I must first begin by saying what an honor it is to hold the title of Fan Club President. The competition was fierce and the election process was far from pleasant. Best wishes to my competitors.

The main reason I wanted to become fan club president is my simple agreement with the tenets of the book. I will address what I consider the main premises of the book: careerism, credentialism, materialism, and doctrinarism in the field of psychology. I will present my spin on these issues and why I became jaded with the discipline of psychology.

Careerism: When I began my studies in the field of psychology, as a green high school senior, I believed psychology was a great field to enter. I was warned about the lack of jobs and low pay, but I loved the ideas being presented and nothing would interfere with that!

I entered college the following year and chose psychology as my major. I began to notice the competition for internships and similar positions. My fellow majors were fighting each other tooth and nail for ready-made resume material; an easy step towards a graduate school application. I considered research and toyed with the idea of producing some actual original thought, but my peers questioned how that could have possibly translated into a 3-credit graduation requirement. Seeing the mentality I faced, I ran to fight another day.

Credentialism: It seemed odd to me that when I walked down the halls of my liberal arts college, I only saw signs for cognitive and biological psychology. The doors of the other professors only said Dr. so-and-so with no descriptor. Was it assumed that they were guardians of the "older" disciplines of the field?

The more professors I studied with, the more I realized that cognitive psych was the current banner under which we fought and physiological psych was the only "enemy." Maybe I missed a memo, but where were Freud and Skinner in all of this? I was able to find one professor who still taught psychodynamic principles but he told me what a maverick he was considered. Even the students thought so; I guess I would have to buck a trend merely to study what I thought were the main foundations of the field.

Materialism and Doctrinarism: I minored in philosophy and materialism was all the rage there too. It seemed that you were either a faith-oriented religious zealot or a billiard ball determinist. Psych was the same thing; everything was a "process" or related to "neurotransmitters." I couldn't get this off my mind. Then I realized my "mind" had little to do with what these people were pushing on me. My id and I were pissed. We didn't get into this field to study biology or computer science. It seemed everything was being taught with the vocabulary of those disciplines and I would have to translate for myself. Luckily for me, they failed to permeate the college course catalog.

The joke was soon to be on my department. I chose to do an "independent study" for my "capstone in psychology." Capstone was their way of saying thesis-lite. They were afraid of forcing the students into an actual research project. That was too far from the statistics programs and too close to knowledge for knowledge's sake! In MY capstone, I mixed psychology with history and literature. I used terms like "psychoanalysis" and "regression" without the department Gestapo asking to see my papers.

The more I look back, the more I realize how lucky I was to get my degree (Bachelor of Arts) with my psyche intact. I was lucky I still knew what psyche meant; that it wasn't the punchline to some tarot cards 900 hotline. I still feel the way I did about psychology in high school. It's a great field to study and helping people is what it should be about. Put away your statistical analysis, put down the Prozac and read Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun.

Benjamin Willard