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Breaking News:

Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun Now Available for Purchase through Amazon.com and PublisherDirect


Psychology Author Finalizes Book Itinerary




Wyatt Ehrenfels met his deadline for the release of his expose/epic thriller, Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, now available through PublisherDirect (click here), Barnes & Noble (click here, and Amazon (click here).

NOTE
Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun available again at Barnes & Noble.com


What People Are Saying about Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun

David W. St. John of Elderberry Press (another publishing house) writes, "My God, what a vivid imagination. This is the stuff of nightmare. Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun is truly a masterwork. It blows the lid off the hypocrisy and corruption...builds tension and character [in a way that] reminds me of Stephen King's It. It is precisely that sense of timing that marks a master...The climax of the novel (or in this case the eruption) had my blood pressure going through the roof...A book I will never forget. I won't ever trust a psychologist again."

Leon Rappoport, Ph.D. writes, "The author of this remarkable novel has created a rare and in some places rather painfully (to those of us in the field) accurate narrative...A surprisingly high drama concerning not only the graduate school environment and its potential life and death impact on students, but also the integrity of psychology as a whole...Reminiscent of Mary McCarthy's The Groves of Academe and C.P. Snow's The Masters, not to mention Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?"

Upon first acquiring the book for consideration, The American Book Publishing Group courted the author with this assessment: "Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun is both a hard-hitting exposé of the discipline of psychology and a riveting drama. The author writes with the soul of a poet, the logic of a mathematician, and the passion of a crusader. This fascinating book is a must-read for every student and practitioner of psychology."

Dreaming & Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun

The major draw for the novel among the public is the book's promise to educate its readers about the relationship between dreaming and waking experience in the context of the dreamer-protagonist's struggle to research dreaming against a para-skeptical contempt for dreams (and other prejudicial policies and procedures) among his professors.

"I wanted my readers to re-live the feelings or residues experienced in their most important or memorable dreams," remarked Ehrenfels. "I challenged myself as an author to tell a story that represented the perfect union, in dreaming, of reality and imagination. I think that what really matters to a person, what speaks to his or her soul, is on the one hand the meaning hidden in reality -- the untapped potential, the unpacked implications, the unformed futures and, on the other, that part of myth or fantasy that is attempting to tell us something about the way we live our lives. People like reality-based films or books, and they also enjoy searching contemporary culture or current events for a deeper understanding of myths and fantasies (most notably Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings), which are often tauted as clairvoyant, prognosticating, or insightful. I think that potentially the most compelling work is the one that seamlessly depicts the dynamic interplay between reality and imagination, and for me, that work is the dream. As a genre of experience, the dream, as a truly indigenous experience, is in a class by itself, surpassing every other medium (even waking reality) in its capacity to educate and transform by using symbolism to weave experiences out of the stuff of our innermost being...and by melting self and world (subject and object) into a single language synonymous with experience. If you attuned to the many ways in which we learn from experience, and ways in which experience influences us, you should marvel at the potential of an experience designed by and for us...from the raw material of our lives, without the arbitrary and random static of a waking reality shared and shaped by others. By virtue of our active participation in myths individually tailored to us as dreamers (i.e. individualized myths), the dream possesses the power to alter vital sources of awareness and alter components of the "equations" by which we organize waking life. All dreams, even those we do not interpret, even those we do not recall, impinge on our style of perceiving, evaluating, judging, and interpreting, re-adjusting senses and sensibilities in ways that fundamentally affect what we want from life and what we think of ourselves. How could I illustrate the dream's handiwork? With a novel that portrays the relationship between dreaming and waking experience in a dream researcher whose waking experience is all about his struggle to research dreaming scientifically against the biases of his professors."

A Chapter-Level View

Wyatt Ehrenfels gave staff members the green light to release additional descriptions of his chapters. The title track to Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun launches into a mysterious event in which one character's dreaming and waking experiences coincide. The coincidence is narrated by the character's spouse, an adjunct instructor who presents her husband's nightmare as a tantalizing lead into a lecture on dreams. The chapter moves back and forth between the instructor's lecture and the husband's mysterious journey through the urban wilderness of Northwest Washington D.C., where events connected to the nightmare unfold even as the instructor relates it to her students. In this opening chapter (originally untitled by the author but given the book's subtitle "You'll Never Trust a Psychologist Again" by the publisher), readers are introduced to the major characters and to the institution (the scheming and patrician National School of Professional Psychology) through which most of the plot will wind.

