ABSTRACT
Psychology has historically struggled to develop and maintain an effective code of ethics while in the grip of the ideology of self-contained individualism, the methodology of scientism, and the vicissitudes of the marketplace. This has from psychology’s early years created a conflict between the good and the expedient. The Hoffman Report on torture abundantly illustrated APA’s post 9/11 difficulties in preventing some of its members—and the association as a whole—from being implicated in the Department of Defense’s practices of torture. It is argued that this failure was caused in part by the discipline’s inability to situate its theories and activities historically and interpret them politically and morally. A vicious circle is detected in psychology’s doctoral curricula that leads from scientism to instrumentalism, proceduralism, and technicism, to a thin and unpersuasive code of ethics, which leads back to scientism again, and the circle grinds on. By using a hermeneutic perspective it is suggested that an alternative to curricular deficiencies would be the meaningful introduction of training in cultural history, hermeneutic moral discourse, and relational theory, in addition to its regular scientific curricula. No branch of psychology is better able to aid in that task than theory and psychology.
