Last week the Wall Street Journal published an opinion piece about what has been happening at the American Psychological Association. The APA is now in danger of losing its accreditation authority over antisemitism.
Last month, a bipartisan advisory board to the Education Department voted 7-4 to recommend suspending recognition of the APA’s Commission on Accreditation. The vote followed testimony alleging the group tolerated a “pervasive culture of antisemitism” in psychology programs and professional settings.
But antisemitism, as the authors pointed out, is not the group's only problem.
Consider APA Division 39, which is the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology. Its flagship conference in New York this year drew nearly 800 attendees and included 90 panels over four days. One would expect the program to focus on patients, therapy and psychological treatment. Instead, it sounded like a graduate seminar in radical politics.
The conference opened with workshops on “Cisteria! A Psychoanalysis Against Anti-Trans Panics,” “opposing institutional oppression,” and “loosening/abolishing gender assessment guidelines.” Later sessions covered “Doctoral Student Narratives of Stress, Resilience and Identity in the Trump Era,” “Fragments of a Queer Anarchist Psychoanalysis,” and “ ‘White’ Analysis: Race, Institution, and the Limits of Psychoanalysis.”
One session, “Feel the F— Fantasy (Redux): Drag, Desire, and Queer Theory at WERK in Psychoanalysis,” concluded with a drag performance. Another featured Sophie Lewis, author of “Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation,” speaking on “family abolition.” A session on youth suicide drew on “queer and crip theorizations” and asked therapists to connect suicide prevention with “criminalization and institutionalization.” Some panels were eligible for APA continuing-education credit.
The authors estimate that 70 percent of the panels (there were 90 in all) were focused on left-wing ideology. And in response to the threat to its accreditation authority, the APA selected a new president named Candice Hargons.
Ms. Hargons said: “Our common enemy is systemic intersectional oppression.” Her priorities include “leading with liberation,” and she says scientific integrity requires rejecting “the positivist paradigm’s assertion of objectivity.” Ms. Hargons promises to help build a “liberated future” after “we dismantle oppressive systems.”
This week the Journal received a letter from an APA member saying the opinion piece had been spot on.
In recent years the APA has moved away from the Boulder model and toward a pastiche of political activism leavened with woke balderdash. This in turn has opened the door to all sorts of prejudices, chiefly antisemitism as the discipline now follows the basest trends in our society.
It will take strong measures to affect the course of this organization, and the possible removal of APA’s accreditation privileges may be a good start. In the interim, anyone seeking assistance from a psychologist trained in recent years should ask probing questions about his training and ideology. Getting competent psychological help is too important to be left to the ideologues now running the APA and their students brainwashed by them.
Letting the ideologues run the discipline into the ground seems like an especially bad idea at the moment when there is a real threat AI could take over some of this work.
Americans facing financial pressure and uncertainty about the future increasingly use artificial intelligence (AI) for emotional support, according to a new American Psychological Association (APA) survey.
Among adults who use AI, 49% said they had conversed with it as a friend, while 47% had used it in a role comparable to a mental health professional. This included seeking a second opinion on a therapist's suggestions or practicing therapeutic exercises.
To be clear, I'm not saying AI is currently ready to replace real experts in this field, but looking at the descriptions above you do have to wonder what they are experts in at this point. Plus, AI is cheaper and doesn't try to shove all the woke jargon down your throat (or maybe just less of it). But in my experience, the woke never reverse course, they just keep demanding compliance with their views until someone says no. And then they try to destroy that person. It seems like an ideology not particularly compatible with being a therapist to me.