Chapters 2-5 (Benign Atrocities, Third Person, Degrees of Freedom, 28 Days Till Tomorrow) have been affectionately dubbed "the diary" or "testimonial" tracks by the book's enthusiasts. The chapters remain faithful to the acute events that plunged four real-life graduate students into saccadically deteriorating plights that prove as stubborn as they were, at their inception, startling. From here on, the book focuses on the school's increasingly inhospitable climate, as program officials enforce their better-than-20/20 vision of mental hygiene and scientific gravitas within their walls in preparation for an early accreditation review by the National Psychology Association. Throughout these chapters, the author relieves the tense pace by taking his readers through the dreams of many of the students.

Chapter 6 (Dead Center Field) is the last chapter in a fast-paced 556-page Volume I, setting the stage for what Volume II readers will find at the crossroads of Pathological, Political, and Paranormal. After a 4-chapter hiatus, the synchronistic journey in the title track is deepened by a revelation that embeds the dreaming-waking hybrid experience in an enduring human problem intent to make readers believe similar 'coincidences' are actually a natural condition of the planet. By this time the readers are dogged by a nagging sense that the characters are being controlled by a group mind and that the foundation shared by our deceptively personal lives is beginning to surface, revealing itself for the first time as it begins to crack.

Dubbed the "dream chapter" Chapter 7 takes place almost entirely within a dream shared by two characters. The dream is comprised of dreams from the real dream diaries at the point the real-life graduate students felt the brunt of the pressure from a pantheon of petty professors bearing false standards for science and ethics. In honor of Jung's obscure Mysterium Coniunctionus (translating to "mysterious conjunction") the title of this seventh dream chapter was patched together from Latin roots (Viatica Deflexionibus) to mean "journey by deflection." The characters in the seventh chapter are wholly determined by the will of ethe dream in which they are trapped, haplessly deflected by symbols whose meaning they must sense to survive till morning. The readers sense the characters are being carried along a current of logical necessity, symbolized by events architected to transform the dreamers. In some ways, this bold chapter provides readers with a break from a heavy political plot, and while it can be skipped without confusion, it is entertaining in its own right and provides the densest illustration yet of connections between dreams and waking events both past and yet to pass. It will enrich the reader's experience of chapters 8-10. "Viatica" remains the favorite chapter of the author's wife.

Chapters 8 (The Heart of Artifice) and 9 (Experiography) set up the readers for a relentlessly meaningful and thrilling conclusion that unfolds across the 100-page finale. Once the province of dreams alone, symbolized meaning crosses the line and finds incarnation in yet more waking events. The protagonists divine theories to make sense of what is happening to them, theories absorbed with coincidental ease into research for the protagonist's pre-existing masters thesis.

This epic's marquee coincidence comes full circle in Chapter 10 (A Cross Purpose), nicknamed the "action track" for its suspenseful and symbolic turn of events. The fates of many characters collide with lethal force as the universe willfully pares down its possibilities into one fateful outcome. One reader commented on the remarkable way some characters and some events appeared to be surrogates of others as characters and readers share an obscure glimpse of experience's hidden infrastructure as it expresses itself (like latent dream meaning through manifest imagery) in the concatenation of conflicts that sends people topple like dominos.

Leveraging Successes into Stepping Stones

Wyatt Ehrenfels is currently negotiating events with public access television across multiple states, having taped an hour of interviews for two episodes of OKTV's cable access program "Alternatives" (which will be re-broadcast for residents of New York's Borough of Manhattan) and having arranged to tape an interview of unspecified length for HCTV serving all of Fairfax County, Virginia (a bed room community for Washington, D.C.). Wyatt Ehrenfels has been named by a senior producer in connection with a prospective May appearance on a "significant national radio program." Details concerning events at local bookstores and universities are also forthcoming.

