-fulfilled. The expectations are seldom challenged in the meeting, where the goal of gathering accurate information is subverted to the goal of maintaining group harmony. After all, these "judicial members" are appointed for life and it is for that term that they have to live with one another. Students come and go, going as fast as they come in some cases.
- I know of clinical psych profs who have even availed themselves of DSM diagnostically charged constructs or buzzwords in efforts to disqualify students, but many of the professors themselves are walking cocktails of personality disorders, DSM features, and non-clinical levels of neuroses that arguably impair their ability to discharge duties as researchers, educators, and trainers. See The Shadow DSM and Psych profs suffer from analogue of Borderline Personality Disorder.
I even advised one student with a prior history of psychopathology not to abandon his pursuit of a career in Psychology. "If I were you, and I decided not to pursue a career in mental health delivery, it would not be for a history of psychopathology." The important thing in training to be a therapist is to learn how your psychology affects that of your clients. This is an art that all therapists must learn and which most programs do not teach (and I wonder how much this skill is actually refined through formal education). This skill
requires considerable self-knowledge which, in my opinion, few psych
professionals possess, as their training and therapy models seem to be too busy eradicating selfs (and favoring students who carry little self) because it is too difficult to instill or evaluate self-knowledge. Many profs who preside over these psychotherapy training programs want their students to be blank slates which is not only regarded as a form of "mental hygiene" (like clean streets, I imagine) but which also serves as a hook for the projections of clients. Many of these clinicians develop a surreal, artificial idea of "normal" behavior based on the subtraction (exclusion) of the presenting symptoms and stresses of their clients. This model of normal behavior, based on limited human contact, is foisted on students.
Many of these ostensibly "healthy" professors have a lot of issues, sensitivities, compulsions, insecurities, or problems of adaptation which fly under the DSM radar. So they never end up becoming self-knowledgeable. As our training in psychopathology (as well as our research) is increasingly oriented by DSM diagnostic constructs in a fiercely professionalized field, the more problematic our crisis of self-knowledge will become.
The Meaning of ShadowPsychology
What is the meaning of ShadowPsychology? In Jung's personality theory, the "shadow" refers to an unconscious complex that consists of all those values and qualities we have disowned, rejected as incompatible with our self-image, or rejected as inappropriate or incompatible with what we think is necessary to
survive and flourish in our current routine. According to Jung, all these qualities self-organize into an "opposite" personality that through dreams and other mechanisms predispose us to perceptions, decisions, impulses, and moods that broaden our waking experience and make room for itself in our lives. Under normal circumstances the compensatory value of the shadow can complement our conscious identities and help us achieve our conscious aims. However, if our attitude toward the shadow material is one of prejudice, the personality loses freedom and flexibility vital to both adjustment and growth, compromising our ability to respond to changing conditions and to unfold according to our characterological blueprints (i.e., self-actualize or individuate). Under such conditions, the shadow, itself an attitude, reciprocates antagonism, and this may result in instances in which we sabotage ourselves in one of many ways
- dreams and nightmares; nocturnal experiences which through affect or imagery can leave a residue that throws us off our game or tampers with the cognitive structures at the root of waking awareness and executive functioning
- accident proneness; bad things just seem to "happen to us" or we find ourselves in strange situations
- blind spot; blindness to the consequences of actions we undertake that seem on the surface to advance our goals but later prove ironically counterproductive
- projection; we make enemies or seek friends who would make even better enemies; we unconsciously assign the shadow qualities in ourselves to an 'other' who is then perceived as an 'antagonist' or through a physical infatuation or mystical attraction we become inextricably bound to a member of the opposite sex whose effect on us is distracting or transformative
A Cosmopolitan Neurosis
At the root of Psychology's urbanization, its domestication of the explorer, its development of the open range, and its abortion of frontier research, is a cosmopolitan neurosis. Psychologists have no understanding or appreciation for the nuances of a human science. Psychologists want only to be recognized as belonging among the ranks of the scientific and professional community. In their view, this is not attainable unless they project an image of SOLIDARITY and LEGITIMACY.
