The American Psychological Association could lose its power to accredit higher education programs for good reason: its focus on leftist political activism, two scholars wrote recently at the Wall Street Journal.
In their column, evolutionary biologist Colin Wright at the Manhattan Institute and clinical psychologist Andrew Hartz, founder of the Open Therapy Institute, responded to a September vote by a federal advisory board to recommend the APA’s accreditation status be suspended.
The U.S. Department of Education board based the recommendation on testimony about a “pervasive culture of antisemitism.” But Wright and Hartz said the department should consider the APA’s progressive politics, too.
“Patients shouldn’t have to worry about whether their treatment is evidence-based or shaped by a political agenda,” they wrote:
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.
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.
Our view isn’t that psychologists should avoid discussions of racism, sexuality, politics or social institutions. But serious problems arise when professional organizations become so ideologically homogeneous that they are unable to separate their activist goals from their scientific mission.
Read their full column at the Wall Street Journal.
