history final chapter 9 (1)

The Founding of the APA

In the summer of 1892, G. Stanley Hall convened a meeting of psychologists at his home in Worcester, Massachusetts.
The purpose was to discuss the need for a national organization for the new science of psychology.
This meeting led to the founding of the American Psychological Association (APA).
The first official meeting of the APA was held in Philadelphia in December 1892, with Hall as its first president.
Initially, membership was small but broad, including philosophers and two psychiatrists.
Women were welcomed as members, which was uncommon in scientific societies at the time, except for anthropology.
In 1895, the APA adopted its first constitution.
The sole objective of the Association was "the advancement of psychology as a science" (Sokal, 1992, p. 115).
The APA stuck to this single objective for 50 years, despite protests from members who wanted to include a professional focus.

The Development of a Profession of Psychology

Nineteenth-century psychological practitioners were in business in America before scientific psychology arrived.
A new applied psychology grew out of the science of psychology, including areas like child study, clinical and school psychology, advertising, mental testing, and forensic psychology.
Psychologists who did not find employment in universities created this profession, working in schools, insurance companies, child guidance clinics, department stores, juvenile court facilities, vocational guidance bureaus, advertising agencies, and other settings.
Contemporary psychology has many specialty areas, but the chapter focuses on the four primary specialties recognized by the APA in 1981:
- Clinical
- School
- Counseling
- Industrial–organizational (I–O)

Defining a Profession

A profession is a calling requiring specialized knowledge and often long and intensive preparation, including instruction in skills and methods, as well as in the scientific, historical, or scholarly principles underlying such skills and methods.
It maintains high standards of achievement and conduct through organizations or concerted opinion.
It commits its members to continued study and work that has the prime purpose of rendering a public service (Gove, 1961, p. 1811).
A profession includes specialized knowledge involving intensive training.
It has high standards of practice, usually supported by a code of ethics. Psychologists practice under a written code of ethics. Violation of the code can cause a psychologist’s license to be revoked.
Continuing education is required to keep practitioners current with the latest developments. Psychologists typically need to take additional courses or workshops to maintain licensure.
It provides a service to the public.
The APA, CPA, and licensing boards have set the doctoral degree as the minimal standard for the independent practice of psychology, requiring a minimum of five years beyond the bachelor’s degree, including a full year of internship.
Most professions have a standardized curriculum, ensuring comparable training across programs.
Professionals train in professional schools.
They have national, regional, and local organizations.
Professionals publish journals in their field.
Professionals are certified or licensed. Licensing laws protect activities associated with the profession.
The professionalization of psychology involves these characteristics.

Experiences in World War I

Applied psychology was underway before World War I (WWI), but the war placed psychologists in applied settings they had not experienced before.
Psychologists were largely responsible for testing soldiers using the Army Alpha and Army Beta, headed by Robert Yerkes (APA president in 1917).
Walter Dill Scott led a personnel selection project, developing selection tests for officers. The Committee developed more than 100 selection instruments for 80 different Army jobs and tested 3.5 million soldiers.
Scott was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal in 1919.
Psychologists were exposed to psychiatric cases in Army hospitals, with 40 hospitals each employing at least one psychologist.
Harry Hollingworth was stationed at an Army hospital in Plattsburgh, New York, which contained cases of “shell shock” (now PTSD).
Charles S. Myers coined the term “shell shock” in 1915 to describe psychiatric casualties of the war.
Military leadership often viewed shell-shocked soldiers as weak or cowards. Over 300 British and commonwealth soldiers were executed for cowardice or desertion.
The U.S. Army hoped psychologists could develop tests to screen these individuals, but Robert Woodworth was unsuccessful in constructing such a test.
Psychologists typically administered a test battery to soldiers upon admission, including intelligence tests, assessments of reasoning and decision-making, vocational and aptitude tests, and morale measures.
Psychological testing was the primary task of psychologists in these jobs, rather than clinical interventions.
World War I exposed many psychologists to applied work and psychology’s efforts in selection and intellectual assessment were viewed as successful.
This positive image opened doors for the application of psychology after the war, especially in business and the treatment of psychological disorders.
Research in applied psychology expanded, leading to the founding of the Journal of Applied Psychology in 1917 by Ludwig Geissler and G. Stanley Hall.