Solidarity
Solidarity is not possible unless they work to conceal or compensate for their own natural diversity of interests, personalities, and pet theories. This movement is also fueled by an uncanny intolerance for the kind of AMBIGUITY and DISHARMONY that energizes the exploration and serendipity at the root of pivotal discoveries.
Legitimacy
Legitimacy is achieved by imitating cosmetic features of other sciences, such as rigor and parsimony. Despite impoverished conceptualization and restricted fact collection, psychological research thrives on the self-serving scientific sheen aided by an impeccable deployment of design principles and statistics. The adjudication of a binary hypothesis by inferential statistics in a controlled and confirmatory environment also feeds this atmosphere of formality. Editorial review committees reinforce this formalism where it appears in research submitted for publication, resulting in an emphasis on inferential, confirmatory, and quantitative data sources at the expense of descriptive, exploratory, and qualitative data sources, the latter of which complicate and consume time in ways that compromise the impression of formality psychological researchers manage for themselves, their students, and the public. Because submitting an article for publication is always a long shot, risk-averse researchers stack the deck in their favor by pursuing the 'safe bet,' publishing on a competitive career timetable positive findings that address hypotheses rather than questions. Mobilizing university classrooms into research outlets, psychological researchers bureaucratize knowledge production by harvesting superficial data from subject pools in exchange for course credit.
Whether we're talking about the individual researcher or the individual research participant, a viable psychology preserves the integrity of the individual. Unfortunately, in psychological research the vehicle of life (i.e., individual research participant) is seldom the unit of analysis. Care should be taken to consider the whole context and to draw conclusions within individuals as a first step toward extracting commonalities across participants. This cannot be substituted by the sausage-grinding of (a) numbers labeling fractured and superficial observations through a (b) formula selected to yield a test statistic that necessitates a limited (yes/no) conclusion about the (c) rejectability of this binary hypothesis that barely resembles a question and (d) that fails to represent the scope of the phenomenon, issue, or question. But it is so substituted. One can be forgiven for turning a pejorative phrase critical of Psychology's organized body of all knowledge worthless or trivial. I like to think I have improved upon Rychlak's gentile epithet "method madness" with such tags as "ADHD Science" and "Autistic Empiricism." There is room for pioneering in the field of lampooning a community of administrative savants who have forged an entire discipline from their own echopraxia. (When clinicians observe among laypersons an imitative repetition of the movements, gestures, or posture of another, they call it "schizophrenia"). Psychologists contend that the burden of probing the scope rests not on the shoulders of the individual researcher but is distributed among members of the community. This is used as justification for managing a massive and stingy framework of expectations intended to facilitate communication and integration, resulting in a state of affairs that warrants yet another epithet: "Games without Frontiers."
Expectations Great and Shared
Each professor is burdened with the role of extending the work of a peer to fill a hole in the literature. Those who attempt original research or research incur a substantial risk of being turned away for publication. Any professor who does not produce positive results at least once a year incurs this same risk. Since psychologists will commit to reading only what can be comprehended mindlessly and lazily, any research that pushes the limits of what can be read by the least intelligent member of an editorial review committee over a Long Island Iced Tea will not be published. Anyone who does not publish at least once a year is likely to perish unless they already have tenure, at which point the vast majority of psychological researchers seem to lose interest in publishing.
