I am thrilled to receive the 1995 Ezra Saul Psychological Service Award, and deeply honored to join the illustrious group of previous award recipients.

     I am sure that most of you have heard the ancient Chinese curse, "May you live in interesting times." And many of you also are aware that we are so cursed, as to live in the most interesting of times in the history of psychology.

     Psychology, just over 100 years old, has grown and diversified beyond the wildest dreams of its early pioneers, and has produced research-based applications for nearly every aspect of human endeavor. From health care to education, religion to the arts, business and industry to law, and from sports to the military and on to engineering, it is hard to find an area of human activity where psychology doesn't have relevance.

     However, our spectacular growth and diversification has spawned problems which threaten our future as a unified discipline, to the point that we have growing rifts between those whose calling is more academic-scientific and those who practice the arts of psychology. And even among practitioners, as the industrialization of health care has conducted its inexorable march, our ranks have polarized between those who seek to work within managed care and those who seek its end.

     To survive these threats and continue to grow and thrive it is important to reaffirm the values that undergird and animate the science and practice of psychology in all of its forms.

     In this spirit, and on this occasion, I would like to share with you some of the things that I most value about psychology. (Parenthetically, I wanted to point out that I have a list of eleven values, so as to avoid any appearance of similarity with David Letterman's "Top Ten" lists).

1. I value the tremendous creativity within the profession that enables us to respond to an expanding set of human needs, developing evermore areas of science, application, and service. When I joined the APA in 1975, there were 33 divisions, each representing a discrete substantive area of scholarship and practice. In the past 20 years, the number of divisions has grown 50% to 49.
2. I greatly admire the disposition of psychologists to question authority, and to put things to the test. Just to mention one example, consider certain psychotherapy-innovators, such as Boyd-Franklin and Szapocznik, who, recognizing the limits of traditional methods for ethno-cultural minorities, developed new techniques designed with sensitivity to these populations.
3. I value the activist orientation of psychologists, who choose not to wait in the ivory towers for the public to clamor over their discoveries, but instead use sophisticated political skills to insure the public's access to psychological services and public support for psychological science.
4. I cherish the high ethical standards of the profession, which help us to maintain a level of conduct that unequivocally and steadfastly puts the interests of the client or patient uppermost in all of our professional activities.
5. I truly appreciate the responsiveness of the profession to people in need, whether they be victims of disasters or minorities who are chronically underserved and discriminated against, such as ethno-cultural minorities, gays and lesbians, women, the poor, and persons with disabilities.
6. While much of psychological service is a very subtle art, depending on one's finely honed intuitive responses, I value the fact that it is also based on science, though probably not yet to the degree that some would like.
7. I greatly value the fact that the person of the psychologist is an essential part of the service.
8. I value the abundant opportunities that being a psychologist provides for achieving higher degrees of personal maturity.
9. I deeply appreciate the opportunities that being a psychologist who specializes in the new psychology of men has provided me to learn about the effects of male role socialization and to overcome some of my own personal limitations as a man. As I have said in the past, "My name is Ron, and I am in recovery from masculinity."
10. As a psychotherapist, I truly appreciate the privilege of being invited into people's lives and to witness their at times heroic struggles to face hard realities and find solutions to impossible dilemmas.
11. And most of all I value the relationships -- friendships, colleagueships, and professional relationships -- that I have had the privilege and pleasure of having over the course of my career.

     In closing let me say that we psychologists have a special responsibility in these "interesting times" to insure the survival of psychology as a science and as a profession, so that future generations can experience the benefits of our calling. For, to paraphrase former MPA President Norine Johnson (who got me hooked on MPA 17 years ago), "Life is truly better with psychology."

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