Playing 'connect the dots' with experiences ripped from his own life or the lives of others within view, Ehrenfels created a story intended to serve as the companion to his essay-style web site. "I thought a narrative, and specifically one drawing from actual experiences, is an effective way of raising the critique to the populist plane. Once my publisher informed me I could select a date 'as early as late February,' I couldn't pass up the symbolism. The month of February fulfills a prophecy of sorts. The month was fated. At the time I learned the book would be released in February, the day in February was placed at my discretion, and I selected the 29th in honor of all special events, events that represents a point in a cycle. As will be explained later [see below], the February date of this release marks the finale in a series of four events whose dates combine to suggest an uncommon mathematical structure. And that's no hoax. That's not even a publicity stunt. It is what it is. Moreover, this date is in keeping with the purpose of Shadow Psychology itself, which is one of adjusting or correcting for Psychology's biases. The term Shadow here alludes to the role ascribed by Jung to the "shadow complex" in the personality. Much like the shadow complex corrects with psychopathology ranging in normality for the expedient or fashionable attitudes and identities we necessarily adopt to make our way in life, and much like the addition of a 29th day in February 97 times every 400 years corrects for the difference between our tidy 365 day calendar and the actual length of the tropical year (365.2425 days), so the Shadow Psychology Network, through fireflySun.com and Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, contributes to the correction for various biases -- deficiencies and excesses -- that became congealed fixtures within Psychology's professional culture and the attitudes of its members. [For details, read About the Author piece."

Wyatt received a complimentary copy of Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun (pictured below) shortly before Christmas. The first-time author reports being pleasantly surprised by the quality of the two soft-bound 6 x 9 volumes. Wyatt is in the best spirits of his life, buoyed by the physical evidence of 2 plus years of hard labor: 18 months of writing plus 5 years of doctoral training, having what he calls "more fun than a human being should be allowed to have." He was especially amused by the reaction of one of his colleagues, a 50-year-old technical writer and life coach, who is currently coping with efforts by psychology professors to drive him out of a local doctoral program. "He seemed mesmerized by the cover, and stared into it as he declared 'This is serious.' He borrowed my copy long enough to read the 10-page introduction, after which he exhorted, 'They're going to get you. They're going to get you, [REAL FIRST NAME OF AUTHOR OMITTED]. You're going to do damage to this field.'"

The release of Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun marks another milestone in a journey that, from one perspective, began with the writing of the novel February 1, 1999. According to sources inside the Shadow Psychology Network, Wyatt's wife is rumored to have incited her husband in the waning days of January to back up his complaining. "Do something about it," she said, "why don't you write a book." Write a book he did. And the writing of Fireflies began that day, the making of Fireflies was much longer journey that can be traced back to an August, 1984 nightmare. This is the first written record of an event critical to the epic journey, the first documented dream in what evolved into a 16-year, 2500 typed page diary. "The production of Fireflies is a lot like pregnancy," reflects the author. "I had no idea that throughout the ordeal that was my formal education I was actually conceiving a book, the mother of which is years of independent reading and research emerging from my childhood dream life. So to say that I breathed life into so many bound pages and that this book bares my DNA is no mere poetic device. Fireflies is more than a piece of recorded history, it is an extension of my life, a living bridge linking ancestry to progeny. Like childbirth, it marks a beginning as much as it does an end, if not more."


"Some of you have asked me -- um -- have asked me -- well, when I'd like to see the thing out -- and I always maintained for reasons I will elaborate on shortly that I preferred February to January and March. Soon after the book is released, we can all enjoy discussing the book's many characters, storylines, and symbols, and I look forward to adding Fireflies to the reading lists of regional book clubs and libraries. The benefits of a coffee house discussion forum should extend to the author. Every once in a while, you come across a novel that defies classification. In answer to your question I think the book is classified as Fiction/Spiritual -- at least that's what the back cover reads -- even though it is based on too many actual events for comfort. The trans-genre Fireflies is part testament -- I witnessed many things that puzzled me over the years -- from the paranormal to the pathological -- so everyone, author included, can expect to learn a thing or two from a collaborative discussion of the work. In this way, Fireflies is unique. I present this dramatic expose as evidence of interventions in our familiar worlds of 'otherworldy intelligence,' the stirrings of ulterior things -- things living in its soil and its atmosphere, on occasion grazing the plane of our world to be glimpsed if only we'd look and at other times unseating us with guttural movements on a tectonic scale -- manifesting the random edges and extremities of an infrastructure unknown to us. In writing this book I seek not a classroom of students but partners in an investigative journey."