People can be driven lifetimes by a sense of conviction that comes from within. Choices are often the instruments of a process of professional and personal development in which ones vocation unfolds according to its own design and unto its natural conclusion. But in what amounts to Grand Mal Cognitive Dissonance, professors and students who surrender their freedoms and faculties to a community need to believe that community will prevail over all. The community becomes their only source of guidance and validation, and to the extent they invested in this community, and to the extent that their characteristics are constituted or provided by this community, they must defend the community or else face an existential terror. Since the path on to which they signed is not their own, they must believe it is the one true path. They will not tolerate ambiguity or alternatives. And so when a student steps one inch to either side of the white line, be it by unconventional tendencies or early training miscues, the student absorbs a punishment that has a distinctly personal and disproportionate flavor. They have unwittingly rekindled foundational questions in their professors, the questions themselves evidence of intolerable doubt. For professors who identify with their professions and fill the hole in their self-system with th community persona, the conformity of their peers and students is therapeutic evidence of their "okayness." Psychologists thought their paradigm would solve their insecurities and win them the respect from the public and the broader scientific community. But it is only a patch. It is a loose collection of social conventions with no real grounding in science and nature -- club rules -- and as such it can be violated. Just ask some graduate students.
Faculties that oversee the training and professional development of their students set of committees designed to monitor academic progress and ethical fidelity. These committees devolve into instruments of darker purposes. Born of personality conflict, nurtured by groupthink, and advanced by slander and self-fulfilling prophecy, accusations arise that question the "professionalism," "fit," or "character" of students, including students with 4.0 GPAs. With nary any of the ethics, empathy, or evidence they claim to embrace, the psychologists violently draw inferences about the attitudes of these students, who are then censured with one of many categories of conduct probation.
It is important to distinguish the institutional requirements from the true scientific ones. Much of what Psychology pontificates and requires in the name of science is nothing more than club rules, from the APA style that governs how we write to the null-hypothesis testing system and the model of statistical induction that governs how we perform research. The problem with a scientific paradigm is that it could be filled with too much pork, too many arbitrary and superfluous norms with no real grounding in science or nature, only in social necessity. In actuality, it constrains independent thinking and works against essential science. What is essential science? Just look to the simplicity of the experimental method as one example. It is an open framework that allows the individual researcher considerable discretion in drawing constructively from his or her own wits and experiences to design methodologies in pursuit of knowledge about a phenomena of interest. Designed to manage relationships between researchers, the paradigm suppresses the individual contribution to the research, undercuts the strengths of the individual researcher, and limits his or her stake in the results to that which has implications for his or her career. When Psychology forces us to appeal only to extrinsic benefits/rewards for our work, it undermines scholarly motives. In the end, the community amounts to a well-oiled machine in which colleagues integrate with ease the results of poor individual research studies. The multiplication of a million zeroes amounts to a zero product.
Psychology's paradigmatic science is so oppressive to a researcher with any real curiosity, inherent connection to a phenomena of interest, and appetite for creative control over the work, that it stands in opposition to science. As the broker or middle man, the paradigm distances the individual researcher from his or her own wits and from the phenomena under study. If psychological science were a tree, it could be said to be "truncated," having lost both its roots (phenomenology) and its crown (theory). The professors neither have their heads in the clouds nor their feet on the ground.
The modest social benefits of these universal expectations are tauted without equal time for the costs. And over successive generations of training, these benefits are elevated to the level of supreme principles and work is performed "for their sake." One example of this is the reification of the DSM. Once a pragmatic insurance coding tool for third-party reimbursement, the new metaphysical DSM presents a language of psychopathology that organizes psychological research, confers legitimacy on proposals submitted for NIMH funding, and spawns an industry of manualized treatments promoting new classes of "specialists" who deal in this or that disorder. They are inculcated as "virtues" in the pliable minds of young students whose pursuit of a career makes them amenable to indoctrination into Psychology's academic and professional culture (i.e., "the best candidates for training"). The stage is set for social evolution and the shaping of Psychology into a homogeneous community worthy of generalizations.
How the West was Won: Psychology's Manifest & Latent Destiny
I have been reviled for my generalizations about Psychology's academics and practitioners, but if you think about it, when they manage communities in the way they do, they become susceptible to such generalizations. Furthermore, as scientists they should not so lazily dismiss the role of sociological and historical factors in shaping the academic and professional communities into a homogeneous Psychology worthy of certain generalizations. This is social evolution. Natural selection. To carve a niche for yourself in the field, you have to adapt to so many challenges to your career survival.
- So many levels of vetting built into the system
Psychology students are never done applying for some kind of membership or milestone. You apply for admission to graduate school. Then your fidelity to the training curriculum is evaluated by committee at the end of each academic term. As a clinical PhD student, you apply for two practica, an internship, supervised post-doctoral but pre-licensed employment, and then licensure. As a candidate for either a clinical or research PhD, you have to build a CV as a graduate student, and so you jockey for position to teach as many sections of Introductory Psychology as possible. You also join as many research teams as possible, hoping to become the sixth author of a four-page publication. Worse then the "committee" with which you "authored" the research is the editorial review committee to whose lowest common denomintor you must pander to win publication. If fortunate, you may be footnoted for working the overhead projector for a professor as he presents his research on a six-person panel addressing an audience of five at some conference. Perhaps one day, you can win a place on one of the APA's hundreds of task forces or committees, perhaps the one which decides that "drowsiness or coma" or "psychomotor agitation or retardation" will take their place among the thirteen symptoms of a disorder for which only three symptoms are required for diagnosis. All this must be in place by the time you apply for a tenure-track assistant professorship, which explains why students need 6-12 years to finish what amounts to an "extracurricular" dissertation that is both undigestible and non-dictinctive to any faculty search committee. And finally, after 4-7 years as an assistant professor, you apply for tenure.
- Death by Committee
At each level, you have to make an adjustment to fit in. More egregiously, you have to make an adjustment to appeal or pander to the lowest common denominator of some committee (since these selection decisions are seldom administered by less then three people). This spate of committee decisions weeds out, wears down, and pares down. By the time tenure is conferred, you have demonstrated a remarkable inability or disinterest in the original ideas tenure was meant to protect. Tenure is therefore wasted on tenured people. Members of the academic community would have you think tenure is meant to protect professors from evil Republicans, but who protects the rare ascetic from tenure?
I often refer to the academic and professional community as vampires, having sold their soul for eternal life (tenure) and membership in this carnal brotherhood. They willingly surrendered their wits and freedoms for such membership. Eventually the field evolved into one in which the academics could select those who have no wits to cede and those with no freedom to choose their abrogation. The field has evolved from one which preferred those willing to sell their souls to one which preferred those with no souls to sell, those who were never right for this field. And the field now reflects this. According to Webster's Dictionary, psyche means "soul." And psychologists have abandoned the "psyche-" for the "-ology." They have surrendered their claim to subject matter expertise for the glue that holds them together as a community.
- Cherry-Picking
If you haven't been worn down or weeded out, you may be pared down by the brute force of competition. Since there are so many students vying for graduate school and so many PhDs vying for a place in a university, the selection committees can afford to cherry pick the persons who embody the epistemology, whose CV shows a pre-packaged professional standing. Don't let anyone fool you with the term "professional development." Real professional development implies a dynamic spooling of potential. CVs are browsed for certain actuarial features that signify established ties to funding sources, sheer number of publications and teaching experiences, and social networks/affiliations. We have no interest in assessing a young person's potential and no interest in probing adequately the quality or nature of that person's thesis or dissertation work. The individual student is treated much like the individual research subject, like an anonymous interchangeable brick in a wall in which the cement in valued above all. In a managed community, between-persons transactions are regulated and enhanced, but this often comes at the expense of self-development and self-expression. We place so much emphasis on how everything fits together (research with research, people with people) that the integrity and quality of the individual research project and personality is eroded.
- Reinforcement in a Token Economy
No accounting of Psychology's development would be complete without a reference to one of psychology's most vaunted principles: reinforcement. Psychologists behave as if my generalizations constitute some intellectually and morally offensive sterotyping. And yet it is they who exhibit a lack of intellectual curiosity when they refuse to consider that a field can be shaped by principles of evolution and reinforcement. This is a profession that has devolved into an expensive vanity project.
