Bell Ends

In which a psychoanalytic institute disinvites a noted transphobe . . .

Avid fans of inside psychoanalytic baseball might have heard that last week, two affiliated institutions—the Contemporary Freudian Society, and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research—rescinded, under considerable pressure, an invitation to speak that they had offered to one David Bell.

Bell is part of a cohort of psychoanalysts who have been instrumental in generating transphobic pseudoscience and propaganda. This is not some idle bigotry in a psychoanalytic backwater. This is the body of knowledge (soi-disant), and the activist effort, that led the assorted organs of the fascist right to unify around anti-trans politics as the wedge issue that would animate the right and split the left in order to drive Trump to power. Psychoanalysis played a decisive role in the creation of the current US fascist endgame. The ability to appear, even superficially, as if transphobic policies, like the promotion of treatments that bear such striking similarities to conversion therapies as to be frightening¹, had some legitimate scientific basis was essential to fascists being able to offer would-be members of their constituency a moral alibi for rank bigotry, under the guise of protecting the children.

Bell has, in addition to his own authorship of dumb transphobic work, collaborated with a number of Astroturfed organizations that promote these “gender-exploratory” therapies and advanced demonstrably untrue pseudoscience characterizing being trans as, presumptively, a socially contagious mental disorder spread virally via the internet, and of trans-affirming care providers (like me) as being “cult-like” and pathologically refusing to think. He has been a particularly important and effective useful idiot for this anti-trans movement. Don’t take my word for it—since my book about all this isn’t coming out for another two years (that’s a long story for another day), you should peruse the Southern Poverty Law Center’s CAPTAIN Report, which describes all of this fuckery in considerable detail.

I’m actually not terribly interested in David Bell. I’m interested in why someone who has such a sterling record as a pseudoscientist, propagandist, and professional bigot would continue to warrant the attention of the psychoanalytic profession as anything other than a cautionary tale. How Bell came to be invited, and then disinvited, by a noted psychoanalytic institute that claims to be especially committed to research tells us a lot about what ails the psychoanalytic profession.