Why I Hope the Book Will Not Be Available Until February: Reasons Large & Larger

I had actually hoped the book would not be available before February, but there is no succinct and simple way to tell you why. For those of you who've read the first chapter of my book (available on my web site), you'd understand that there is a site here in the D.C. area, a nexus of coincidences which I worked into the plot of my novel. This site also happens to be about 2 miles from one of the psychology programs on which the book is based, ground zero for many of the actual events to which the book testifies. The following four dates present the cardinal points on a time-map of sorts. If the hypothalamus can be said to regulate such basic functions as body temperature, than I have to wonder whether there isn't an organ at work, analogous to a compass, sending me in and out of harm's way on a curious schedule. What follows is actually a very mild example of the patterns from the "You-just-can't-write-stuff-like-this" file. That's what I like about Fireflies. It provides an obscure glimpse of a script beyond imagination. Kind of gets you thinking about a psychological equivalent of DNA, perhaps not unlike Jung's "collective unconscious" and "individuation vis-a-vis a personal myth"

  • August, 1984: I awaken from an August nightmare I would never forget.

  • October, 1988: Nightmare is realized, unfolding across a sequence of events on a Saturday morning in October. I leave the city.

  • April, 1998: I learn that I would be returning to the city, as one of the few schools in the country offering clinical respecialization programs for research PhDs admits us. (I later withdrew from the program under political pressure, but my wife continued to finish her second doctorate).

  • February (?), 2004: This is when I am anticipating the formal release of my book. This would be spectacular. It would come at a perfect time if I consider the resources available to me in this month, and when I consider it would also mark the month in which my wife completes her licensing exam.

As you can plainly see, the February, 2004 date is pure speculation. Well, it's more of an educated extrapolation. My book is due to be released shortly, and I suspect it will be February; given the first three plotted points, February is the fourth and only missing set of coordinates in this square-shaped script. There seems to be a symmetry here. 1984, 1988, 1998, 2004. Moreover, if we consider the months...(INNER JOIN: 1988, 1998)...April and October are six months apart (diametric opposite points on the calender). October (88) is when I decided I would be leaving D.C. April (98) is when it became clear I would return...(OUTER JOIN: 1984, 2004)...August and February are six months apart. February also happened to be traditionally the worst month in my graduate school career, hence the title of Chapter 5, "28 Days Till Tomorrow."

The numbers corresponding to the months involved are 2, 4, 8, and 10. Without stretching the coincidences too thin, I am caving under an impulse to search for more connections. Something tells me that the numbers associated with the years themselves (84; 88; 98; 04) bare some sort of improbable similarity with the numbers associated with the months: (8-84), (10-88), (4-98), (2-04). Some with metaphysical sensibilities, like a numerologist or alchemist, might be inclined to muse over the math involved here. Okay, so I will tell you that I am working on it and will leave it at that!

Without going into the details of Chapter 1 -- and its subsequent connection to Chapters 6 and 10 -- I will say that I was thinking of reconstructing the 'walk' featured in Chapter 1 (the October, 1988 realization of the August 1984 nightmare) and then from there continuing to the school (April, 1998), thus connecting the four points in this "synchronistic quad." (Paranthetical text added).

As for the book celebration, I am thinking of typing it into a mini-pilgrimmage, a walk retracing my steps from DuPont Circle to the Washington National Cathedral to a site that will forever live in infamy, the last straw from a straw discipline. The straw that broke this camel's back, inspiring a book so "large" that readers will be breaking its binding for years to come.

(End Statement).

