APsA, Racism, Antisemitism

The American Psychoanalytic Association Trips Over Its Two Left Feet

This is a personal and passionate cris-de-coeur against some unsavory developments within the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA), that venerable professional organization which long shepherded my colleagues and me through the corridors of history. Because fairness to my esteemed counterparts requires accuracy, I’ve got to start off with a lengthy quotation. Thank you, reader, for your kind indulgence.

Fireworks to follow.

An April 2025 article in Harper’s described the recent unrest within the American Psychoanalytic Association:

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/04/the-social-turn-psychoanalysis-maggie-doherty/

APsA posted a reply, which Harper’s conscientiously printed.

https://harpers.org/archive/2025/06/letters-june-2025/

The following excerpt from the Harper’s article is about 20% of its total length:

The Nazi Party came to power in the Thirties, threatening psychoanalysts—many of them Jews, Communists, or both—with annihilation. Freud died on September 23, 1939, twenty-two days after World War II began, and didn’t live to see the war’s devastating effect on the psychoanalytic community. Many European analysts were imprisoned and killed. Others fled to the United States; the influx of émigré analysts was one among several reasons that psychoanalysis took off in America after 1945. But anticommunist sentiment had forced some analysts to suppress their leftist politics. González described this moment of collective repression to me as one of several traumatic moments in the history of the discipline that must be worked through. “What’s needed now is the psychoanalysis of psychoanalysis.”

“Psychoanalysis can go burn!” said Sameer Khan. “We’re here to serve patients.” The future of the profession writ large was not Khan’s concern.

Khan, a psychiatrist in New York, is a friendly man in his forties with long, dark hair and an easy smile. We met in between sessions on the penultimate day of the conference. By that point, change was in the air. In panels and plenary addresses, speakers encouraged the audience to try out new clinical approaches, and to resist change at their own risk. During one event, Kerry Sulkowicz, APsA’s president, a slick figure who works in leadership and organizational consulting, took the stage to announce that a ballot measure loosening APsA’s membership requirements had passed with 81 percent of the vote. Before, it had been the case that only M.D.s, Ph.D.s, and social workers who had completed psychoanalytic training at an APsA institute could become full members of the association—but now others (therapists, academics, and researchers) who were trained in psychotherapy at APsA or equivalent institutes could join the association with full membership. The change “helps ensure our future,” he said, to raucous applause.

Khan was skeptical of all this celebration. “Is change nice?” he asked, rhetorically. Psychoanalysts, he told me, tend to romanticize change, fear, and uncertainty, as if they were always productive. He seemed to doubt the social turn—not because he objected to training more analysts of color, or to adjusting treatment plans to better reflect the patient population, but because he didn’t think it would change the profession very much. (Another skeptic declined to speak with me on the record, fearing being branded as conservative or racist. Some others I contacted refused to speak altogether.) For all this talk of the social, there wasn’t as much talk about how to make psychoanalysis more affordable to patients. APsA represented people who often earned six figures a year. “It’s like, yes, we want to do good, but also, how much do these pants cost?” he asked, gesturing to the pair he was wearing. (They cost three hundred dollars.)

“You’re supposed to get people to talk about things so that everything can be metabolized,” Khan said. But during many discussions, analysts of color were careful and controlled, as they had been in the discussion group on social and historical factors. They were inhibited. Such self-censorship was pragmatic: those in power would resist change if they felt themselves threatened. What we had witnessed at the meeting might be reform rather than revolution—or, worse, simply a self-congratulatory discussion of things that might never come to pass.

Not long after the New York meeting, the American psychoanalytic community erupted. During planning for the June meeting, several committee members proposed inviting Lara Sheehi—an assistant professor of clinical psychology at George Washington University known for her work on Palestine—to participate in a panel. Sheehi was being investigated by her own university (and would later be investigated by the U.S. Department of Education) after StandWithUs, a pro-Israel advocacy group, filed a complaint with the department’s Office for Civil Rights alleging that there had been anti-Semitic discrimination in her classroom. APsA’s executive committee, headed by Sulkowicz and president-elect Dan Prezant, forbade extending the invitation, claiming that organizers wouldn’t be able to “contain” reactions to an event with Sheehi. In response, the program committee ultimately refused to plan a June program entirely. The executive committee then disbanded the program committee. APsA’s email list promptly went nuts.