Early Organizational Efforts in Professional Psychology

In the early 20th century, psychologists working outside academia called themselves applied psychologists or consulting psychologists. The word clinical psychologist was also used, usually meaning someone who did intellectual assessments, but the label clinical psychologist had something of a generic quality to it, which would include the functions that today would be the purview of school and counseling psychologists.
Many early applied psychologists were women, who found academic jobs were closed to them.
These psychologists were concerned that the public could not distinguish real psychologists from those with no training.
In 1917, a small group formed the American Association of Clinical Psychologists (AACP), led by J. E. Wallace Wallin and Leta S. Hollingworth.
Membership in the AACP was intended to serve as a credential for the public, identifying the person as a legitimate psychologist.
Leta Hollingworth called for APA to establish a committee to explore the possibility of certification in psychology.
Certification protects the label “psychologist,” licensure protects the activities of what psychologists do.
She suggested APA publish a list of psychology departments that offered training in clinical psychology, standardize the curriculum (including a year-long internship), and require a doctoral degree for clinical psychologists.
Hollingworth also proposed a new degree, a Doctor of Psychology.
The APA worried that the AACP might divide psychologists and so considered making the group a part of APA.
In 1919, the group became part of APA as the APA Section on Clinical Psychology.
In 1921, the group persuaded APA to form a certification program to identify clinical psychologists. The program was abandoned when fewer than 30 psychologists applied for certification.
The Section asked APA for other help: developing an ethics code, providing more applied training opportunities, and asking psychology departments

Mental Testing

Mental testing defined twentieth-century American psychology.
It began with Cattell’s mental tests, then Binet’s intelligence tests and their translations in the United States by Goddard and Terman, then assessment efforts in the military in WWI.
This spawned selection tests for industry, personality assessment in the 1920s and 1930s (including projective tests like the Rorschach Inkblot Test), assessments in schools (some federally mandated), and tests to measure student attitudes, problems, interests, and aptitudes for vocational counseling.
Psychological testing has been a huge industry, making test publishing companies wealthy, giving psychometricians job security, providing practitioners with diagnostic tools, and aiding millions of people.

