From the above arguments, one may well conclude that MDs don’t know what a Psychologist is supposed to do or what they know how to do. In most cases, this is correct. However, in defense of my professional antagonists, I can report on good authority that many aspiring Psychologists don’t know what they are doing either or what they are getting into, that is, until they arrive at the university where they are to be trained, the truck pulling up packed with furniture and dishes, suitcases in hand, with their spouses and pets about to enter a new house in a new town, sometimes thousands of miles from their home. And, depending on your previous training, the change can be overwhelming especially when you discover that everything you learned previously no longer applies.
This was my situation and also the situation of most of my peers. Much like in the military, we were about to be transformed from couch potatoes, drones of the hive as it were, then broken down, to be built up again as fully functioning, worker Psychologists to go out to the field to extract knowledge like honey. Well, this may be true for some people anyway…
In the Beginning, most people enter this field because they want to help people. At least in my case, my master thesis was not taken seriously and, indeed, it embarrasses me even now, although I still keep a copy of it. In an essentially non-academic Master’s program, such as mine, they teach you various methods of counseling and counseling theories. The statistical requirements are minimal. You are given enough information to know how to read a bar graph or pie chart. In short, by the time you finish a Master’s degree in psychology from a program that is not tracked for further education, you are trained to counsel and, it is hoped, pass an exam to be a counselor.
Contrast this with Ph(ony) D(octor) training in Psychology. By the time they finish with you, you are trained to study human behavior with a microscope and may even know something about the functioning of the brain itself. This can be a little disconcerting if you have the notion that you are studying Psychology for some other reason. At least in my doctoral program, if you had the idea that you were training to be a PhD because you wanted to find out more about how to help people survive or do anything else useful for them, you were very soon disavowed of this notion.
What does a psychologist learn? one may well ask. Why, testing of course! A good doctoral program will teach you how to do psychological research and testing, which you will realize if you think about it for any length of time, are both essentially the same thing, one applied to groups and the other to individuals.
I remember well how this bit of information met my ears and bore into my brain. “Testing?” I said to myself incredulously. “What in blazes does that tell you?” I have since found out the answer to that question because I had become so disoriented by the unexpected and overwhelming situation in which I found myself that I did my cognate (minored) in Psychological Testing. Frankly, I didn’t know what else to do my cognate in.
So, when you look at me now almost 20 years after completing my degree, what do you see? A psychologist who understands what testing is for and how it all works. I use very few tests with regularity now. I can approach research in a way that allows me to understand the sleight of hand that gives it meaning. But, the thing that fascinates me now is the very same thing that has fascinated me since I was a teenager—how can we make something of ourselves as human beings and how can we solve even the seemingly insurmountable problems in our lives. And I hate to say it, but I still do not consider myself particularly good at testing even though I know how to do it.