Bias and Prejudice
All this has some real consequences. Their "culture" or "system" is riddled with biases. They don't discriminate against race or ethnicity, and in fact, their fetishistic rhapsodizing about multiculturalism and diversity conceals their hatred for a diversity of ideas and interests (their hatred for individual talent and freedom). Original ideas and their human progenitors are not the only victims. As in any evolutionary habitat, there are characteristics that are selected out, some deliberately, some inadvertently, some even without notice. The paradigm works against certain research interests, not by design, but simply by giving a competitive advantage to some interests over others. There will be many papers published about those interests that lend themselves most perfectly to a quick-and-dirty methodology that also confers a cosmetic rigor. Meanwhile, some phenomena require phased and fluid research that is exploratory and free-wheeling at the outset and which only though time will be shaped into theories from which hypotheses can be formally derived and tested in controlled settings to meet confirmatory standards. Certain personality characteristics, including certain values and strengths, that happen to be correlated with these research interests, are weeded out along with the research interests. The people left in the field, who may recognize that not much has been written about a certain phenomena, are not those who would do justice to the phenomenon. In the best cases, the phenomenon is subjected to the same one-size-fits-all paradigm, and is subject to technical distortion, as is the case when some unimaginative and myopic researchers conclude that dreams are "nothing more than" "brain secretions," "cognitive filing cabinets," "info-waste material," or "post hoc narratives spun after the fact by this or that part of the brain as it struggles to make sense of random neuron firing." In the worst cases, and this is the most likely scenario given the profile of those who survive to carve a niche in the field, the phenomenon is subject to distortion by prejudice. For example, dreams themselves, because they lend themselves less readily to the methodologies, are mistakenly deemed unsuitable subjects for science, and the "consummate scientists," who dismiss the role and significance of dreaming out of hand, seek anything they can call "empirical justification" for their predilections.
To use an analogy here, we are all aware that there are people for whom it is more odious to [a] pass into non-existence without being able to complain they were duped into believing in an afterlife than to [b] be denied admission to Heaven because they spent their lives as evangelical atheists. This pretty well sums up the prevailing attitude toward dreams and other phenomena within Psychology's academic and professional communities. 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. In these circumstances, the phenomenon itself is "add odds" with Psychology. A personality conflict exists between the phenomenon and the psychological community. It's just unfortunate that the much-maligned, marginalized, and maimed phenomena are the truly psychologistic phenomena at the heart of the human condition.
What Surives?
While these core topics are marginalized and distorted (creating a caricature of the human condition), the professors overpopulate the field with research into highly circumscribed technical and utilitarian issues that the paradigm can handle with limited distortion. The shortfalls of the paradigm are not conspicuous when professors research such issues. If the paradigm is a hammer, than these are the nails. We can publish studies about how to build a better spatula. But we expose our weaknesses in a rather humiliating way when we undertake research into phenomena that demand adequate conceptualization and fact collection. As thinkers, psychology professors are intellectually lazy, logically sloppy, or existentially timid, and the data collected is a poor reflection of the scope and depth of factual material surrounding the phenomena under study. We just aren't equipped to conduct good social and personality research. (See Junk Science for an example of poor research in interpersonal attraction). And departments of psychology have evolved to reflect this: Human Factors and I/O and Health Psychology are burgeoning while Personality has all but disappeared. It's not that we can't do good personality research, but that we do not consult or maintain any connection to persons who have the ability and the temperament for this trade. And so psychology is becoming less psychologistic, less human, and less unique as time goes on and we are forced to accept the community's wistful observation that Psychology is really just a blend of other fields.