Clinical Psychology

The role of the early clinical psychologist was to administer, score, and sometimes interpret psychological tests.
This role was natural because psychologists developed the majority of tests.
Interpretation of test results, diagnosis, and treatment were in the job description of the physician, not the psychologist.
Despite efforts by the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, psychologists' role in clinical matters grew (Benjamin, 2005).
In the 1930s, clinical psychologists expanded their role to personality assessment, relying heavily on the Rorschach Inkblot Test.
This test allowed psychologists to do more than administer and score; they had to reveal the subtle interpretations of the responses, a skill that physicians did not have (Searls, 2017).
This test remained a prominent instrument in clinical psychology into the 1970s and is still in use today despite serious concerns about its validity (see Lilienfeld, Wood, & Garb, 2000).
Other personality tests such as the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT), and the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) were added in the 1930s and 1940s, expanding the psychologist’s role into interpretation and diagnosis.
WWII allowed the profession to take the next big step—providing psychotherapy.
With a shortage of psychiatrists and a great need for mental health services, the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) and the VA worked with APA and university psychology departments to accelerate training in clinical psychology after the war.
The APA established an accreditation program and in 1946, began evaluating doctoral programs in clinical psychology to assure quality in their training.
Psychologists had already been involved in doing psychotherapy during the war, pressed into that role because the need was so desperate. In blind clinical trials, they had shown they could do the job, and the government was eager to fill its needs as soon as possible.
The VA became a major employer of clinical psychologists. In April 1946, of the 74,000 patients in VA hospitals, 44,000 (nearly 60%) were classified as neuropsychiatric patients (Miller, 1946).
Psychology still had not reached agreement on a model for clinical training, and the USPHS and VA were encouraging APA to make progress on that issue.
With federal government funding, APA organized a conference of about 70 psychologists and a few individuals from related fields (psychiatry, social work, and nursing) who gathered in Boulder, Colorado, in the summer of 1949 to hammer out recommendations for how clinical psychologists should be trained.
They decided on a doctoral program that would not only provide strong training in science, but also provide the student with clinical skills, including a one-year predoctoral clinical internship.
The chief architect of this plan was David Shakow (1901–1981).
Shakow’s model became known as the scientist-practitioner model (also called the Boulder model), and it continues to be a dominant training model today in many programs in clinical, counseling, and school psychology (Baker & Benjamin, 2000).
What Leta Hollingworth had called for in 1918—a curriculum for training clinical psychologists—had finally been achieved in 1949.
Licensure was also underway in 1945 with laws passed in Connecticut and Virginia. It would take until 1977 for all states and provinces to pass psychology licensing laws.
The big change, of course, was that psychologists were now able to deliver psychotherapy.
Clinical psychologists had been around psychotherapy in a variety of settings such as state hospitals and child guidance clinics, and they had been using psychotherapy in university counseling centers since the 1920s.
The door was now open wide, thanks to the military, and psychologists were quick to join the ranks of the treatment givers.
Their theory (and therapy) was dominated in the 1940s and 1950s by the psychodynamic ideas of Freud and the neo-Freudians, meaning that the goal of their therapy was to help their patients resolve interpersonal and intrapsychic conflicts.
But their therapy techniques were more broad based. For example, group therapy methods, pioneered by psychiatrist Jacob Moreno, were in use after the war.
Behavior therapy techniques, often referred to as behavior modification, began to appear in the late 1950s (for example, Joseph Wolpe’s systematic desensitization) and dominated the 1960s, including techniques based on Skinner’s operant psychology.
These operant-based therapies involved the resourceful manipulation of reinforcers to increase the occurrence of desirable behaviors and punishers or extinction techniques to decrease or eliminate undesirable behaviors.
With the social upheaval in America in the 1960s surrounding the war in Vietnam and civil rights, humanistic psychology added its therapeutic techniques to the practice of psychotherapy.
Humanistic therapies encouraged self-exploration and self-determination. Humanistic psychologists emphasized the goodness of people and the potential for human growth that they believed was inherent in everyone as a life goal. People were seen as motivated toward self- actualization, that is achieving their ultimate potential and the sense of worth and satisfaction that accompanied that state. Humanistic therapies sought to help individuals discover their potential and to be able to pursue life as they wished.
Another major force in clinical psychology in the 1960s was the cognitive therapies that resulted from the re-emergence of cognitive psychology (which will be discussed in Chapter 11).
Behavior therapies had been shown to be effective, but there was a growing recognition that the problem was often not behavioral, but the result of disordered or irrational thinking.
The goal of these therapies was to restructure the individual’s thought patterns and eliminate irrational thoughts. They focused more on mental states than behavioral states (see Rosner, 2012).
Today, these therapies are still very much in use because their validity has been substantiated by empirical studies. This group of therapies is labeled CBT or cognitive behavior therapy.
The 1970s became a golden age for psychologists who finally had become the major providers of psychotherapy in America, able to practice independently of psychiatry and reimbursable by health insurance companies.
But after a few decades, managed care and the rise of master’s-level practitioner groups such as licensed professional counselors and marriage and family therapists changed the picture of psychotherapy once more and relegated clinical psychologists to a smaller role in that arena.

