AHP Perspective is a magazine published bi-monthly for members of the Association for Humanistic Psychology. It includes interviews, articles, essays, updates on member activities, conference announcements, and book reviews. Members receive the complete AHP Perspective as part of their membership.

AHP PERSPECTIVE Aug/Sept 2002 Table of Contents

Life in the Woodwork: Humanistic Studies in the
Training of Psychologists at CSPP — Don Eulert

An old story tells about the purchase of a finely woodworked table, a finished heirloom it seemed. After a time the table, which had been such a proud possession, seemed to contain faintly discomforting sounds. By and by the sounds were obvious to all witnesses so that the perplexed owner brought it to confirm his potential claim against the seller. But while they watched, a creature emerged with such resplendent wings that the owner felt obliged to express his gratitude to the seller, and to ask if there were more workings made of the same wood.

I don’t go back quite 40 years in humanistic psychology. But this reprise might provide a case study of efforts to “carpenter” humanistic studies into the training of mainstream clinical psychologists, describe where humanistic psychology is now, and suggest how we might spread our wings in the future.

TAKING WING My base, the California School of Professional Psychology, was founded in the early 1970s (in San Diego, later also at Alameda, Los Angeles, and Fresno, separately accredited). The training programs intended to meet the need for clinical psychology practitioners not being met by traditional academic institutions. CSPP was the first free-standing professional school of graduate psychology, since widely imitated by many others. Very quickly the Schools accounted for the majority of clinical psychologists graduating in California. (Today, more than 60% of San Diego Psychological Association members are graduates of professional psychology schools.

***************************************************************************
Hello! You've used this unregistered copy of SmartWrap™ 32 times. Please register at <http://www.selznick.com>. Thanks! (SmartWrap™ result is below.)
***************************************************************************

Then there was the question of his graduation. He missed 42 days of school, first period English. I asked him why just first period English? He said, “I am living with my girlfriend, and I really wanted to get up and go to English, but she always had my cock in her mouth, and she would just keep sucking it and sucking it everytime I tried to get up to go to English class. I gave this a moment of pensive thought and I said, “I know of no method of psychoanalysis or behavior modification that would cure this problem!” He blurted out almost simultaneously, “You ought to be a psychologist.” I blurted out “I am a psychologist.” His meaning was that he felt so understood by the nature of my responses (no matter how bizarre they seem to an outsider).

To provide more than technical training for license, the original curricula of our Schools were broadly and deeply humanistic. One of the founders at the San Diego campus was AHP President Larry Solomon. Humanistic theories of personality and of psychotherapy were required courses for all. “Professional and Individual Growth” (essentially encounter groups) were part of entering candidate’s requirements, as were courses in humanities topics.

These humanities courses specifically were not psychologyslanted in the study of (for example) Modern Poetry, Mexican History, Greek Tragedies, Myth in Western Film, Drawing and Painting, Creative Writing—to be experienced firsthand, not studied through a filter of theory or enslaved to applications in clinical practice.

All course grades were Pass/Fail, and evaluations were narrative. There was no faculty rank.

In 1975 when I hired on, the curriculum required 10 semester units of sociocultural context, 5 of ethics, 12–15 of Humanities. Of therapy courses, in addition to Psychodrama, separate courses were offered in music, poetry, drama, and dance and art therapies. Of theory courses, 5 were offered in Jungian theory and five in Existential/Humanistic.

By 1985 ( within 10 years), 45 courses listed in the catalog for sociocultural studies had disappeared, any remaining subsumed into Humanities, as was the case with all the therapy and theory topics noted above, with the single exception of an elective course in existential/humanistic theory remaining in the clinical curriculum.

When the faculty voted to go for APA accreditation in the early 1980s, reductionism set in far beyond APA guidelines. We dropped the “C-Series” (Culture) completely as the study of cultural contexts of psychology devolved into ethnic polemics. All our dissertations now showcased statistical rigor, and the curriculum went cognitive/ behavioral. We organized into programs with hierarchical rankings, and demonstrated rigor by first cutting requirements for the “soft” humanistic studies. Nonetheless, APA site visitors were very positive about humanistic studies in San Diego’s training “for the whole person.”

