California Institute for Human Science: Psychology Program

Academic Process	Masters Program
Current Course Schedule	Doctorate Program

Expressive Arts Therapy

Psychology Program

M.A. General Psychology: The Master's program is first of all dedicated to examining the philosophical and methodological foundations of psychology as a knowledge discipline. The perennial tension between psychology conceived as a realm of measurement, quantification, experimentation and statistical analysis vs. psychology conceived as a realm of meaning, discourse, observation, and interpretation is addressed in detail. The goal is to expose rather than to mask the philosophical and methodological issues which psychology has struggled with for more than a century.

Although the M.A. program is a stand-alone program, it is nonetheless designed to provide a bridge into the clinical psychology Ph.D. program by enabling interested students to obtain relevant (and necessary) clinical coursework and experience. Twenty units of clinical coursework, including two four-unit Practicum courses, allows M.A. students to become prepared for advanced clinical coursework in the Ph.D. program. The course in Foundational Skills (PSY 621), in particular, addresses the challenges involved in astute listening, comprehension, and responding to the client's discourse and accompanying behavior in a manner that fosters therapeutic benefit rather than ineffectualness or worse. The point is strongly made that everyday-life social experience in dialogue and interaction does much to foster habitual zones of insensitivity which must be methodically sensitized in clinical training.

The remaining elective coursework allows students to select substantive (non-clinical) areas of interest for study. In most of these elective course offerings the student can readily discern how topic-areas in psychology interpenetrate with other areas in the social and life sciences (sociology, biology, medicine, political economics, and so on). The important message conveyed by such inevitable overlapping with other disciplines is that the individual psyche never develops or functions in a social vacuum and that the psyche is always merged with the soma (body).

Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology: The doctoral program in clinical psychology is based upon the scientist-practitioner model. In other words, clinical psychology is conceived both as a knowledge-area which can be advanced by appropriate empirical study and as a practical realm of treatment, skill, know-how, information, etc. that can be acquired through education. With regard to the possibility of advancing clinical knowledge through empirical study, the Institute's position is that qualitative research methods have traditionally been underemphasized in scientist-practitioner programs and in clinical research in general, and for this reason PSY 703 (Qualitative Research Methods) has been incorporated into the core curriculum in order to enable students to think in terms of qualitative research projects and methods for the dissertation requirement. In the realm of clinical psychology, it cannot be overlooked that advances in theory and practice primarily emerge from the writings of especially astute clinicians rather than from traditionally trained researchers. The notorious gap between clinical understanding and traditional methods for generating quantitative group data for statistical analysis is taken quite seriously at the Institute. For this reason, qualitative methodologies are presented as a real dissertation option for clinical research.

The problem-area and task for clinicians is to address the following related set of questions: what is the matter, how and why did it develop, what can be done to remedy or ameliorate what is wrong?? The core curriculum is primarily devoted to offering courses which address these key clinical questions. It is worth pointing out that the core curriculum does not overlook a range of clinical issues which commonly receive short shrift in clinical psychology programs: how to identify indications of somatic pathology which may easily be misconstrued as psychopathology, clinical practices and social policies which may interfere with treatment benefit or even cause harm iatrogenics, critical examination of drug treatment research and findings, and other issues.

The Institute receives its approval as an educational entity from the State of California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education (BPPVE). The practical importance of BPPVE approval is that graduates of the Institute's Ph.D. program in clinical psychology are eligible to take the Clinical Psychology licensing exam in California.