Industrial–Organizational Psychology

By the time of WWI, several academic psychologists were doing applied research in business, including Scott, Hollingworth, Münsterberg, and Walter Van Dyke Bingham (1880–1952).
Bingham established the first department of applied psychology at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (CIT) in 1915.
Bingham built an ambitious program at CIT, hiring Scott from Northwestern University and adding several other faculties who would become eminent applied psychologists.
Working with local businesses in Pittsburgh, Bingham established the Bureau of Salesmanship Research in 1916 to develop selection instruments.
Scott, who headed that bureau, would later modify some of those same selection tests for the Army during WWI.
A few years later Bingham founded the Research Bureau for Retail Training, a Division of Vocational Education, and a School of Life Insurance Salesmanship.
After the war, the program declined, mostly due to a decision from the university’s administration to pour its resources into engineering programs.
Scott left CIT to found a private consulting firm, the Scott Company. Other faculty dispersed to other university jobs and jobs within the business community, taking advantage of the applied experience of CIT and the exposure afforded by the publicity surrounding the war (Benjamin &
Baker, 2003).
Much of the work after the war was in personnel psychology, partly stimulated by the continuing emphasis on efficiency and the belief that psychology could supply the tools for that work.
Further, as businesses evolved, job specialization increased, making a good match between worker and job even more critical.
Geissler’s Journal of Applied Psychology became the major outlet for this personnel work, publishing selection instruments for firefighters, police officers, pilots, telegraphers, mill workers, stenographers, and other occupations.
Psychologists touted their wares in a rash of new books in the 1920s such as Kornhauser and Kingsbury’s Psychological Tests in Business (1924), Griffith’s Fundamentals of Vocational Psychology (1924), and Laird’s The Psychology of Selecting Men (1925).
One of the forces in personnel psychology in the 1910s and 1920s was Katherine Blackford, a physician who promoted a program of physiognomy in selecting workers. Her methods were popular with businesses, and psychologists regularly attacked her in their books and articles.
She recommended, for example, that businesses hire blonds for sales jobs because they were likely to have convex faces indicating traits of aggressiveness and persistence (Blackford & Newcomb, 1914, 1916). Eventually, businesses abandoned her methods in favor of more scientific approaches.
The Great Depression of the 1930s, which resulted in a peak unemployment rate of 25%, would change the face of industrial psychology. Because hiring was often nonexistent, many companies laid off their personnel departments. Yet some businesses saw the unemployment lines as a pool to be tapped for better talent, making selection skills even more important.
Industrial psychologists used this time to redefine their field.
Up to this point, industrial psychology had emphasized job analysis, selection, and performance appraisal; that was the “I” side of the I-O designation.
The 1930s, however, would add the “O” side, broadening the field to its current label of industrial– organizational, or I-O, psychology.
One of the emphases of the new organizational psychology was a focus on human relations in the workplace, an emphasis that had come out of the Hawthorne studies, a series of studies in the late 1920s and early 1930s at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in Chicago.
The studies focused on factors contributing to productivity, finding that management needed to pay much greater attention to assessing worker attitudes, interviewing workers, providing counseling programs in the workplace, allowing workers to have input into the establishment of workplace norms, and encouraging workers and supervisors to develop teams in a collaborative fashion (Mayo, 1933; Roethlisberger & Dickson, 1939).
Moreover, personality tests began to be developed in the 1930s for industry use, tests that principally were designed to screen out employees who likely would be troublemakers in the workplace (Gibby & Zickar, 2008; McMurry, 1944).
Finally, other studies in the 1930s and 1940s stimulated interest in the concept of job satisfaction as a principal component in productivity, and psychological tests and methods were developed to measure and improve worker satisfaction (Fisher & Hanna, 1931; Hoppock, 1935).
World War II brought another work outlet for I-O psychologists, the field of human factors psychology, sometimes called engineering psychology.
This field was to aid in the design of equipment that involved a human interface so that operation of the equipment was more efficient and safer.
Psychologists became involved in the design of airplane altimeters that could be more easily read, radar images that could be more easily interpreted, bombsights that produced fewer visual errors, and control knob design and placement in aircraft that minimized negative transfer problems, thus reducing crashes when pilots flew different aircraft.
After the war, human factors psychology continued to be part of the military work for
psychology, but psychologists also found employment with IBM, General Motors, American Telephone and Telegraph, General Mills, and many other large companies.
Working with engineers, psychologists helped design everything from clothes irons, arc welders, telephones, candy vending machines, and computers to automobiles, nuclear power plants, and space shuttles. It was a field that blended what psychologists knew about human behavior, perception, learning, memory, attention, fatigue, and motivation, with product design.
Human factors psychology remains an important activity, particularly in terms of the human–computer interface (Hoffman & Deffenbacher, 1992), but its practitioners today are usually trained in departments of industrial engineering rather than psychology.
Organizational psychology has continued its growth into contemporary times.
The field includes older topics such as worker motivation, job satisfaction, and leadership, and new areas, such as organizational communication, conflict management, organizational socialization, organizational climate, and organizational commitment.
Many I-O psychologists came to believe that they could have greater impact in achieving their goals if they focused their efforts on changing organizations, rather than on changing workers or managers directly.

