Читать книгу Ethics in Psychotherapy and Counseling - Kenneth S. Pope - Страница 36

Founded in 1892 and incorporated in 1925, the APA first formed the Committee on Scientific and Professional Ethics in 1938. As complaints were brought to its attention, this committee improvised solutions on a private, informal basis. There was no formal or explicit set of ethical standards, and the committee’s work was done on the basis of consensus and persuasion.

A year later, the committee was charged with determining whether the organization needed a formal ethics code. In 1947, it decided that a formal code was necessary, stating “The present unwritten code is tenuous, elusive, and unsatisfactory” (“A Little Recent History,” 1952, p. 425). The board of directors established the Committee on Ethical Standards for Psychology to determine what methods to use in drafting the code. Chaired by Edward Tolman, the committee members were John Flanagan, Edwin Ghiselli, Nicholas Hobbs, Helen Sargent, and Lloyd Yepsen (Hobbs, 1948).

Some members strongly opposed creating formal ethical standards, and many of their arguments appeared in the American Psychologist. Calvin Hall (1952), for example, wrote that any code, no matter how well formulated,

plays into the hands of crooks …. The crooked operator reads the code to see how much he can get away with, and since any code is bound to be filled with ambiguities and omissions, he can rationalize his unethical conduct by pointing to the code and saying, “See, it doesn’t tell me I can’t do this,” or “I can interpret this to mean what I want it to mean” (p. 430).

Hall endorsed accountability, but he believed that it could be enforced without an elaborate code. He recommended that the application form for APA membership contain this statement:

As a psychologist, I agree to conduct myself professionally according to the common rules of decency, with the understanding that if a jury of my peers decides that I have violated these rules, I may be expelled from the association (p. 430–431).

Hall placed most of the responsibility on graduate schools. He recommended that “graduate departments of psychology, who have the power to decide who shall become psychologists, should exercise this power in such a manner as to preclude the necessity for a code of ethics” (p. 431).

The APA Committee on Ethical Standards (APA Committee) determined that because empirical research was a primary method of psychology, the code itself should be based on such research and should draw on the experience of APA members. As Hobbs (1948, p. 84) wrote, the method would produce “a code of ethics truly indigenous to psychology, a code that could be lived.”

The board of directors accepted this recommendation, and a new committee was appointed to conduct the research and draft the code. Chaired by Nicholas Hobbs, the new committee members were Stuart Cook, Harold Edgerton, Leonard Ferguson, Morris Krugman, Helen Sargent, Donald Super, and Lloyd Yepsen (APA Committee, 1949).

In 1948, all 7,500 members of the APA were sent a letter asking each member “to share his [their] experiences in solving ethical problems by describing the specific circumstances in which someone made a decision that was ethically critical” (APA Committee, 1949, p. 17). The committee received reports of over 1,000 critical incidents. During the next years, the incidents, with their accompanying comments, were carefully analyzed, categorized, and developed into a draft code.