| Abstract: | It is shocking to summarize the ongoing debates on licensing of psychologists and on the relations between psychologists and psychiatrists. We psychologists seem chiefly to place the blame on the psychiatrists for the slow progress in gaining recognition of the professional function of psychologists. I offer a dissent which declares that a restrictive block must be removed from the thinking of psychologists before we are going to get anywhere on the problems of licensing and recognition of professional function. The block is manifested by the efforts of psychologists to imitate psychiatrists and beat them at their own game. This game is the diagnosis and treatment of mental and emotional disorders, illnesses, aberrations, etc. Such diagnosis and treatment involves a mechanistic and concretistic thinking which is proving itself powerless to deal with the behavioral functioning of human individuals in interactive contexts. I am tempted to say "has proven," but there is a sad lack of experimental evidence, for which psychologists must shoulder their share of the blame. For my part, I don't blame psychiatrists for opposing the licensing of psychologists to treat "mental and emotional illnesses." Without realizing it, the psychiatrists are doing us a big favor in warning us away from this fruitless endeavor in which they are themselves experiencing so much heartbreak. We are wasting our time in seeking to crowd with them into a theoretical structure which will not support intense scientific effort. No psychologist should discuss with any citizen the relief of symptoms which are now manifest in the citizen's organic functioning. The psychologist's function should be to teach his interested fellow human beings how to perceive an interpersonal world and interact within that social realm on a more efficient and harmonious basis. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |
