"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:

• 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