Missing Persons

75

The letter that I’d mailed the day before I met with Bill Miller?

The head of the Ethics Committee of the Colorado Psychological Association didn’t know exactly what to do with it.

Psychologists don’t usually turn themselves in for ethical violations.

But I did; I turned myself in for multiple violations of the ethical code of the American Psychological Association.

There’s a psychological phenomenon, an ego defense if you will, called undoing, or sometimes, doing-undoing. A husband sends flowers to his wife the day after he flirts shamelessly with his secretary. A mother makes a special dessert for her daughter after she sentences the kid to death row for not putting the cap back on a tube of toothpaste. It’s unconscious psychological misdirection-the substitution of an act that is acceptable to the ego for something that was not. In the world of psychological defenses, it’s the great cosmic chalkboard eraser.

Turning myself in for unethical conduct was my own twisted version of doing-undoing.

What I’d prepared and submitted to the ethics board was a detailed account of my multiple professional transgressions in the clinical care of both Bill Miller and Bob Brandt. Although I had to withhold plenty of specifics-including my patients’ names-I put in sufficient evidence of misjudgment to make my myriad ethical lapses crystal clear to my colleagues.

I’d also sought written permission from both Bob and Bill to release their names to the ethics investigators, but both, not surprisingly, chose anonymity and declined to participate in the inquiry. Neither was eager to prolong public scrutiny of their behavior. Without the cooperation of the patients involved the board had little to go on other than my self-damning appraisal of my own professional conduct.

The head of the board phoned and asked me, mildly exasperated, what I thought they should do with me.

I suggested a sanction: a full year’s monitored supervision of my practice by a senior, respected psychologist.

The board greedily concurred, content to have the matter behind them.

I felt a little better, but not much. As an ego balm, doing-undoing is a notoriously ineffective palliative. And when you know you’re doing it-and employ it without the insulation of unconscious motivation-as I was, undoing amounts to little more than a half-hearted mea culpa.