School Psychology

G. Stanley Hall and Lightner Witmer represent the beginnings of school psychology (Fagan, 1992), a specialty field that trains practitioners whose education typically stops at the master’s degree level.
School psychologists work for schools, testing children and meeting with teachers, parents, and program specialists to see that children get the special services that they need to succeed academically.
The goals and functions of the school psychologist have remained much the same over the last century.
Although Witmer could rightly be called the first school psychologist, the first person to hold that title was Arnold L. Gesell (1880–1961), a student of G. Stanley Hall.
Gesell earned a medical degree in addition to his PhD in psychology. He was hired by Yale University where he established a research laboratory and a clinic for child development. While at Yale, he worked part time as a school psychologist for the Connecticut Board of Education.
Gesell’s most often cited work was in developing a set of normative tables for physical and psychological development.
Yet he made other important contributions such as developing matching processes that aided in the adoption of children, advocating for early school programs such as nursery schools and kindergartens, and helping create state and national policies that helped special needs children (Harris, 2011).
The early psychology programs in the schools focused on identifying children who were “mentally defective” and moving them into special schools for the “feebleminded” such as the one in Vineland, New Jersey, where Goddard worked.
Furthermore, school psychologists were involved in assessing children at the other end of the intellectual spectrum. Stanford University’s Lewis Terman was especially interested in intellectually gifted children. He worked to develop instruments, in addition to the Stanford- Binet, to identify these children and to recommend accelerated learning experiences for them.
Leta Hollingworth was studying gifted children at about the same time. In fact, she wrote the first textbook on gifted education (Hollingworth, 1926) in which she recommended against
acceleration and, instead, promoted enrichment opportunities for those children while keeping them with their same age mates.
The New York City schools, where Hollingworth had worked, were in the vanguard for school psychology. They established a certification program that required practitioners to have a master’s degree in psychology, at least one year of experience in the schools, and pass an examination created by the city. Such actions stimulated the growth of training programs for school psychologists, first at New York University in 1929, and then at Teachers College of Columbia University the following year (Fagan, 1986).
In 1935, New York was the first state to offer certification for school psychologists, followed by Pennsylvania (Baker & Benjamin, 2014).
The first book on the topic of school psychology was written by Gertrude Hildreth, Psychological Services for School Problems (1930), and other books soon followed.
By the end of the 1930s, the books, training programs, and recognition of the profession by certification, indicated that school psychology had come of age as a separate identity within the field of applied psychology.
As discussed earlier, intelligence testing had been the defining task of the clinical psychologists in their early years, but as the tools and responsibilities of that group expanded, such intellectual assessment shifted primarily to the work of school psychologists.
All areas of psychological testing (e.g., personality, ability, and achievement) have been challenged in terms of their validity; no tests have been attacked more often than intelligence tests.
The principal reason for such attacks is that the stakes are so high in terms of the consequences of such assessment. It means, for example, that a child may or may not gain admission into selective programs. Intelligence tests have been challenged on a number of grounds, including the scope of the tests in measuring what contemporary psychologists see as only one kind of intelligence.
The greatest criticisms of these tests have been claims of cultural bias. That is, the fact that some ethnicities score lower on these tests is seen as a result of the inherent cultural bias of the tests, a fact generally acknowledged by many psychologists since the 1930s.
A major voice on this issue in America in the 1930s was George I. Sanchez (1906–1972), the first Latino to earn a doctorate in educational psychology. His research showed the misuse of intelligence tests for placements of Mexican-American children, based on differences in language and culture (Sanchez, 1934).
Sanchez was a tireless advocate for the elimination of barriers to education for Latino students, particularly the over-reliance of mental tests that were demonstrably prejudicial. A more in-depth discussion of this issue appears in the next chapter.
Although there were plenty of master’s degree training programs, by 1953, there were only three doctoral programs in school psychology, a fact that worried school psychologists within the APA. The number of these doctoral programs grew slowly, and by 1971, APA extended its accreditation program to school psychology.
Today, school psychology continues to be a blend of master’s-level and doctoral-level personnel in the schools. Most of the former belong to a professional organization called the National Association of School Psychologists (NASP), founded in 1969. Many of those with doctorates in school psychology not only belong to NASP, but also hold membership in Division 16 of the APA, its division on school psychology. There are turf battles between the two, but they have cooperated on most important issues.
Today in the United States, there are more than 200 institutions with training programs in school psychology and perhaps as many as 25,000 school psychologists (Baker & Benjamin, 2014).