IDEAL TRAINING PYRAMID About the time CSPP won accreditation, the burgeoning of new Schools like CSPP resulted in a conference of National Schools of Professional Psychology and a follow-up (1986) publication Quality in Professional Psychology Training. With our faculty in leading roles, the conference recommended a training model which included a rationale for humanities. Julian Meltzoff, our rigorous research director, described the ideal training for professional psychologists as a five-sided pyramid. It included practice, theoretical principles, research skills, and culture and society, “which deals with knowledge of customs, minority subgroups, attitudes and values, social forces, environmental impact, and the like.” The fifth side of the pyramid called for “a broad background in the humanities—literature, drama, philosophy, art, music, history—a base of knowledge that identifies professionals as educated men and women and brings depth and perspective to their professional world . . . [One] who practices without some genuine understanding of culture/society and humanities will be a narrow technician . . . .” Meltzoff’s model might be required reading for tomorrow’s curriculum planners.

As recently as 1993, we were offering 24 Humanistic seminars per year, many of them practitioner-oriented, the “HSeries” being a last resort when those courses such as Jungian/ existential approaches and expressive arts therapies were dropped from the clinical curriculum, and multicultural studies were added in.

Nevertheless, our program, like many in the milieu, faced further major challenges to the value of humanistic training. Locally, we experienced a year of hysteria during a provisional denial of APA accreditation (we were flooding the market by admitting 100 candidates a year for the clinical Ph.D.). Separate programs—Ph.D., PsyD, Health Psychology, and Organizational Psychology—set up autonomous decisions about curricula. Our long-standing obligation and opportunity to graduate all our psychologists from an enlightened philosophical and moral tradition began to lack consensus.

In the drive toward accreditation, we had already gone to a more mainstream model of academicians and researchers, whereas in the first years almost all our instruction was by part-time active clinicians. We made a lot of “middle-generation” hires. I observe that as compared to the clinicians (and those we train for clinical practice), they were mostly sensate types, compared to our intuitives, thinking rather than feeling types, judging as compared to perceptive. Many of them were trained to be vociferous in proposing psychology a “valuefree” science based on statistical research.

SURVEY ON THE VALUE OF HUMANITIES COURSES

Since research was queen, in 1994 I questioned all our graduates about the value of required humanistic studies in their training and in their practice. Some graduates resented them:
“Each course is a lot of money. I believe that all courses need to have a practical application. I had humanities in college. I went to graduate school in order to learn how to be a psychologist.”

A more typical response was this narrative answer: The seeds [that] CSPP’s humanities planted provided a philosophical perspective that deepened my understanding of psychology. After ten years of practice, I frequently reflect upon the ideas studied in my humanities courses in the never-ending quest to understand what it means to be human. The values, meaning, and purposeknowledge acquired have been an invaluable part of my abilities as a clinician, that I have drawn from in momentary feelings of exhaustion, confusion, and doubt. Psychotherapy is a noble but lonely science best undertaken after [such] training.

Of those responding (a high and representative n of over 300), 83% recommended—often eloquently— that future trainees continue with the same (or more) humanistic studies required of them. When presented with this statistical data, our then Ph.D. clinical director replied, “Well, that’s their opinion,” and proceeded to cut all humanistic studies (except as electives) from that program.

On the other hand, the new PsyD Program in 1996 unanimously voted the following motion:
At CSPP-San Diego, since its founding, we have sought to train candidates who understand themselves and their clients within social, political, and historical contexts. We intend that our graduates practice with an awareness of cultural and human values . . . . the Faculty reaffirms the Humanities requirement, with its specific charge to study the intellectual and cultural history of human expression and interaction . . . We seek practitioners who will integrate therapeutic work with ethical, philosophical, and spiritual concerns.

Within this history, I have needed over and over to articulate the rationale for humanistic studies in the training of clinical psychologists to site visitors, fellow faculty, and trainees. That imperative continues for all fellow travelers.