Discussion on the email list was vicious, with some posters supporting the executive committee’s decision and others supporting the program committee. People leveled accusations of racism, misogyny, and anti-Semitism at one another. APsA members on both sides claimed to feel “unsafe.” One member characterized those angry at the executive committee as “birds of prey” who were “willing to rip [APsA] apart.” Another member told me that it felt like everyone had to pick a side.

The weeks that followed were chaotic: it seemed the June meeting wouldn’t happen, then it was back on. (It did, in the end, take place as planned.) The program committee was gone for good—then, suddenly, reinstated. In a stunning reversal, the executive committee offered an apology to Sheehi, who had recently been cleared of wrongdoing by George Washington University, and, in late March, invited her to present at the June meeting after all. (She declined, and has since been cleared by the Department of Education’s investigation.) Less than two weeks after that, Sulkowicz, although a self-described proponent of the social turn, sent a letter to membership resigning from his position as president of APsA and pointing fingers at an “illiberal, extreme left” that had “asserted its exclusive occupancy of the moral high ground” and that aimed “to transform APsA from a professional organization into a primarily political activist organization.” He worried for the future of psychoanalysis: “Our tendency to turn against ourselves represents a social defense against psychoanalytic progress vis a vis the outside world, and may be our greatest risk.”

Well, I don’t know Dr. Khan, and I have no personal quarrel with him. But when I hear someone with that last name glibly announce that the profession we share (Sigmund Freud’s work, which the Nazis damned as “Jewish science”) “can go burn,” I don’t feel I am hearing a reliably enlightened discussion. It sure ain’t his fault that another psychoanalyst from a different generation, the defrocked, notoriously Jew-hating homophobe Masud Khan, had that same name. But if that were my last name, I think I might be a bit more careful about announcing that anyone or anything Jewish “can go burn.”

The Harper’s article isn’t bad, but it misses what for me is the main thrust of what happened in the period it recounts. Yes, earnest efforts to redress racial grievances of Black-identifying analysts and candidates eventuated in the Holmes Report. It did valuable work, and probably helped improve some aspects of some Black people’s experience in the psychoanalytic community. It certainly occasioned much self-examination in those who participated in its construction, and in its eventual readers. I was in the big meeting hall on the day narrated in the article, when the Report was released and its architects presented onstage.

In the minds of its critics, the Holmes Report unjustly scorned those who identify as white—not me—in some of the same ways as did Donald Moss’ notorious article “On Having Whiteness“ (JAPA, 2021 April, Vol. 69 No. 2: pp.355-371). That paper’s abstract runs thus:

Whiteness is a condition one first acquires and then one has-a malignant, parasitic-like condition to which “white” people have a particular susceptibility. The condition is foundational, generating characteristic ways of being in one’s body, in one’s mind, and in one’s world. Parasitic Whiteness renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse. These deformed appetites particularly target nonwhite peoples. Once established, these appetites are nearly impossible to eliminate. Effective treatment consists of a combination of psychic and social-historical interventions. Such interventions can reasonably aim only to reshape Whiteness’s infiltrated appetites--to reduce their intensity, redistribute their aims, and occasionally turn those aims toward the work of reparation. When remembered and represented, the ravages wreaked by the chronic condition can function either as warning (”never again”) or as temptation (”great again”). Memorialization alone, therefore, is no guarantee against regression. There is not yet a permanent cure.

