Operation Firefly is your chance to "stick it" to your psychology department. Headquartered at fireflySun.com, Operation Firefly, a campaign to reclaim -- or resurrect -- the human psyche from the professional culture of Psychology, needs an infantry of bright psychology students to spread the news that Psychology as we know it today is ripe for a major revolution.

Who Am I?

I am author J. Wyatt Ehrenfels and Ph.D. in Social-Personality Psychology. My novel, Fireflies in the Shadow of the Sun, uniquely blends fact, fiction, symbol, and theory in an effort to depict the erosion of human nature in the students and subject matter of modern Psychology.

What Do I Want from You?

I hope you will read through the 16 doctrines of Shadow Psychology below my signature. I also hope you will join the 1,300 students nationwide who have decided to take part in the discussion, and perhaps even the coalition built to raise awareness of the discrepancy between what Psychology is and ought to be. Coalition members range from active observors who can take the pulse of their university or community to participants who can raise awareness of the web site in one of many ways (e.g., posting fliers, e-mailing fireflySun links to peers, composing opinion pieces for my web site, recruiting subjects for research, or holding seminars about the book/web site).

Passive observors who simply wish to enjoy the spectacle of the war on Psychology, which will soon begin with the book tour, are also welcome.



Thank you,



J. Wyatt Ehrenfels, Ph.D.

http://www.fireflySun.com

http://community.webshots.com/user/ehrenfels

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ShadowPsychology

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ShadowPsychologyII

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ShadowPsychologyIII



The Core Beliefs of Operation Firefly & ShadowPsychology: 16 Doctrines

(1) Career OPPORTUNITIES for the BA or BS in Psychology are more limited than those available to most other majors.

(2) COMPETITION for advanced studies or post-doctoral university employment is staggering. Odds of achieving admission to graduate school in Psychology (or of procuring a tenure-track assistant professorship) are slim-to-none.

(3) The competition results in a BUYER'S MARKET in which faculty search committees and student admission committees can afford to seriously consider only those applicants willing to tow the company line. What kinds of applicants are these? Naïve students and vapid drones with no inherent vision -- no true calling -- no genuine interest in the human condition. These are psychologically unsophisticated career-seeking youth who are most easily socialized (or indoctrinated) into the professional culture of psychology.



(4) The competition also results in a sequence of HURDLES that serve as delivery devices for requirements that constrain creativity and independent thinking. The "psych-" is abandoned for the "-ology." Manuals and policies are created to both (a) "train" those with no self-direction or self-motivation and (b) promote a pseudo-scientific and pseudo-medical PERSONA that serves political and public relations objectives. Tenure is wasted on tenured professors, who have survived so many levels of vetting as to have proven themselves unlikely to maintain an original idea.

(5) What is the "professional culture" of Psychology? This culture refers to a constellation of practices and prejudices that preclude an adequate exploration of psychological phenomena at the heart of the human condition. In the parochial style of the academics and self-styled professionals, four human perceptual functions (sensation, thinking, feeling, and intuition) as conceived by Jung are perverted into pathological forms (Materialism, Doctrinarism, Credentialism, and Careerism). These -isms form the foundation of the professional culture and the cardinal points of its mental and moral compass. Yes, your professors themselves, including the creators and patrons of the DSM, have their own unique disorder! I speak here of a business model that serve the professors and practitioners themselves -- not the student, not the client, and certainly not the study of human nature. Psychology has become a career combine for those with established records of conformity and imitation!
.

(6) Those students with self-direction and a motivation that is genuine have difficulty negotiating the requirements for a degree in psychology. They become primary targets for the faculty gatekeepers. If the professional culture does not transform them, the political embattlement will wear them down or weed them out in the tradition of boot camp. By extension, those most likely to meet the requirements are those least disposed or able to contribute to a worthwhile body of knowledge. You should not be surprised that what passes today for the organized body of knowledge in Psychology is at best inbred and derivative dribble, sacrificing adequacy for parsimony, sufficiency for expediency, and worth for opportunity.

(7) The REQUIREMENTS for a degree, for publication, and for post-doctoral employment weed out visionaries, explorers, and intellectuals, leaving behind a field populated exclusively by "clerks" and "customer service representatives." Is it any wonder the term "scholar" has been replaced by the term "professional" and the phrase "pursuit of truth" (about human nature) by the "pursuit of excellence" (in the field of professional Psychology).

(8) To compensate for their lack of psychological education and sophistication, psychologists have lobbied for a privilege currently enjoyed by psychiatrists, the authority to prescribe medication (even though psychologists lack medical training). But psychologists have no other choice. They do not value the psyche, only the brain and statistics. Over the years, their clinical training in psychopathology has been increasingly geared toward the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a manual of disorders that likely have an organic basis because of the typicality with which their symptoms cluster within the general population. The DSM is published by the American PSYCHIATRIC Association (trained physicians with a background in medicine). It seems psychologists have nowhere else to turn but the pills when they lack both the psychological sophistication and the interest in the psyche. Most psychologists have a stake in treating the mind and brain as interc!
hangeable, and in their MATERIALISM fail to understand how evolving mental processes can gain a functional autonomy or individuality with respect to the organic basis from which they originally sprung. Consequently, the reliance on the brain as an explanatory principle and on pharmacology as a treatment has homogenized if not neglected the intrinsic value, richness, and integrity of psychological life.

(10) But even before the applicant becomes a student, he or she may be denied entrance into the game by SELECTION CRITERIA with no real relevance for diagnosing potential scholarship. These criteria are created from the requirements themselves and take the form of questions like "how often has the student published or presented as an undergraduate student?" and "is the student affiliated with a professor with whom I work as a member of APA Division X or Y." Admission is a socio-political game with no real winners and no real players. In effect, faculty search committees and student admission committees restrict opportunities to like-minded, psychologically unsophisticated, existentially timid, politically biased, and intellectually lazy applicants who are most willing to cede their freedoms and faculties to external authority and central agencies. For the lack of discoveries and real knowledge in the field of Psychology, the field is excessively manualized, pushing policies !
and manuals as actuarial as they are arbitrary.

(11) Psychology has little if any knowledge. But you wouldn't know this, because Psychology disguises its own formalisms (i.e., jargon, format) as knowledge. In other words, they pass off their own culture as the nature of the psyche. They figure that if you cannot understand their publications through their jargon and format, the publications must appear to you to carry some intellectual or scientific merit. They have neither.

(12) 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). Ironically, the ideas and interests that are most victimized by their prejudices are those phenomena at the heart of the human condition, such as dreams, spirituality, attitudes, emotions, symbolism, structure and dynamics of human mind. While these core topics are marginalized and distorted (creating a caricature of the human condition), the professors overpopulate the field with research and therapy that is political and popular (e.g., trans-gender identity, racial prejudice, self-esteem) or pragmatic (e.g., engineering cockpits). THEORY (the product and process of intellectual thought, contemplation, and reflection) is itself minimized, as i!
s PHENOMENOLOGY (the attention to raw facts of experience from which quality data for research is derived). Science is now truncated, with the tree having lost both its crown (theory) and its roots (phenomenology). The professors neither have their heads in the clouds nor their feet on the ground.

(13) This culture or "system" has all the appearance of objective facticity. In other words, the field's precepts are treated as tablets handed down on Mt. Sinai or rocks dug up from the earth. But in fact, most policies and practices are determined socially (i.e. arbitrarily) in committee. But the practices and policies they expect their students and peers to model, a source of systemic discrimination, is not the only level at which the discrimination operates. The system is aided and abetted by the ATTITUDES of individual faculty members, which perpetuate and proliferate the profession by discouraging curiosity and encouraging skepticism for those phenomema (e.g., dreams) that lend themselves LEAST readily to the business rules. It is these phenomena that MOST threaten the integrity of the profession's fragile persona and that of the academic's equally fragile self-esteem. The students who claim these phenomena as their interests carry a terrible burden.

(14) The business rules consist largely of the research methodology and a preference for sophisticated statistics and designs which, applied uniformly across all subject matter, result in an emphasis on inferential, confirmatory, and quantitative data sources at the expense of descriptive, exploratory, and qualitative data sources. Arbitrary and artificial research design constructs like "hypothesis" strip the human-sized question of its meaning as it is prepared for placement on the scientific assembly line. Attempts to standardize, streamline, and sterilize the conveyor belt (so to speak) simplifies and automates the production of knowledge, but results in poor research and transforms the university into a data warehouse, career clearinghouse, and overall sweat shop (for graduate students and adjunct instructors). University research can be characterized as the mass production of superficial behaviors -- mined like coal from college freshman -- for deposit into statistical!
 formula and topped off with sloppy, biased, and opportunistic interpretation. The paradigm itself, which I have named the NOMOTHETIC NULL-HYPOTHESIS TESTING SYSTEM, produces statistical fictions designed to preserve university life and the careers of its denizens. One would be prudent to doubt the accuracy, adequacy, and authenticity of anything appearing in a psychology journal. It is as far removed from the reality of the individual psyche as it is from public awareness on the yellow pages and dusty shelves of the university library.

(15) But the STANDARDIZATION does not end there, but with textbooks, test banks, multimedia, diversity policy, CVs and publication timetables, DSMs, grants, committee assignments, teacher manuals, classroom demonstration booklets, and the APA manual governing writing style.

(16) To protect themselves from dwelling on REPRESSED SELF-DOUBTS, the academics demand their students walk a fine white line and punish non-conformity or originality with various categories of academic and conduct probation administered through "student ethics & evaluation committees." Many 4.0 students have been placed on probation for the endorsement of views deemed "unprofessional" due to their "unconventionality."

 Farra Trompeter wrote:
I wanted to forward this message to the list...for those of you who work with treatment issues, this month's chat will focus on being an advocate for recovery.

Hope to you can join us tomorrow---Thanks, Farra

----- Original Message -----
From: "NCADI Update"
To:
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 3:27 PM
Subject: Recovery Month Web chat


> *********************************************
> SAMHSA's National Clearinghouse for Alcohol and Drug Information,
> The NCADI Update
> *********************************************
>
> LIVE WEB CHAT: Raising Voices for Recovery on August 21, 2002, 3 p.m. - 4
> p.m. EST
>
> Join us for a live Web chat with Anita R. Marton, Senior Attorney with the
> Legal Action Center, a public interest law firm specializing in legal and
> policy issues concerning substance abuse, AIDS, and the criminal justice
> system on Wednesday, August 21, 2002 from 3 p.m. - 4 p.m. EST.
> This online discussion will answer questions like:
> **What does it mean to be a recovery advocate?
> **Who should stand up and be counted?
> **Why is it more difficult for some people to become recovery advocates?
> In addition, we will explore how individuals can make a difference by
> raising their voices in support of recovery.
> To participate in the chat, log on to:
> http://ncadi.samhsa.gov/recoverymonth/2002/multimedia/webchat5.htm
> immediately before or during the chat time and follow the directions to post
> your questions.
>
> For a schedule of all upcoming Webcasts and Web chats, please visit:
> http://ncadi.samhsa.gov/recoverymonth/2002/multimedia/. For additional
> information on Recovery Month, please visit the Substance Abuse and Mental
> Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) Web site at: http://www.samhsa.gov
> and click on the Recovery Month 2002 icon.
>
> *********************************************
> Visit us at http://ncadi.samhsa.gov/, or call 1-800-729-6686 to
> speak with an information specialist.
>
> We value your opinion. If you would like to make comments or
> suggestions about this service, please go to
> http://ncadi.samhsa.gov/promos/ncadiupdate/
> *********************************************
> SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE
>
> If you wish to subscribe/unsubscribe to this newsletter,
> please send an email to [log in to unmask]
> and type in the body of the message:
>
> subscribe ncadiupdate youremailaddress
> OR
> unsubscribe ncadiupdate youremailaddress
>
> (for example, subscribe ncadiupdate [log in to unmask])
> *********************************************

Send one line: unsubscribe click4hp to: [log in to unmask] to unsubscribe
See: http://listserv.yorku.ca/archives/click4hp.html to alter your subscription


---------------------------------
Do You Yahoo!?
HotJobs, a Yahoo! service - Search Thousands of New Jobs

Send one line: unsubscribe click4hp to: [log in to unmask] to unsubscribe
See: http://listserv.yorku.ca/archives/click4hp.html to alter your subscription