Anthropology Free-For-All Politics Psychodrama

Visiting Bedlam

October 22, 2026 by David 53 Comments

Colin Wright and Andrew Hartz eavesdrop on a gathering of the American Psychological Association:

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 programme 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.

Always a sign of mental wellbeing.

Another featured Sophie Lewis, author of “Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation,” speaking on “family abolition.”

Ms Lewis’ tugging on the intersectional crack pipe has been touched on before.

As when telling us, quite emphatically and with occasional chuckling, that abortion, via drugs or dismemberment, is a corrective killing, a righteous “unmaking.” A means of “going on strike against gestational work.” Says she, “We need to move away from… arguments around when human life begins.”

Which sounds terribly convenient for those with sociopathic leanings.

By our count, about 70 of the conference’s 90 panels had a clear ideological agenda, and every overtly political speaker came from the left. There were no comparable conservative, libertarian, centrist or heterodox perspectives.

Today’s words, since you ask, are ideological capture.

Therapists have outsize authority over vulnerable people. Patients shouldn’t have to worry about whether their treatment is evidence-based or shaped by a political agenda.

Or whether their licensed therapist is himself unhinged.

Division 39 has failed this test. Its promotion of next year’s meeting solicits work on capitalism, imperialism, white supremacy, critical race theory and genocide. Other topics include “proximity to whiteness,” “colonial domination,” and “carcerality.” Most concepts essential to psychotherapy and psychoanalytic therapies are missing.

Well, I suppose the ostensible job, listening to the outpourings of unhappy people, is much less exciting than pretending that you’re radical and heroic, the star of the drama. Say, by denouncing the imprisonment of carjackers and gang bangers as “systemic racist inequality,” and deploying the word “white” as a go-to pejorative. That kind of thing.

Hence the APA electing as its next president Candice Hargons, who uses the term “womxn” entirely without embarrassment and rails against “systemic intersectional oppression.” And whose list of things to be righteously dismantled and entirely done away with includes attempts at verification and objectivity. Such details presumably being obstacles to her own monomaniacal politics.

Update, via the comments:

EmC quotes this,

I suppose the ostensible job, listening to the outpourings of unhappy people, is much less exciting than pretending that you’re radical and heroic, the star of the drama.

And adds,

Aren’t therapists supposed to know about narcissism?

Well, you’d think that supposed experts in psychology might show some interest in the extent to which politicisation of this kind – making everything a vehicle for leftist posturing – is a self-flattering, self-exalting exercise. One in which the self-styled activist is conveniently foregrounded as some heroically radical being. A cosmically important creature.

But no. Seems not.

Consider this an open thread.




Subscribestar
Share: