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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.
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California
Institute for Human Science
701 Garden View Ct.
Encinitas, CA 92024
760-634-1771
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2003 California Institute for Human Science. All rights
reserved.
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