Franco Basaglia

From: "Andrew Phelps" <math_anxiety@yahoo.com>

To: withholdapadues@yahoogroups.com

Date: Friday, July 10, 2009 11:59 AM

Subject: RE: [withholdapadues] APA and 1.02

 

Ijk:

More thoughts;

They think APA became a business club for clinicians rather than an organization with intellectual integrity.

I learned that in the 70s. My mentor at U.C. Berkeley Psychology Dept. was trained as a clinician. He decided based on the [!] experimental evidence that clinical psychology "wasn't a science" because helping people "using other skills" was demonstrably "just as effective." He also noted that the APA was "taken over" during the 50s/60s by "clinical and counseling" psychologists to the detriment of those who were into "the science of mind." He went into "personality psychology." And he left the APA, way back then.

When I got my Ph.D. in mathematics, as a "client/survivor," he was Dean of Letters and Science. He came to the ceremony to watch me graduate.

He also defended me against the Maslach/Zimbardo power play which prevented me from becoming a social psychologist (1977).

It seems like APA has risen to the APS challenge and is now promoting more scientific inquiry. Perhaps if they experience a significant challenge from another group over the ethics code, they will need to take another look.

I believe if they hired an appropriately trained expert, that person would not buckle under to the pressure to act like a damage control expert rather than an expert in ethics.

I don't agree with this. Such a person would actually be forced to "defect," akin to the outcome Bryant Welch reports for himself when he was at the center of APA power.

Let's find an appropriately trained person and designate her/him the director of ethics and begin publishing the kind of analyses that should guide official policy.

In my own way, I tried something like that. I worked as a research assistant for Norma Haan in her moral psychology research; my job title was "moral observer."

The problem is one of organization not one of bureaucratic management.

 

Andrew Phelps

 

 

reference:

Social Science as Moral Inquiry, ed. by Norma Haan, Robert Bellah, Paul Rabinow, and William Sullivan, Columbia U. Press, NY, 1983