Splitting the Atoms of my Life

I remember the birth of my first hobby. At age twelve, I traipsed idly across an old haunt of mine, a hilltop overlooking the 'hood,' where my eyes snagged an object of uncharacteristic color and texture, its broad side scantily clad in the loose dirt that nearly drowned it in the earth in which it was lodged. I delighted in the coarse and dusty imperfection of the metallic thing, in the fact it was neither as smooth nor as shiny as anything manufactured, in the fact I may have stumbled upon something on which the eyes of this world have not glanced. Once I decided it was worth a bend at the hips, I reached down. I delighted in the difficulty and in the depth with which I pried and jimmied the edges of the thing with my fingernails, which fortunately for me, I seldom cut as a youth. (My fingernails were always an average one centimeter longer than any of my friends, male or female, in the penultimate year before puberty). Once I weighed it in my hands, the word 'rock' bristled my wits, where it jumped to the head of the quality assurance queue to which I subject all hints and hunches. And while rocks have no one specific look, feel, or smell, I declared it was a rock because a rock was all it could be. "It looks like a rock because it has no (distinguishing) 'look.' It feels like a rock because it has no 'feel.' And it's not about to make any sound without any help from me. It's official. It's a rock." But it was heavier than any rock, or for that matter, any other object it's size. To this day I have no idea what compelled me to do what I was about to do. But I immediately descended the hill with rock in hand, walked across the cul-de-sac, entered the split-level colonial they were mass producing in the early '70s and which I called home, and...and what would lead me to think this thing, nondistinctive but for its weight, should cling to the refrigerator without the aid of a shelf or industrial adhesive? I had my grandfather, who worked alongside a former geologist at Picatenny Arsenal, take the thing to work with him. This same guy, who I never met and who would subsequently name my pink-and-green unikite, my jasper, and my amethyst, came back with a verdict on this, the first rock, in my collection. And it was 'magnetite.' This is not a gem by any stretch of the imagination. It did not have the structural qualities (the precision cut, geometric design, transparency, or symmetry) associated with most rocks of commercial beauty and value. This is not the kind of rock you'd find in the pop culture corner of the geological universe. But I found value in something whose unusual qualities were concealed beneath a deceptively crude exterior. No less than ten years and one hobby later, roughly seven years after I had all-but-forgotten I was ever interested in rocks, the amnesia dissolved in the curious revelation that this value captured the essence of me and threaded all major undertakings to follow in life. And from the value emerged a skill. Two months later I found a predominantly khaki rock (at least somewhere between buff and khaki) with an unusually opaque band of red, as if there was some vivid color inside the rock shining through something transparent in a substance that was anything but transparent. My source for all things geological at Picatenny cut the stone into what resembled two slabs of extra-veiny prime rib. The diagnosis...The discovery...something called 'Jasper.' The word seemed to fit the look of the rock. Don't ask me how. But once again I was giddy with discovery, with having found something as real as it was hidden from the world, which is a literary way of saying "hidden" and "real." Over the next year, I combed the neighborhood and local quarries in search of rocks with various 'personalities' until I discovered my sexuality and sold my collection, including my magnetite, for my own phone line and other bedroom accessories with babe-magnetism. I suppose it is no less than strange for me to grow more ashamed of my sale as I grow older, but I do feel now that I really sold out then, ever since which I have become about as ardent and adept at identifying "sell outs" as I once was at detecting magnetism (and other unusual qualities) in interior rock. In an episode for the "ontogeny-reciptulates-phylogeny" file, I emerged cataclysmically from childhood having left behind an ancient state of being for a new-and-improved consciousness not unlike that "modern man" evolved from his primitive ancestors. My interests matured, shifting from the interior of entities as primordially material as, well, rocks, to experiences that spring from our own interiors: to dreaming, personality, and the hidden structure of life. But dreaming is hardly a clear break from tradition. Like rocks, dreams are objective products of nature -- psychological nature -- concealed at every waking moment but impinging on us with a range of irrepressible experiences as diverse as they are ineffable...which is a literary way of saying "hidden" and "real."

Rapid Fire Bullets

Members of the Ehrenfels team dispersed across shopping malls, colleges, and metro stations over the weekend to distribute fliers and introduce the campaign to reform Psychology to members of the community. fireflySun.com shattered its two-day record for web visits and accesses, and Wyatt Ehrenfels poured over dozens of e-mails. The public has spoken. And in appreciation for the interest in the web site, Ehrenfels deferred to public opinion by prepending his normal prose with a high-level view of Psychology's shortfalls in bulleted form:

  • The professors responsible for Psychology research and education are intellectually ill-equipped to address (and indisposed to appreciate) the meaning of psychological life.

  • Psych profs are less interested in the human condition (human nature is the 800 lb. gorilla in the psych department) than in (a) making their business transactions, day-to-day operations, and relationships easier and (b) managing a cosmetic impression of legitimacy for their students and for the public at large.

  • Toward these ends, psych profs adopted standard operating procedures that show a fundamental lack of respect for the integrity of the individual, whether that individual is another professor, a research participant, a therapy client, a graduate student, or the much-maligned "man in the street" to whom the psych prof generalizes his or her research findings. These procedures include manualized diagnosis & treatment, approved textbooks and standardized course content, and derivative and imitative research methodologies that grind through masses of research volunteers like so many pounds of sausage.

  • Psych profs develop a "para-skeptical contempt" for research topics (i.e., phenomena) that do not lend themselves as neatly or readily to these vaunted and self-congratulatory SOPs.

