The APA has been undergoing a very vocal crisis of conscience on this issue for the past few years. The psychologists who have been speaking out against the APA's handling of it are, to me, professional and patriotic heroes. At the APA convention in San Fransisco this August I expect to see the spirit of social justice activism alive and well among many of my colleagues. To me, this is a struggle for the soul of our profession. Are we to be caretakers, committed to bringing healing to real people, or are we to cast ourselves as disinterested social scientists -- consultants, rather than healers, with ethical obligations far more diffuse and more easily compromised for the sake of political and economic advantage?

While I'm sad that there are people in my profession who think that their responsibility to the abstract notion of "all innocent people everywhere" subsumes their ethical obligation to the real human beings in front of them, I'm also at least somewhat heartened by the fact that we are, at the very least, having such a vocal debate about this issue. There's a lot of deathly silence on this topic in this country, and if I have to cringe at the behavior of some of my colleagues, I can also feel proud that many of us are not willing to stay silent about it.

This also just goes to show that our standards for training and licensing are far too focussed on producing good scientists and far less interested in helping young people acquire the personal characteristics required to go out into the world and do no harm. I find myself wishing for far more help learning how to be a better person in order to be a better healer. I fear some of the psychologists involved with SERES and the CIA have terrifically honed intellects and relatively underdeveloped hearts.

Before everyone piles on against the entire profession of psychology due to the behavior of some psychologists, I would like to point out that the people who are calling out these abuses and demanding that they stop are themselves psychologists. These people are heroes.

Also, our entire country has known about these torture practices for years and done very little about it, besides, for instance, making Jack Bauer a television phenomenon. That there are psychologists implicit in these practices is absolutely horrible. But it's not the profession that made them open to the idea in the first place. It's the culture in which all of us are participating.

The divide here is not so much between nefarious psychologists and everyone else, but between psychologists who see our profession as something akin to that of a medical doctor who must "do no harm" and those who see themselves as social-science free agents who can sell out their calling to the highest and most politically powerful bidder. In other words, we've got just about the same moral range in this profession as you find in any other profession, except maybe nuns and used car salesmen. And the nuns I'm not so sure about.

There are actually fairly stringent standards for licensing psychologists. You need a doctoral degree from a fully qualified program (no small investment of time and money), and at least in my state you need 3000 hours of supervised experience (which usually adds up to several years of unpaid or extremely poor paying work), a very clear set of supplementary coursework, lifelong continuing education, and two major examinations that include a lot of subject matter on ethics. Licenses can be revoked by state boards of psychology for many reasons, much indeed as a bar association can revoke an attorney's qualification. It is true that standards vary state by state. The APA is not directly involved in this process but wields no small amount of influence, either.

And most of us are not, in fact, flying blind with our practices. The reason we get doctoral degrees to begin with is to learn about how to do empirical research and how to apply that research to practice. I'm sure there are some psychologists out there who still persist in selling snake oil. But a lot of us are very concerned to ground our work in good social science. It's a helluva trick applying scientific data to the individual circumstances of each person's complex life, but we don't go to graduate school for half a decade in order to just fly by the seat of our pants.

Yes, Brightstar, I take it all back. It is, indeed, all about you. Your frustrations with feminist cultural criticism and "political correctness" are clearly directly relevant to a linguistic gag order in a court of law. How silly of us feminists not to see the obvious parallel between citizens speaking out against racist and sexist language in our culture and a judge forcing a woman to say "sex" when she means "rape."

You did get the part where the whole objection to the gag order was that there is no term to describe a sexual act that does not either imply consent (sex, intercourse) or the lack of consent (penetration, assault, rape), right?

Oh, sorry, forgot. This is all about you.