Apart from its shocking eagerness to medicalize race, and that in quite hateful rhetoric, the trouble with this discourse is that it attacks its target while sealing off the exits from the condition it despises. If you want to change people’s consciousness and behavior, you give them an opportunity to move in the direction you want them to go. You do not nail them down permanently into the despicable category where you say they are, and then hurl degrading insults at them in perpetuity. Unless, of course, improving them or the world is not really the point, and your actual goal is sadomasochistic, ahistorical, moralistic grandstanding.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., it was explained to me many years ago at Brandeis University, “gave people who identified as Southern whites a way of remaining so which did not include the racism which they had inherited, and which he and his multi-ethnic movement deplored.” Like Ibram X Kendi, Donald Moss never invited his targets to be white in a different, better way, let alone suggest—as the great James Baldwin did—that they might simply stop being mythical “white people” altogether, and go back to being historical persons like everyone else, by becoming one or another kind of European-American: “So long as you insist upon being ‘White,’” Baldwin famously wrote, “I have no choice but to be Black.”

Once more with feeling, for the pull quote:

‘So long as you insist upon being White, I have no choice but to be Black.’ —James Baldwin

See the invitation to move in the direction Baldwin wants his audience to go? See how the ideal reader need not lose face in order to improve along Baldwinian lines? Donald Moss, by contrast, insists that you remain white, so he can pour venomous contempt on you and on himself. That is how moralistic virtue-theater works. And this man ran the Program Committee at APsA for years.

The Holmes Report says this:

The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsA) was started in 1911 by British psychoanalyst Ernest Jones and seven American physicians, all white men. Membership was limited to physicians and psychoanalysis was characterized as a medical treatment in order to gain public acceptance. As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, there was a large backlash in the United States against Jewish refugees and comparatively few were allowed to immigrate to this country. In this context, the analyst refugees fleeing Europe in the 1930s and 1940s were not always welcomed at American psychoanalytic institutes as they were perceived as heretical competition and many were nonphysicians (lay analysts) and/or were women. This led to splitting and schisms as psychoanalytic institutes struggled to accept the progressive ideas that came with diversity.

More importantly, it also says:

“The Commission study did not study the intersectional differences for white Jewish or white Christian participants” (p. 131).

Excuse me? Six million of my people were expropriated, raped, loaded onto cattle cars and tortured to death because they were racially not white, and you get to tell me I’m “white Jewish” when it serves your interests? And in the same sentence, where you admit you ignored my experience, you pair me with “white Christian” persons?

Some of my family was murdered by the Nazis and their European collaborators, but some of my family survived. We survived Europe. Our culture, our genetics, our history, is all from Israel. Jews are indigenous to Judea; Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. Half a million Arabs immigrated into the British Mandate of Palestine from 1933 to 1945, during the alliance between Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany and the Islamist Arab “Grand Mufti” of Jerusalem, Amin Husayni, who worked with the butchers in the SS.

The Holmes Report innocently states: “As the Nazis rose to power in Germany, there was a large backlash in the United States against Jewish refugees and comparatively few were allowed to immigrate to this country.” Comparatively few, huh? The United States, Britain, and Europe closed their doors to the Jews, and in the years directly leading up to the founding of the State of Israel, these millions of displaced refugees had nowhere else to go but back to their ancestral homeland. Zionism was not one option among others; it was the only option. If you oppose it—like so many of Lara Sheehi’s admirers, the psychoanalysts who vehemently deplored Israel for two years on APsA’s internal listserv after the October 7th Massacre of Israelis by Hamas and their Gazan supporters—if you oppose Zionism, you either wish the West had opened its doors to the Jews a century ago, or you wish we all had been killed then, not just 30% of us. Which is it? I can usually guess.

Prof. Haviv Rettig Gur on “The Great Misinterpretation: How Palestinians View Israel” 1/21/2024 The video doesn’t embed properly, so this snapshot is a link to it on YouTube.

Jews are indigenous to Judea. Genetics proves it. Archaeology proves it. Culture proves it. History proves it. Zionism is the only successful decolonization project in history.

Contrary to the endlessly-repeated lies of antisemites of both the left and the right, world conquest of any kind is totally alien to Jewish life. World conquest by bloody force is, by contrast, the proudly announced core mission of Arab-Islamic culture and scripture and history, with the Jews as the special target of their explicitly genocidal rage and hatred. Why? Because Jews were the first to refuse the Prophet’s message (peace be upon him). But that’s not the only reason.