  • As you might expect, tragically the phenomena being sacrificed (i.e., neglected or distorted) are the Big Picture questions or the psychologistic phenomena most associated with the heart of the human condition -- phenomena like dreams that pose the biggest intellectual challenges and make demands on psych profs to exhibit flexibility and originality in designing empirical methodologies which, like the best detectivework, is a confluence of qualitative and quantitative data, descriptive and inferential statistics, and exploratory and confirmatory data analyses. Currently, our excessively, precipitously, cosmetically, and gratuitously formal research accentuates the latter in each of the above pairs at the expense of the former, resulting in a one-sided science. Good research and necessarily expeditionary research simply cannot be judged by the same standards and cannot be comprehended with the same mindless minimum expenditure of energy with which they integrate all other slavishly expectation-compliant research.

  • But alas, psych profs refuse to make compromises or concessions to the requirements of their subject matter and so, even while psych profs love to play God by disabusing the contemptible layman of his or her faith and folk beliefs, they perpetrate this myth that the essence of science is a collection of rules -- rules which, if followed correctly confer superiority on the game player. The scientist is portrayed as a disciplined mind and team player who seeks to converge on the same methods and truths as his or her colleagues. In actuality, however, genuine science is an open-ended framework that allows the individual scientist considerable discretion and latitude with which to draw constructively from his or her own wits and experiences. More accurate terms for the brand of quote unquote science currently practiced by psych profs include "paradigm," "epistemology," or dare I say "game" -- a Psychology version of Monopoly with rules (i.e. institutional requirements) that have less standing in science than in social necessity, social expediency, and worse yet, social control.

  • And community management begins at home! Like many of the elimination-oriented reality TV programs, psychology graduate students who declare an interest in a problematic phenomenon (e.g., dreams) are summarily disqualified or systematically deprived of career milestones. A student interested in studying dreaming for a living must take a back seat to (and make considerably more sacrifices and adjustments) than students of subjects which are:
    • simple (for example, replicating previous research with an ethnic sample is requires minimum expenditure of energy, minimum risk, and assurances regarding publishability)

    • wayworn/derivative (for example, in the 1960s, thousands of faculty and students jumped on the 'cognitive dissonance' bandwagon with their own 'two-cent research.' Despite all this 'idle thrashing', a lack of original thinking failed to provide the high level view necessary to discern the broader clinical applications. When finally laid to rest, this subject was eulogized as 'academic' in both senses of the word.

    • socially conscientious (for example, the volume of research studies about racial stereotypes and gender identity)

    • materialistic/pseudo-psychologistic (for example, the number of faculty positions occupied by 'scholars' who cut up lesser lifeforms like frogs, rats, and pigeons for a living)

    • utilitarian/technical (for example, building a better spatula or designing cockpits on grants from the Federal Aviation Administration)

    • inbred/artifactual (by and large, clinical research studies DSM diagnostic constructs and the efficacy of manualized treatments for individuals diagnosed with these canonized 'disorders.' When sports reporters devote less coverage to NFL games than to annual rewiews of instant reply among league owners, you would have the sports equivalent of what we currently enjoy in Psychology.

    • advancing the APA's political agenda (for example, passing off opinions as an 'analysis' of affirmative action policy)

    The adjustments to my methods of research necessary to compete for a career in Psychology (and then to preserve that career) would not have allowed me to do justice to dreaming. For this reason, psychology's policies and procedures behave like prejudices and require an affirmative action for scholars who want to study human nature. Despite excellent grades, such students might find it impossible to achieve admission to graduate school. If they do manage to get through that gate, they may fall victim to the prejudice of an individual professor bent on questioning their fit, professionalism, or mental hygiene publicly in an end-of-academic-term faculty meeting that culminates in some category of conduct probation. Or they may find themselves unable to build a CV that allows them to compete for a post-doctoral teaching position because they cannot network, publish, or teach on a frenetic career timetable that supports only ADHD, frivolous, and highly technical research (or curriculum). At the end of the day, when all the vetting is done and all the checkpoints negotiated, the only available individuals on whom tenure can be conferred are those who are neither burdened with a superhuman curiosity nor sidetracked by a disposition to think. These "scholars," for whom a new mantra, "commitment to excellence," replaces the classical pursuit of truth, have adapted so adroitly and sacrificed so willingly as to prove they do not need tenure. Tenure, the real value in which is protection from one's colleagues (and not from House Republicans, as they would have you believe), is wasted on tenured persons. Like maggots born out of dumpster trash, the modern academic is a product of an institution, a creature of imprimatur, and instantiation of its policies and procedures.