In a recent interview, Kirk Schneider, editor of the 2001 Handbook of Humanistic Psychology, addressed the issue of humanistic training for psychologists in this way:

Professional psychology today is sorely lacking in “living” humanistic psychology curricula. In many mainstream graduate schools, for example, students are exposed to (at most) a smattering of outdated or stereotyped humanistic notions—humanistic psychology is often held up as a “straw man” for problematic scholarship. We wanted to show emphatically that . . . there is a treasure-trove of keen and inspired thinking going on in humanistic psychology right now, and not just from 30 years ago . . . comprehensive humanistic psychology courses can now be taught all over the country, and indeed world, on the strength of one (or a few) [comprehensive] texts. It is incumbent on all humanistic educators, in my view, to see that these courses become realized.

TAKING WING AGAIN EVOLUTION INTO INTEGRATIVE PSYCHOLOGY For the future, I propose “Integrative Psychology” as a better name for what humanistic psychology now represents for the next 40 years. Schneider says openly, “Humanistic psychology is an integrative psychology . . . .” Within the swings of cultural contexts, professional politics, and local history in maintaining such studies, three years ago I changed the name of “humanistic” studies to “integrative psychology.”

Suddenly there’s a critical mass of applicants who recognize this nomenclature. Nearly 40% of our PsyD applicants this year have found this emphasis area as motive to apply to our campus for study of a psychology that incorporates “the good, the true, and the beautiful” [Wilber’s Integral Psychology]. Such a psychology adds to the mainstream of scientific truths a full measure of values, up to the spiritual, and the further gifts of the arts. “

Best seller” course topics— staying alive even when our candidates now must pay by the unit—include Psychology and Spirituality, Women and Culture, East/West Psychologies, Psychology of Political Terrorism, Contemplative Practices, Aging and Dying (Integrating Creativity and Spirituality), Ritual and Healing, CG Jung and Shadow, Postmodern Ethics and Pathfinding, Creative Writing/Journaling, Transpersonal Psychology, Expressive Arts Therapies, and The Holocaust.

In interviewing candidates for the profession, in the last couple of years increasingly I see future psychologists seeking an APAapproved program that honors spirituality, moral agency, and aesthetics as well as scientific “truths.” APA has published three collections on spirituality in psychology. So the pendulum has started back from the extremes of reductive scientism, but toward what balance in the training of new psychologists? The events of 9/11 surely have spiked trainees’ idealism for making a difference within a global perspective. The humanistic tradition can answer their quest with “all-quadrant, fullspectrum” (Wilber again) integrative psychology. Humanistic studies have not been dormant these last 40 years, but it’s time to come out of the woodwork with new wings.

“TO PRANCE, TO POINT, TO PRAISE!” We arrive at a point of both urgency and equanimity. Our postmodern historical condition requires a psychology that integrates not only the cognitive and scientific, but also the ethical and aesthetic domains of life, including diversity of worldviews and levels of consciousness. It’s time for a noisy pupa to emerge. Survival of humans on the planet might well depend upon psychology’s advocacy for social change as a scientific truth. And psychology must emphasize what makes for a life worth living. Artistic expression and scientific achievement both evidence the wondrous reach of the human imagination, empirically. MD poet William Carlos Williams said that we’re here “to prance, to point, to praise!” A full-spectrum psychology for a positive future must incorporate “prancing and praising,” in addition to “pointing,” in training and in practice.

DON EULERT, Professor of Cultural Psychology in San Diego at the California School of Cultural Psychology may be contacted at deulert@alliant.edu, fax (760) 788- 2541. For 25 years I have enjoyed the unique position of designing humanistic courses for clinical and organizational psychologists in their doctoral training. Humanities Studies represented the School’s commitment that graduate education include self-reflection, creative expression, and cultural awareness. The number of graduates of CSPP/San Diego (now affiliated under Alliant International University) required to engage in humanistic studies now approach 2000 psychotherapists and educators.

AHP PERSPECTIVE June/July 2002 Table of Contents

AHP Perspective Editorial Guidelines Advertising Information