The increasing dissatisfaction with the political direction taken by the American Psychological Association (APA) has reached boiling point in the last couple of months. An open letter expressing people’s frustration with the leadership of the APA has recently been published. APA members have been making their disquiet known by resigning in droves.
One high profile senior academic, Prof. Jon Mills, has just joined this exit. He has given us permission to publish his scathing resignation letter to Division 39, APA in full and unredacted, which you can read below.
Dear Board of Directors of Division 39:
After over two decades belonging to the Division, including serving on the editorial board of the Division’s journal, Psychoanalytic Psychology, for 24 years, I am resigning my membership. I will no longer support, let alone finance, an organization that has become unethical and politically-ideologically corrupt. The Division’s Board has become a hotbed of antisemitism and Jew-hatred based upon its continued endorsement of Lara Sheehi, who is an open supporter of Hamas, which is deemed a terrorist organization by the U.S. government. Your egregious failure in leadership, grotesque hypocrisy, and repugnant immorality for not terminating this person as President only shows your deplorable lack of honour.
Political activists who are currently on the Board of Division 39 have signed petitions supporting The Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel while in office, which advocates for the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state. These include those on the current Executive Committee: Secretary Leilani Salvo Crane, Counsel Representative Almas Merchant, Members at Large Carter J. Carter and Elizabeth Clark, Committee Chairs Kori Bennett, Stephen Anen, Romy A. Reading, and Brian Brown. And those on the Board who do not share these views are still complicit in cravenly allowing the ideological regression in the Division that places identity politics over ethical principles and the broader interests of the larger group membership.
What is most repugnant, is that the entire Board of Directors of Section IX: Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility, had obscenely issued a public statement shortly after the October 7th pogrom in support of the Liberation of Palestine. Not only is this anti-Zionist/antisemitic statement a racist tract, it is callously insensitive to the Jewish people in the wake of their collective suffering where more innocent Jews were slaughtered since the Holocaust. This statement is endorsed by the entire Board including President Matt LeRoy, Past-President Carter J. Carter, President-Elect Molly Merson, Treasurer Drew Madore, Secretary Sara Blair Jenkins, Section Representative Sodah Minty, Co-Chairs of the Publications Committee Andrea Recarte and Rossanna Echegoyen, and Members-at-Large Tara Lasheen, Brianna Suslovic, Charla Malamed, Diana Shencherey, and Mamta Dadlani. These people are flagrantly violating the APA Code of Ethics that explicitly prohibits the misuse of influence (Principle A); irresponsibility and failing to uphold professional standards (Principle B); harboring biases (Principle D); and showing disrespect for people’s rights and dignity (Principle E), hence failing to uphold the integrity and standards of the profession. The Division’s vulgar support for Section IX only reinforces a climate of racism and hate, which is a disgrace to the field.
Not only does the Division’s leadership lack ethical virtue and human decency, you have become an embarrassment to the psychoanalytic world as the only organization that is openly antisemitic in the name of social justice. I hope you suffer professional and personal consequences for your shameful conduct.
Sincerely,
JON MILLS, PsyD, PhD, ABPP
Honorary Professor
Department of Psychosocial & Psychoanalytic Studies
University of Essex, UK
Faculty, Postgraduate Programs in Psychoanalysis & Psychotherapy
Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, Adelphi University, USA
Faculty, New School for Existential Psychoanalysis, USA
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