  • Why is it so significant that the bureacratization of knowledge production, diagnosis & treatment, and education & training places psych profs at odds with independent thinkers, exploratory researchers, and certain classes of phenomena? The effects are pervasive, profound, and permanent. Let's examine this from the perspective of natural selection, as observed over the course of many training generations. Psych profs on search committees and graduate admission committees can afford to cherry pick the 4-5 'perfect fits' from among the hundreds of applicants for graduate school and teacher-track assistant professorships. In conjunction with committee decision making, this seller's market helps the psych profs to re-populate their communities with like minds (do not let the racial and ethnic diversity of the flesh distract you from this fundamental truth). The community grows increasingly homogeneous, which adds to the pressure to uniformity additional pounds per square inch every year, making the industrially-polluted air in psych departments virtually impossible to breathe or penetrate with the human eye.

  • I wish I could say all the fault lies in trans-individual entities, facticities, and other inexorabilities and sociological constructs that take on a life of their own. True, some biases are built into the system, but the system, with the full complicity of its individual patrons and administrators, determine how and with whom the academic community will be repopulated. And criteria for admission to graduate school and for tenure-track assistant professorships favor individuals with personal biases similar to those of the system so that prejudices now reside in increasingly large numbers of individual psych profs, in whom we find an unhealthy attitude to science and education. More psych profs depart from the normal balance between open-mindedness and skepticism, willing to categorically discount a phenomena as inherently unscientific. More applicants favored are those tractable types who simply demand to be shown a manual and told what to do. In the end, generations of psych profs who once grudgingly surrendered their freedoms and wits in exchange for access to common sources of guidance, validation, and identity gave way to generations with no wits to surrender and no freedom with which to choose their abrogation. The new generations of psych profs are, in a nutshell, "scary dumb."

  • The bottom line: the psych department invented a new law of thermodynamics in which deindividuation passes across a gradient from people and work of relatively greater insipidness and imprimatur to people and work of relatively lesser insipidness and imprimatur. Psych profs seek to be scientists first by imitating the cosmetic (albeit outdated) aspects of harder sciences, and in observing this letter of the law fail to grasp the spirit of discovery and exploration. By fashioning themselves ambassadors of a generically scientific and professional community first and student of human nature second, psych profs lose all claim to scholarship and become mere clerks who preside over the cogs in a bureacratic knowledge production, diagnosis & treatment, and mass certification combine.

  • Given this state of affairs, it behooves psych profs to fulfill their civic duty to accurately and adequately portray for their psych majors the odds and obstacles surrounding graduate admission, psychology-related career opportunities in the post-bacceleaureate labor market, and post-doctoral employment for those who endure the abuses and sacrifices to earn the vaunted PhD in Psychology.

"...The condensed version is that psychology professors employ a combination of selection and reinforcement pressures to maintain a like-minded community of individuals intolerant to deviation and dissent and dependent on external sources of guidance, validation, and identity. As I implied, part of this is in selection and part of it is in socialization. You obviously take in the cute puppies who are already house-broken and then subject them to an advanced professional-grade weaning. As for the student with the pioneering glint in his eye, well, you leave him on the doorstep like some skanky barn cat. Most people who get my argument wrong do so because they don't read it. They assume I mean that the field attracts the wrong people, people with (psychological) issues. This is only partly true, but there isn't enough truth here on which to stake any compelling generalization."

-- J. Wyatt Ehrenfels


Many of my readers are likely to wonder why I declared war on Psychology. Many of my readers expect an itemized list of grievances, something for which I can "bill" Psychology. But I cannot allow my readers to think it is that simple. My reasons for doing what I am doing, and similarly the faults of Psychology, fall into various categories, which I present differently depending on the report. For example, I broadly outline a two-pronged case against psychology in You Have to Defeat Me on Both Fronts, present four distinct "articles of evidence" in my report Doubling Down, briefly identify a longer list of smaller issues in The New Memo followed by a categorization of these shortfalls with respect to the ideals of beauty, freedom, justice, and truth, and present a gritty recapitulation of my own personal grievances or observations in my novel. But for our purposes here I will discuss psychology's failures as examples of infidelity and abuse: