Klein: "Our field's intolerance of childhood sexuality is a historic error that says far more about individual practitioners and our profession than about children..." An historic error? Now that's going in my dictionary as a terrific illustration of the definition of "mealy mouthed." Today's alleged "mental-health" practitioners, by and large, have had extremely inadequate education in every aspect of their optimistically named "professional training." As a result, when one speaks of "historical errors" made by these "professionals," one is speaking so tactfully that one's restraint is made conspicuous. This "historical error" Dr. Klien mentions is just one among many, many similar errors. These errors derive from several genererations of ostensible "mental health professionals" who were never adequately trained for their work and who then have no choice but to become, in effect, highly paid promoters of some of the worst aspects of the status quo. It's hard to fault the practitioners themselves when they barely know they have not been adequately trained and would find it hard to tolerate the realization that their expensive and time-consuming "training" was so inadquate. So the "historical fault" for the "historical error" is due to many better trained professionals not objecting to generations of supposed "training programs" selling a lot of self-aggrandizement in place of a rigorous education in scientific psychology and sexuality. There are probably no more than about two dozen graduate programs in the United States that teach their students in the "mental health" fields enough fundamentals so that students would be able even to recognize, much less to understand, when something is derived from a scientific outlook, let alone from scientific evidence. Moreover, it is also not uncommon these days to even find many graduates of today's training programs presenting us with facile but patently fallacious and glib "arguments" explaining why they should not even aspire to be scientists nor adopt a scientific outlook. Or they insist that science is mere a variation of the ostensible tyranny of patriarchy. Or they claim that they are in the spirituality business and, so, need not concern themselves very much with scientific approaches. It turns out that anything BUT careful and rigorous reasoning and evidence is now consistently defended as not only good enough for pratcitioners but even is defended as better than science itself! The "historical error" turns out to be a comprehensive, entrenched, narcissistic, and dsiturbing professional malaise that could not exist without the persistent well paid promoters of this malaise in so many mental-health "training programs."
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