The big reason, deeper than any other, is because Judaism is the main cultural source from which Islam was developed, and nobody wants to be reminded that they, or their culture, came from anybody or anything else, and therefore would not exist without that predecessor. Japan’s brutality to older Asian cultures in WWII fits this; Amerindian denial of the Berring Straits land-bridge hypothesis fits this; every claim to autochthony fits this. Even Genesis 2:23 fits: “She shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.” Of course that’s exactly backwards: all human beings come out of the bodies of women. Nobody is “taken out of man.” But some men need to deny that, ergo this myth about the rib.

It’s a defense we see again and again, the world over: the repression of an unpayable existential debt, through claims to supremacy that entail total entitlement and domination. And Christianity, of course, stands in roughly the same relation of unbearable cultural debt to Judaism. Big chunks of its theology were improvised for the purpose of repressing that debt and inverting it. And as for psychoanalysis, the “Jewish science”—the great Francois Roustang once summed-up Jacques Lacan’s great usefulness to France: “Come, let me de-Judaize psychoanalysis for you...”

Every single Islamic prophet was Jewish---except that last one, who decapitated Jewish men by the thousands, and sold their wives and children as slaves and sexual playthings. It’s all in the Holy Koran and the Hadith and the history books, even if you feel upset about that fact. Sure, there are the “verses of peace,” but these are generally ignored in favor of the “verses of the sword.”

If you want to call these remarks “Islamophobia,” remember that phobias by definition are irrational, unfounded fears. “Islamophobia” is a university-hatched word, a term of blissful ignorance, wielded by people privileged with such insular safety that they cannot dream of the magnitude of the violence done by Islam to Jews since 622 C.E., and the jihadis’ daily oaths to destroy us all. Islamophilia, this uncritical, Bambi-eyed reverence for a monocultural imperial project of global scale is, of course, the very opposite of multiculturalism, which was until recently the supreme value professed by the sort of Disneyland utopians who utilize the word “Islamophobia” and wear keffiyehs on both sides of the Starbuck’s counter.

Back to the Homes Report: “The Commission study did not study the intersectional differences for white Jewish or white Christian participants.” Whoever wrote this appalling sentence is apparently captive to the naive belief that Judaism is just another “Abrahamic religion,” like Christianity and Islam, two universalist faiths directly responsible for centuries of forced conversions and mass slaughter in explicit pursuit of world domination. But “world domination” is exactly what their worst antisemites accuse the Jews of pursuing, because the heart of bigotry is projection.

In projection, I disavow what I cannot tolerate in myself, and project it onto you, as if onto a screen, where I can safely attack it.

Projection is the heart of the current wave of antisemitism, as of every previous such wave from antiquity through the medieval, renaissance, modern, and contemporary eras. Every day, countless groups within the jihadi world openly vow to murder every last Jew on Earth, but the Jews—some 15.8 million people, amid 2 billion Muslims, and even-more-numerous Christians—are accused of genocide. Israel has achieved the lowest ratio of civilian to combatant deaths in the history of urban warfare, but the Jews are accused of genocide. Israel trucked-in over 1.5 million tons of food to the people who attacked it, but the Jews are accused of genocide.

See “Deconstructing the Genocide Blood Libel,” by Ari Rosenbaum.

For the Gaza War that Hamas started with the October 7th Massacre, Hamas’ entire strategy was, and is, to maximize Gazan civilian casualties, so as to turn the world against Israel. So, Israel’s strategy has been to keep those casualties as few as possible: with phone calls warning of incoming airstrikes, with leaflets specifying when to leave, with the massive operation of moving over a million people out of Rafah so the IDF could attack Hamas without mass civilian casualties, and with the endless stream of food convoys (food which Hamas stole and sold to the Gazans at huge markups). But the Jews are accused of genocide.

See “The Genocide Libel,” by Norman Goda.

That genocide libel is the accusation made by Jennifer Mullan, founder of “Decolonizing Therapy,” in her “Open Letter: End the Mental Health Field’s Complicity to [sic] Genocide,” which is a tissue of pro-Hamas, anti-Israel propaganda that puts Jewish lives at risk, while jeopardizing the livelihood and safety of myself and my Jewish colleagues in the field we share.

