Medicine and psychology are constrained to collaborate with one another in their common human service enterprise, but are methodologically separated by psychology's loquacity, its dependence on words, and the silence of the medical gaze, its wordlessness. If psychology is co-opted by the politically more powerful medical profession, it cannot attain its full human welfare potential. Its professional development is stunted, it is subordinated to psychiatry in mental health settings, and prevented from communicating effectively with its clients by the imposition of information giving constraints appropriate to medicine but alien to psychology. In this paper the author argues that in South Africa there cannot be a liberatory psychology until there is an autonomous psychology, governed by a statutorily independent licensing board.
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