From: lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady)
Newsgroups: sci.psychology
Subject: Re: Inner-Child
Summary: Yeah, academic training sounds good on paper.
Date: 8 Apr 92 02:56:13 GMT
Article-I.D.: news.1992Apr8.025613.5361
Followup-To: sci.psychology
Distribution: sci
Organization: University of Hawaii (Mathematics Dept)

In article <1992Mar28.172533.23199@Princeton.EDU> roger@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
>In article <1992Mar28.110926.20843@news.Hawaii.Edu> 
                     lady@uhunix.uhcc.Hawaii.Edu (Lee Lady) writes:  ...
>>         ...
>>Unfortunately, clinical psychologists seem dedicated to the idea that
>>education in clinical psychology is the way to learn to do therapy.
>
>Unfortunately, you picked up this misconception somewhere.  Clinical
>psychologists do lots of therapy in their training, and take classes in
>how to do testing and therapy, and are observed doing therapy, and
>require over a thousand hours of supervised therapy before they may be
>licensed. Those who get a Psy.D. instead of a Ph.D. do practically no
>research outside of the therapeutic environment.  Ph.D.'s do do research
>elsewhere as well.  

If I had any sense, I wouldn't get into this argument.  I am FAR from
being any kind of expert on university programs in clinical psychology. 
I should stick to the resolution I keep making (and breaking) to simply
post articles about the good stuff I know of, and refrain from
attacking other people's attitudes and beliefs.

But I find that I just can't let these assertions pass.  They touch on
two things that especially bug me:  1) What I in my mind sometimes refer
to as the "academic scam," and 2) The general lack of skills that I
observe in academically trained therapists, based on listening to them
give talks about their work, plus my informal (and a few formal) encounters
with them, and listening to many accounts of people's experiences with
their therapists.  Plus occasionally actually watching therapists work.

As to 1) ...  Your response is the standard defense of academic programs.
"Our students take x number of credits in A and y number of credits in B
and ..."  On paper, it really sounds good.  The only thing is, when you
look behind these credits the reality is very different.  

There's no doubt that taking all the relevant courses and acquiring the
thousand hours of supervised practice is a formidible achievement.  And
there's no doubt that students do in fact learn a whole lot.  But as to
whether they actually become highly skillful is another matter.

We can argue about skill rather fruitlessly, because eventually what will
emerge is that we'll discover that we're talking about different skills.
I'm quite prepared to believe that academically trained therapists are
fairly skilled at assessment.  After all, pinning labels on things (and
people) is one thing we academics are really good at.  I'm also fairly
willing to believe that many of them are fairly good at making judgements
about what things need to be changed in a client.  

Some of the skills I don't see though:  I don't think I've ever met an
academically trained therapist (except for my NLP teachers) who were much
good at just plain dealing with people, in the way that most salespeople,
bartenders or waitresses (or psychiatric nurses!) are.  I don't see
therapists who are very good at being aware of other people's values and
being able to know what it's like to look at the world through the
filter of that other value system.  Or to ask just ordinary intelligent
questions of the client to find out what he's talking about and what he
means by the words he's using, instead of proceeding on the basis
of assumptions.  I don't see therapists who are much good at just plain
paying attention to the person they're dealing with and being aware of
the abundance of information that any person gives you about himself,
both verbally and non-verbally, simply by being himself.  

(I went to a therapist here in Honolulu who had formerly been an
assistant professor of clinical psychology.  One day I finally had to say
to him "You know, you consistently step on your lines."  He had no idea
what I meant by that, so I had to explain it to him.  Over and over
again, he would say something that I wanted to think about, and he
wouldn't notice at all that he had had an impact on me and would just
keep on talking, so that I would have to block out what he was saying
in order to think about the important point.  "You ought to spend some
time studying stand-up comics" I told him, which he thought was very
funny.  He didn't become any more perceptive, though.)

>>  It
>>is as if music departments believed that the way to become a musician is
>>through the extensive study of musicology, with very minimal time devoted
>>to actually learning to play an instrument and composing.  
>
>Sorry, this is simply and totally wrong.  Have you ever looked at a
>clinical psychology curriculum or spoken to clinical psychology students
>or even looked at the description of what the department is supposed to
>do?

When I was taking all the NLP courses I took in California, and later on
while I was a volunteer doing suicide prevention work here in Honolulu,
I met several students who were in the process of racking up the 
thousand hours of supervised practice for their MFCC (marriage, family,
and child counseling -- the primary credential for therapists in
California) or graduate degree in clinical psych.  Certainly it's a
formidible requirement.  But all sorts of things other than what one 
would suspect count toward those "supervised therapy" hours.  And
the supervision is often minimal.  It's possible that if I counted
things up right I'd have close to those thousand hours myself.

Since you are a musicologist, I will suggest that you think about all the
things a musician does in order to become really good at his
art/craft.  And I ask:  If musicians were educated the way therapists
are in universities, would you expect many good musician to result from
such programs?

>>Because academic programs in clinical psychology don't see as their
>>objective the education of the intuition, the "right brain" of their
>>students. 
>
>This just ain't so.  Where did you read this?

I suggest the following:  Think about how you would design a program in
clinical psychology if one of your main objectives were to weed out
those students who are strongly right-brained or who have a strong
natural aptitude for doing therapy.  How different would that be from the
programs that actually exist at most universities?

>> The question as to whether there's value in this sort of
>>education, and what approaches are most useful in developing a
>>therapist's intuition are not the sort of things clinical psychologists
>>do studies on.  
>
>Wrong.  DEAD wrong.  Therapist efficacy and therapist education and
>therapist attitudes are the topic of VAST amounts of study.  Again,
>where did you her this?

Well, again, I'm FAR from an expert on such studies.  I'm glad to hear
that there are so many of them.  But every time I hear of one it seems
that the results are at complete variance with the things emphasized in
actual clinical psych programs.

For instance, here is a question I think studies have been done on:
Which is more important to the effectiveness of a therapist: skill at
assessment? or WEG (warmth, empathy, genuineness)?  And which of the two
do clinical psych students spend the greater amount of effort acquiring?

Okay.  I've unloaded all the criticisms I feel the need to speak and now
you can argue about them.  As soon as I get my income taxes done I'll try
to post something more constructive.  Namely:  What are some of the ways
intuition was developed in the NLP courses I took?  Plus some of my own
ideas for teaching therapists right-brained effectiveness.

--
Lee Lady                                               
Dept of Mathematics                      lady@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu   
University of Hawaii                     lady@uhunix.bitnet
Honolulu, HI  96822                     
Newsgroups: sci.psychology