APPENDIX: Memo Redux by Virtues Compromised
J. Wyatt Ehrenfels is building a network of authors, students, and alienated professionals who agree with his argument that Psychology abandoned its covenant as the study of the human psyche. With the help of his publisher and staff of web development and communications specialists (and hopefully soon a government grant), Ehrenfels has been bringing the public and student perception in line with the harsh hidden realities of psychology.
Ehrenfels is convinced that if he can persuade enough undergraduates (i.e. the social and financial base of the field) to abandon Psychology for another major, that he can exert considerable pressure on universities to restructure the discipline. The Ehrenfels web site provides a diverse portfolio of arguments that, taken collectively, make a compelling case that psychology fails to explore the human condition in a way that is adequate, authentic, and accurate. This is an abbreviated and abstract (and thus somewhat DENSE) list of those values of which the current regime of academic faculty and professionals deprives us:
I. Truth
Every scientific discipline must respect the fundamentals of essential science. But Psychology, in seeking to manage a public impression of its legitimacy as a scientific enterprise, went overboard, undermining essential science with a massive artifice of superfluous norms that constrain independent thinking and restrict the scope and depth of our attention to the raw facts of experience. If we examine psychological research closely, we will find that it suffers at the conceptualization and fact collection stages but that the researchers conceal or compensate for these deficiencies with a cosmetic rigor (i.e., impeccable deployment of design principles and sophisticated statistical analyses) and unnecessary scientific precepts (i.e., parsimony misconstrued as rationality and then mis-applied to methodology). We have bureaucratized the knowledge production machine in which fast-food, pseudo-formal research articles drop off the assembly line as gilded anonymous bricks in some shapeless wall.
Not only do the academics confound their institutional requirements with their scientific requirements, but also seem to think that a truly scientific enterprise is one that is managed from end-to-end, one in which every decision is prescribed. This is inconsistent with the experimental method and, more broadly with essential science, which are relatively open frameworks that allocate considerable discretion to the individual scientist to utilize his or her own wits and to meet the demands of his or her subject matter and research question. But academics in psychology, even more so than those in the physics department, favor a hard determinism in which universe is broken down into indivisible units for assignment to causes and effects. And while it is myopic to overlook other kinds of determinism, it is even more egregious for them to behave as if the only way to map the strict cause-effect chains is with a scientific paradigm of comparably strident predetermination. The academics confound the assumed order of the universe with an arbitrarily preferred and architected order for their brand of science, or "paradigm."
II. Justice
Those phenomena at the heart of the human condition (e.g., dreaming, spirituality, emotions, motivation) do not lend themselves as readily or neatly to cookie cutter methodologies. Those students who take an interest in these phenomena end up losing their careers because they cannot publish on a career timetable or in journals of competitive reputation. For every 1 tenure-track assistant professorship vacancy, there are roughly 80-200 applicants, and thus search committees can afford to cherry pick the candidate who embodies the spirit of professionalism. Unfortunately, psychologists misconstrue the meaning of the term professionalism for their own ends, confusing it with (a) the acquisition of external sources of funding for popular or utilitarian research interests (e.g., aviation cockpit design) and (b) with the notion of a perfect fit, whereby the appropriateness of an applicant's candidacy is measured by the extent to which the applicant conforms to the interests of the department and advances the goals of the profession in which he or she is an anonymous unit.
The experimental method, to which I referred earlier as essential science, is a much more open framwork than the pork-riddled paradigm peddled by psychology departments. Essential science provides (and even requires) room within which flexible and divergent thinkers can dispose of a certain amount of discretionary energy in designing the kind of phased and fluid research necessary at the outset to broadly explore meaningful questions and virgin frontiers like dreaming. Unfortunately, the mass production of inferential statistics from quantities harvested directly and superficially from a captive audience of livestock (i.e., psych 101 students) to adjudicate some binary (i.e. reject/do-not-reject) hypothesis hardly qualifies as detectivework. Good research requires a confluence of (1) exploratory and confirmatory research, (2) qualitative and quantitative methods, (3) descriptive and inferential statistics, and (4) rational and empirical sources rather than the current system's abandonment of the former for the latter. While psychology should seek to understand the person, inter-weaving the practitioner's respect for the individual with the scientist's pursuit of a generic model, there is really NO emic tradition in this field (as there is anthropology).
The only research that is published with any regularity and with any positive consequences for the careers of the researchers is that research which can survive these biases/deficiencies without looking like an awful caricature. Such research starts with highly circumscribed, technical, or utilitarian questions, which is why, in the end, those who conduct research in aviation cockpit design will end up reproducing (to use a sociobiological metaphor) to populate the field while the entire personality branch falls from the tree. Those who seek to study dreams for example within the stingy and strident framework of norms end up producing research that, to a non-discerning eye, makes dreams look absolutely worthless, and to the discerning eye, makes dream research look absolutely worthless. It's a lose-lose proposition. This may explain why there are so few lifetime dream researchers, why dream research is often a fling or one-night stand for academic drifters and whores who move from one project (e.g. dreams) to the next (e.g. aptitude tests).
Those who seek to do any justice to the phenomenon are among those whose research cannot be published or funded in ways that promote the career of the researcher.
Is this problem even acknowledged? Nope. People are allowed to assume that the cream rises to the top and that those who survive in the field represent the most judicious and intelligent choices.
III. Freedom
There is no intellectual freedom in psychological science. Academics manage a massive framework of expectations designed to promote group harmony and facilitate a mindless communication and integration of findings. In taking this effort too far, academics have abrogated their intellectual freedom, at first grudgingly in deference to some tragic necessities but after generations in which the wits and freedoms of academics have served its former tools and new faculty selected on the basis of their achievements within this system, it appears that among the current regime there are no wits to cede and no freedom to choose their abrogation. First there was no one to lament the degradation of their freedoms and now it appears there is no one to notice their loss. Even in the classroom do they celebrate the Forfeit of Independence Day, as multiculturalism, multimedia, textbooks, and standardization rear their ugly heads.
More interesting is how much of a "perfect misfit" an insatiable curiosity or appetite for freedom will make you in this field, where your colleagues, and this boggles my mind, are comprised of people who get a rise out of being able to claim that something mysterious is nothing more than a byproduct or malfunctioning version of something quite mundane. It boggles my mind that they have such a remarkably strong and uniform preference for this outcome. It also boggles my mind that they would, in what amounts to some combination of premeditated and paradigm-compliant "choices," design research that is likely either to produce these conclusions or NOT to produce conclusions that sustain or provoke interest in the mystery. What drives their research is very different from what drives my research, and the impetus to my research is an endangered species of sorts in psychology departments.
IV. Beauty
All of psychology is ugly, from the macrocosmic (i.e., the organization of psychology into branches) to microcosmic (i.e., individual research publications) scale. Physicists were correct to respect aesthetic urges in helping to guide them to an integration of the four laws of motion into a unifying theory. Nothing of the kind can exist in Psychology. For the most extreme examples of ugliness, we need only to look at the methods and products of dream research performed by physiological psychologists in a sleep laboratory sanitized of any conceptual splendor. Contemplation and reflection factor little into this kind of research, as it would seem those with an access to the brains of research subjects so willingly give up use of their OWN brains. The research is logically sloppy, intellectually lazy, existentially timid, and often politically biased or predilection-laced, resulting in publications that aim to minimize if not dismiss the significance or meaning of dreams. Even the research that ends up framing the significance of dreams as that of cognitive filing cabinets or waste products could end up proven misguided where subsumed under broader research that addresses the role of dreams within the whole personality and waking experience of the dreamer. The mountain range often looks quite different from the foot of the mountain than from a distance of 30 miles. But for such research to take place, we need researchers with the ability and tendency to think about things larger than a bread box, things as large as the individual person and life itself.
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