Academic and Professional Training
If this wasn’t bad enough, the doctoral programs in most universities were geared toward the preparation of researchers and teachers—not clinicians. As I have already noted, I was ill-prepared to provide clinical services when graduating with a Ph.D. degree from a major US university. Fortunately, I soon decided to follow the traditional academic track and became a young assistant professor of psychology. However, after several years, I left the academy and eventually became primarily an organizational psychologist.
It seems that my doctoral program also did not adequately prepare me for this work. I knew nothing about consulting contracts or stages in the consulting process. As an Assistant Professor of Psychology, I knew something about change theory and such psychological concepts as resistance, motivation, and self-fulfilling prophecy. My training as an organizational consultant came from my enrollment in an organization development program run by NTL (the National Training Laboratories). I suspect that many clinical psychologists of the time also looked for independent training programs that taught them about therapeutic strategies, as well as how to contract with a client/patient. By the 1960s, it became clear to those serving in a leadership role at the American Psychological Association (APA), as well as many leading academic and clinical psychologists, that something had to change. This concern came to a head in the 1970s, when consensus emerged from several notable APA conferences that a new practitioner-oriented degree was needed. The Doctor of Psychology (Psy.D.) was born.
The Psy.D. Degree
Under considerable pressure from APA and regional agencies that authorize institutions to grant degrees, those graduate institutions that wished to prepare psychologists for professional services were encouraged (and often required) to offer the Psy.D. rather than the Ph.D. This new professional degree became the mandated doctorate awarded by most independent graduate schools of psychology (which had been created and had grown exponentially during the 1970s). Universities retained the authority to grant the Ph.D. degree, while some of them branched out and decided to offer a clinically oriented Psy.D. program.
These changes in degree offerings were not of much help to those wishing to become organizational consultants or provide psychological testing. There were a few graduate schools that conducted a Psy.D. (or Ph.D.) program focusing on organizational psychology. But not many. Programs that specialize in psychological assessment were even fewer in number. The medical field in the United States did indeed cast a shadow over the field of professional psychology. Virtually all attention was directed toward an area of psychological practice that is adjunctive (and often subordinate) to medicine: clinical psychology and related mental health issues.