Counseling Psychology

Counseling psychology emerged later than the other three specialty areas discussed to this point.
Its roots are not so easily identified, drawing from both the vocational guidance movement and the personnel work of industrial psychology.
Counseling psychology has always had something of a prolonged identity crisis.
When the counseling psychology division (Division 17) was first established in APA in 1945, its initial name was the Division of Personnel and Guidance Psychologists.
Over time, both of these functions have diminished, especially the personnel work, and counseling psychology has moved closer in practice to the role of clinical psychology.
Counseling psychologists existed in university counseling centers as early as the 1920s where they used the intellectual and personality assessments of the time to aid students, especially in the area of what had come to be called career counseling.
They also developed many of those tests including tests that measured student interests and abilities, principally for vocational purposes. Counseling centers were established at many American colleges in the years shortly after the end of WWII (see McCarthy, 2014), and today, they exist at virtually every college and university. Services offered at these centers have expanded considerably and now include psychotherapy, alcohol and drug counseling, test anxiety counseling, learning skills programs, stress management programs, and crisis intervention (suicide prevention).
A major impetus for the transformation of counseling psychology away from its vocational counseling roots and toward a primary role of mental health counseling was the psychiatric realities of WWII. Mental health problems were plaguing the military: 17% of the new recruits were found to have psychiatric illnesses, most of the military discharges were due to psychiatric reasons, and psychiatric cases occupied over half of the beds in the VA hospitals. Such a high percentage of problems in the recruits alerted the government to the incidence of mental health problems in the general population. The outcome was passage of the National Mental Health Act of 1946 that established the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and poured millions of dollars into research and training programs, including programs for clinical, school, and counseling psychologists (Pickren & Schneider, 2005).
Several counseling psychologists were involved in the Boulder Conference on clinical training, and the report of that conference addressed the hope that counseling and clinical psychologists might see an “eventual amalgamation” of their fields (Raimy, 1950, p. 113). Although there was no amalgamation, both fields drew closer together in that they eventually defined their specialties so that they treated all disorders in all kinds of clients in all kinds of settings. Although there were philosophical differences in training and in the approach of the field to the nature of intervention, in an effort to claim as much territory as possible, narrower definitions would not be the order of the day.
Conferences were organized at the University of Michigan in 1949–1950 and at Northwestern University in 1951 to define the field of counseling psychology and determine an agreed-upon program of doctoral training. The Northwestern Conference defined the goal of the counseling psychologist as follows:
… fostering the psychological development of the individual. This included all people on the adjustment continuum from those who function at tolerable levels of adequacy to those suffering from more severe psychological disturbances. Counseling psychologists will spend the bulk of their time with individuals within the normal range, but their training should qualify them to work in some degree with individuals at any level of psychological adjustment. American Psychological Association. Division of Counseling and Guidance, 1952, p. 181
Guidelines were also set in place for a suggested curriculum. As a result, the APA began accrediting counseling programs
in 1952 and the VA created a job classification for them as well, primarily as vocational counselors.
Because of the G.I. Bill, many veterans could afford a college education that would have been beyond their means without such government support. Counseling psychologists were supposed to help with those decisions. In addition, there were adjustment problems created by the combat service, and they dealt with those as well (Baker & Benjamin, 2014). The identity crisis continued for counseling psychologists in the 1960s, as evidenced by at least two committees appointed by Division 17 to define counseling as separate from clinical. The first committee, composed of three leaders in the counseling psychology field, recommended that the field dissolve into clinical psychology. Its report was rejected and a second committee was appointed to produce a recommendation more palatable to the Division’s leaders. The result was a reaffirmation of the Northwestern Conference language that counseling psychologists would function principally as mental health service providers for a range of settings, clients, and disorders. Students today who are trying to make a decision about applying to graduate school in one or the other often remain confused.
Like clinical psychologists, counseling psychologists developed psychotherapy skills as part of their treatment practices. They were especially influenced by the nondirective counseling program of Carl Rogers (1902–1987), first described in his 1942 book, Counseling and Psychotherapy.
At first, it seemed like such a radical approach to the counseling community. Where was the counseling? There were no tests and no advice. However, the method gained credibility as therapists learned the active listening skills that allowed the therapist to reflect content and emotion, helping the client reach change through self-exploration and understanding (Barrett-Lennard, 2012). Counseling psychologists adopted other therapeutic styles as well, including psychodynamic, cognitive, and behavioral therapies. Rogers’ ideas, part of the humanistic therapies, have continued to hold a prominent position of influence.

