The Exclusion of Psychoanalysis in Academic and Organized U.S. Psychology: On Voodooism, Witch-Hunts, and the Legion of Followers

ABSTRACT

This contribution focuses on expanding understanding of anti-psychoanalytic attitudes in psychology. Psychoanalysis and related approaches have been openly vilified and discounted within academic and organized American psychology. Socio-historical antecedents of this antagonism provide a framework for understanding how the marginalization of psychoanalysis has been maintained despite the significant empirical, historical, and socio-cultural evidence supporting it. I argue that such marginalization has contributed to professional monoculture, failure to provide consumers with access to effective forms of treatment, and disconnection from critical multicultural frameworks grounded in psychoanalytic tenets. Patterns of psychoanalysis’ exclusion highlight the field’s difficulties in addressing historically situated ideological biases and disputes over resources.

KEYWORDS:

• History of psychology
• eugenics
• psychotherapy
• scientific racism
• monoculture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Southern Poverty Law Center (2012) identified Rushton as “probably the most important race scientist at work today” whose scholarship supports White extremism.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Oksana Yakushko

Oksana Yakushko, Ph.D., received her doctoral education in Counseling Psychology and Women & Gender Studies at the University of Missouri. Her initial scholarly work focused on migration, human trafficking, gender, and xenophobia. Recently she has focused on connecting centrality of eugenics among leading American psychologists to propagation of xenophobic, racist, sexist, anti-psychotherapeutic, and anti-psychoanalytic patterns in U.S. psychology. Dr. Yakushko is an author of several books and numerous peer review articles. She is a professor of clinical psychology at Pacifica Graduate Institute and has a private practice in Santa Barbara, California. Dr. Yakushko is completing her training in psychoanalysis at the National Training in Psychoanalysis, New York. She is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, and has received several awards for her work from several national psychological organizations.