The Inmates Run the Asylum at the Psychological Association

Tolerating antisemitism may cost the APA its accreditation, but the rot goes far deeper than that.

The American Psychological Association may soon lose its accreditation authority. 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.

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 reports are alarming and deserve serious attention. But focusing solely on the APA’s hostility toward Israel and Jewish members risks obscuring a larger problem. A substantial part of organized psychology has ceased behaving like scientific and professional bodies and has become a vehicle for left-wing political activism.

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. 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.

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.

There was perhaps a glimmer of hope that the accreditation threat might prompt self-reflection. Instead, APA members elected Candice Hargons as the association’s next president. The APA praises her work for advancing “liberation-oriented approaches” to psychology. In a campaign statement, 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.”

Her recent scholarship is consistent with radical politics. Titles include “#HotGirlScience: A Liberatory Paradigm for Intersectional Sex-Positive Scholarship,” “Sexual Healing: Qualitative Methods as a Radical Pleasure Intervention Against Anti-Black Sexology,” “ ‘It’s an honor to be in this body’: A Black feminist grounded theory of embodiment through yoga among Black womxn” and “ ‘People already don’t know what the f— i’m [sic] saying’: Nonbinary Black womxn perspectives on sharing their gendered-racial identity.” Not to be outdone, she wrote a 2026 paper examining how black women’s awareness of kink and BDSM informs their sex lives.

Elevating Ms. Hargons isn’t a sign of an institution retreating from politicization. It is doubling down.

The APA’s antisemitism problem might have captured the attention of the federal government for being a glaring example of ideological capture. But the purpose of accreditation is to guarantee more than the mere absence of one specific—albeit serious—form of discrimination. It is supposed to be an earnest commitment to professional competence, intellectual seriousness and standards worthy of public trust.

The Education Department should therefore ask whether a professional association so thoroughly committed to political activism should continue enjoying the government’s imprimatur as a guardian of psychological training. No amount of denying objectivity can shield it from those consequences.

Mr. Wright is an evolutionary biologist and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Mr. Hartz is a clinical psychologist and the founder of the Open Therapy Institute.

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