The Modern Profession

The Vail Conference in 1973 offered an alternative training model to the Boulder model, emphasizing the practitioner side of the scientist–practitioner training and recommending a new degree, the Doctor of Psychology (PsyD).
This recognized an alternative training model already in place in California, marking the start of the professional schools movement.
That movement began in 1969 when Nicholas Cummings (1924–) founded the two campuses (San Francisco and Los Angeles) of the California School of Professional Psychology (CSPP), a school that was independent of any university and focused solely on the training of psychological practitioners. In less than a decade, there were 20 professional schools, some associated with universities and some free-standing such as CSPP. In order to facilitate the growth of these schools and to enhance the quality of professional training, Cummings also founded the National Council of Schools of Professional Psychology (NCSPP).
Today, there are approximately 85 professional schools that hold membership in NCSPP, many of which offer the PsyD degree. They graduate about twice as many psychologists each year as do the university-based programs in clinical and counseling psychology (Thomas, Cummings, & O’Donahue, 2002).
This chapter has focused on the four professional specialties that are the oldest and the largest of psychological specialties. Three of them could be considered health-care specialties (clinical, counseling, and school), although some psychologists use that
label only for the first two. Those two are undergoing a significant transformation at present in the nature of their practice. Managed care, a system of cost containment instituted by insurance companies that reimburse psychologists for their work, has greatly restricted the number of therapy sessions for which financial reimbursement can be obtained. That has caused a great deal of concern among these therapists who worry that the new brief therapies will not provide what the patient needs. Because of cost issues, many states and provinces have established licensure for several master’s-level practitioner groups (such as Mental Health Counselor or Marriage and Family Therapist) that usually provide psychotherapy at a lower cost.
Industrial–organizational psychologists have not been affected by these changes and continue to enjoy a field of stability and opportunity, although their turf has been invaded in recent years by clinical and counseling psychologists who offer executive coaching to corporate executives and managers (see Kilburg, 2006).
Of course, there are new professional specialties evolving all the time as well as some old ones that we have not treated in this chapter, such as forensic psychology, that was begun by Hugo Münsterberg whose work in that area was discussed in Chapter 6. Although psychologists have investigated performance in sports since the late nineteenth century (see Green & Benjamin, 2009), sport psychology is a new field in which psychologists work with individual athletes or teams, seeking to improve athletic performance. It is no surprise that psychological factors are extremely important in sport. In professional sports, where the competition is at such a high level and the economic stakes are so great, athletes will often use whatever edge they can get. Many psychologists have built successful careers in this new field, trying to give their clients that edge (Hays, 1995; LeUnes, 2008).
The largest of the new professional specialties, and the fastest growing, is called health psychology, a field that has enormous promise for the twenty-first century. It will be discussed in the epilogue of this book.
At the beginning of this chapter, we told you about the constitution of the American Psychological Association and how its objective statement was modified in 1945—the first change in 50 years—to state that the Association would work “to advance psychology as a science [and] as a profession …” (Benjamin, 1997, p. 731). There was another important change in that statement, however, that hasn’t been mentioned. That change is the subject of the next chapter.
The 1920s in America were called the “Roaring Twenties,” “the Jazz Age,” and, by politicians, “the New Era.” The economy was soaring, industrial production was up 64% compared to 12% for the previous decade, automobiles were more affordable than ever, women had the right to vote, Babe Ruth was swatting home runs, Rudolph Valentino and Mary Pickford were starring on the big screen, and booze was still available in gin joints, speakeasies, and from moonshiners, despite the Eighteenth Amendment (Dumenil, 2001). There was a public euphoria that manifested itself in many ways. One of those was a greater-than-ever clamoring for psychological services. The public seemed convinced that psychology held the keys to prosperity and happiness. Magazine articles and newspaper columns touted the services offered by the “new” psychologists. People were told that they shouldn’t choose a marriage partner, raise their children, or choose a career without the help of a psychologist. Psychology clubs were formed in most metropolitan areas where people could gather to hear a speaker and discuss the latest notions of popular psychology, self-help books with titles such as “Calm Your Nerves” or “How to Be Happy” became