It has been just under nine months since the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality delivered its findings on the state of American psychoanalysis. The commission’s work was informed from the outset by a complete acceptance of the existence of systemic racism as the following statement in the American Psychoanalytic Association’s press release makes clear: “The Commission studied: how racism is understood in psychoanalysis and its institutions, whether and how systemic racism affects the process of recruitment of analytic candidates as well as their career development (including through teaching and learning in the classroom and supervision), and to what extent systemic racism is enacted and processed across all domains of psychoanalytic experience—on and off the couch.”
Very shortly after the report was published, it was subjected to significant scholarly criticism on the grounds that it was fatally methodologically flawed. The American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA) responded by rallying to the cause of the Holmes Commission; supporting a further evaluative study and a methodological statement. Prof Jon Mills has just written an article in which he reviews these latest responses. He is scathing towards all the actors in this sorry drama including the author of the methodological defence stating that ‘Most embarrassingly is his false claim that systemic racism is as factually true as the law of physics. He proposes a ludicrous non sequitur that just as “gravity exists,” so does systemic racism. One does not need to “demonstrate” or “prove” such matters, just as an aeronautical scientist does not have to prove “the existence of gravity” ‘(p. 6) , Read the whole article in The New English Review here.
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