I wanted to share this absolutely "must-read" article on the shadowed history of psychology by Alliance Board Member, Craig Chalquist PhD, intriguingly and perhaps controversially entitled "Why I Am Not a Member of the American Psychological Association." (Thanks, Craig, for allowing me to post this here)
Craig sent me the link after the conversation came up in the Alliance Board meeting that out of 15-18 presentations which I attended at the recent annual APA (American Psychological Association) conference, Jung was not mentioned once, William James only twice, and even Freud only once as well. Too, depth psychology is NOT one of the 54 different divisions of the APA, though as a Board, we sort of uniformly wondered if that may not be for the better given the limitations it presents, and wondered how depth psychology could engage with mainstream psychology more effectively (and, perhaps, in my opinion with cleverness and stealth...)
I had not read Craig's article at the time, but highly recommend it as an accessible, informative, and actually rather disturbing account of how the shadow side of psychology has evolved. Would love to hear comments from the community on this!
BTW, don't miss Craig's upcoming webinar on "Mythic Activism", Wednesday, August 28
Replies
Craig Chalquist: “Long-standing and of a systematic pattern, they are inevitable expressions of the ideology of seeing everything from the outside, as separable parts rather than as living relations.”
I (4 hours ago,http://www.depthpsychologyalliance.com/profiles/blogs/religion-as-p...): "The world is made of things and relations."
These things are happening to me every day.
Is depth psychology really so deep? I had back in the day my share of altered states of consciousness before reading anything by Jung. I didn't even know why I knew his name. He was for just another guy whom people mention with Freud, like something Engels is to Marx or Wallace to Darwin. When I started reading his books, I was like: "Hey, I've been there. And now it makes sense."
Ivan Illich (A priest!) recognizes two watersheds in development of institutions. The first one is when an institution exists for the people. The second one is when the people (if we are not careful) exist for that institution (or profession).