Here’s international lawyer Natasha Hausdorff in debate at the Oxford Union, refuting the genocide lie. But at the mention of her name, antizionists will do what they do: the moment they hear names they recognize as their opponents’—Natasha, Rawan Osman, Douglas Murray, Gad Saad, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Melanie Phillips, Einat Wilf, Mosab Hassan Yousef, Haviv Retig Gur, anybody who dares oppose the tsunami of lies and bigotry deluging Israel and the Jews today—they label them “right wing” or “propagandist,” and presto! There’s no further obligation to hear what any Zionists have to say. Well, listen:

Natasha Hausdorff at the Oxford Union, 28 November 2024.

This “genocide” lie is the same old blood-libel we heard from the Czarist Secret Police who forged the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and from the KGB, and the Nazis, and the KKK, and now, the crowd of respectable cosmopolitans who seem to think themselves supremely compassionate. Jews don’t count.

Palestinianism is an abysmally cynical exploitation of an Arab population with an identity invented by the Egyptian KGB asset Yassir Arafat in 1964. Its real motive is found in the Hadith that says “Every shrub and every tree will cry out: O Muslim! There is a Jew behind me! Come and kill him.” It is not about land, except that Islamists cannot tolerate a square inch of territory they colonized ever returning to the control of the indigenous people from whom they originally stole it. Arabs are indigenous to Arabia. Jews are indigenous to Judea.

• Either the “right of conquest” confers legitimacy to a territorial claim, or it does not.

• If it does, Israel won the six wars Arabs started against it since 1948, so the Jews own Israel.

• If it does not, then the 7th Century Arab Conquest of Israel is not legitimate, so the Jews own Israel.

Islamic colonial conquest destroyed myriad cultures and populations all over the world through murder, rape, forced conversion, and expulsion. Arab Islam was the main force responsible for over 1,300 years of the enslavement of Africans—between 10 million and 18 million people—and, indeed, of many Europeans. Arab enslavement of Africans continues to this day.

None of that matters to the American left, to D.S.A., to all those supposed “progressive” organizations I used to love, who no longer seem interested in progress, nor in history, nor in reasoned discourse. They have no use for the heroes of the progressive past—the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothy Day, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. (D-NY), Medgar Evers, it’s all forgotten now. For the Democratic Socialists of America, it seems Black Lives Matter until and unless that mattering might make Islam look bad. As for Jewish suffering, Jewish indigeneity, and the Zionism by which the latter heals the former, well, Jews don’t count, and that’s it—because for TikTok warriors, and for much of APsA, it seems—the only lens through which to view the world is oppressor-vs-oppressed.

Though the Jews have been subject to abuse for thousands of years, and suffered the worst genocide in history, we are too successful (as Thomas Sowell pointed out), too creative, too joyful, too wealthy, and too strong to be fit into the victim role that today’s Progressives regard as the heart of virtue. Therefore we must be demonized, yet again, as the all-powerful villains of history. Conversely, anyone else who has suffered at European hands must be infantilized as magically innocent and incapable of harm.

It is a worldview which benefits the narcissists who dress themselves in it to parade their supposed virtue; it benefits corporations who deploy “BIPOC” iconography to wash their environmental and social sins away under cover of melanin-rich beauty in ubiquitous advertisements; and it benefits the brutally racist, monocultural, antisemitic, Gay-bashing, intensely woman-hating Islamists who strive for worldwide Sharia by jihad fast and slow, in stages. It does not benefit those whose interests it claims to promote.

As one of my favorite memes asks:

If we run the whole world, why can’t we get you to leave us the fuck alone?”

As for the American Psychoanalytic Association, it did try to keep the professional peace and hold itself together. Eventually, the most militant of the Palestinianist psychoanalysts “resigned in protest,” as if the remainder were likely to miss them. But the damage was done, and the tone deaf Holmes Report did not help Jews feel as if our safety or our identity was of much importance to APsA anymore. It costs about $1,300 each year to renew a Membership, and after about a decade of doing so, I let mine lapse this year. Maybe I will join APsA again someday, but for now, I’m taking a break.