Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [436]
For forty years, and especially for the last twenty, what has been taking place has been a disorderly integration, a loose, untidy interweaving, a semifusion, of the many dissimilar sciences within the broad realm of psychology. It may well be that no Theory of Everything will appear that neatly explains both the actions of neurotransmitters and the mental processes of writing a poem, both the configurations of neural networks and the course of true love. A Theory of Everything was possible in psychology when we knew very little; it may never be so again. And maybe we don’t really need one.
Schism
Even if the fear that psychology will break apart into shards of disconnected subdisciplines is belied by the developments of recent years, one important schism did take place almost two decades ago, the organizational split between academician-scientists and clinician-practitioners.
Schisms between academic and applied psychologists were nothing new in the APA, the professional organization that had long represented psychology in the United States. The association was founded in 1892 as a learned society whose members were primarily teachers and researchers. From the beginning, applied psychologists were looked down on and rarely elected to important offices; their values and goals were considered venal, commercial, unscientific, and, in a word, grubby. John B. Watson was cast out of academia because of sexual scandal, but the APA ignored him for decades not for that reason but because he sold his skills to the advertising world.
Clinicians in particular were considered by academicians a lesser breed. At the 1917 APA convention, a small group of aggrieved clinicians—there were only a handful in the APA at the time—feeling that their interests were being ignored, decided to found their own society, the American Association of Clinical Psychologists. It grew, and the APA took action. It created a clinical section of its own, announced that it would accept all members of the AACP as members of the APA, and revised its bylaws, stating that its purpose was to advance psychology as a science and as a profession. The ploy worked: The renegades came home and the AACP was dissolved.
Similar events recurred as the number of clinical psychologists and applied psychologists in the APA grew. Each time the discontented formed another organization of their own, the APA made further changes in its structure to keep them in or bring them back. But genuinely harmonizing the interests, outlooks, and values of academics and clinicians was all but impossible. In American Psychologist in 1984, a psychologist, borrowing a concept from C. P. Snow, wrote sorrowfully of “psychology’s two cultures,” mutually uncomprehending, hostile, and alien.
What brought the matter to critical mass was money. During the 1970s third-party payments for clinical services had been available through health insurance, but by the 1980s that source of payment began to shrink as a result of Reagan administration policies and the growth of health maintenance organizations. The clinicians in the APA—by this time nearing a majority—demanded that the organization step up lobbying and publicity on their behalf. This alarmed the academics. They feared that the APA, historically a scientific organization, was becoming a professional association with monetary and political goals, and would soon be dominated by the practitioners.
During the mid-1980s the board of directors of the APA sought to avert mass defections of the scientists by devising plans of reorganization to protect their interests, but all were rejected by the APA’s council of representatives. With a crisis imminent, a patchwork reorganization plan, satisfactory to neither side, was approved by the council, submitted to the membership in 1988—and rejected by an almost two-to-one margin.
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