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Clinical Psychologist and Psychoanalyst addresses relevant political and social issues of our times in a straightforward and honest manner. Taking on anti-logic factions that are growing in society. News and opinions that you can rely on for integrity and depth!
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Political Bias in Therapy: A Conversation with Dr. Andrew Hartz
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Is political bias undermining the integrity of therapy? Join us for a compelling episode with Dr. Andrew Hartz, founder of the Open Therapy Institute, as we tackle how issues like centering Palestinian liberation and the concept of "parasitic whiteness" are shaping therapy sessions today. Dr. Hartz shares eye-opening examples of activism's impact on mental health care and the challenging realities for those addressing these biases. We discuss the lack of literature and training on critical issues such as self-censorship and faith-based concerns, and Dr. Hartz sheds light on the mixed reactions from the mental health field.
Exploring the strength found in unity, we discuss the essence of collective courage and how networks can embolden individuals. Dr. Hartz reflects on the vibrant psychoanalytic community in New York City, noting how its unique environment influences therapy. He talks about founding the Open Therapy Institute and how it expanded his network, connecting him with like-minded individuals interested in open inquiry. Listen in to understand the importance of fostering reasonable perspectives in what can feel like an increasingly looney landscape, and how this is crucial for both therapy and community resilience.
Welcome back everybody to RealClear Podcast. I am so pleased to be joined by Dr Andrew Hartz, a colleague and becoming a friend. From New York City. He runs the Open Therapy Institute, which addresses political bias in the field of therapy. Dr Hartz, good morning. Thanks for having me, you bet. So I know what OTI is. You've graciously invited me to be a member or a creator for OTI and so forth, but the audience doesn't know what OTI is. Give us your introduction, yeah.
Speaker 2:I think basically there's two different ways of thinking about political bias and therapy and mental health care. There's what the field is doing that's biased and there's what the field isn't doing because of bias. And so when we started OTI, it was focused on things that the started Open Therapy Institute it was about things the field was doing that were biased, and it's kind of moved into focusing on things the field isn't doing. So what the field is doing related to bias are shocking examples of really aggressive activism being imposed on patients in psychotherapy. This could be you've got a center white privilege in therapy, or you're trying to dismantle gender or problematize masculinity, and a lot of people, a lot of people in the general public, don't know how extremely politicized a lot of the mental health field has become.
Speaker 2:Um, we had, uh. You'll know these examples and I don't know how much you've talked about them on your show. But, like the, the president of the Division of Psychoanalysis for the American Psychological Association said every psychotherapeutic praxis needs to center Palestinian liberation. You had an article come out in the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association said whiteness is an incurable parasitic condition.
Speaker 1:Parasitic whiteness.
Speaker 2:Parasitic. What Exactly? And there's others. Whiteness is toxic narcissism, and every therapy has to frame people as victims or oppressors based on their demographics. And we could go on and on. I was just reading Daryl Su's incredibly widely used textbook on cultural psychotherapy and he has a chapter in there where one of the goals of the chapter is to educate white therapists about how to keep their whiteness from harming their patients.
Speaker 2:There's so much racial aggression in the field of gender-based aggression and political ideology that I think people are just totally shocked by so when we started OTI, it was really, I think, alarm. I was seeing this in my training, other people were seeing it in their training. I was seeing it come into the therapy room and impact patients and hearing complaints from patients. But then, as we started kind of unpacking this problem, we started realizing wait, there's also a bunch of things that the field isn't doing because of bias. There's clinical issues that just don't have a literature, there's trainings that just aren't happening, and that's a problem too. So, for example, one is self-censorship. Our last workshop that we did at the Open Therapy Institute was on self-censorship. Millions of people in the country are self-censorship. Our last workshop that we did at the Open Therapy Institute was on self-censorship. Millions of people in the country are self-censoring.
Speaker 2:There's a lot of reason to think that that impacts their mental health. It can come into their therapies. It can exacerbate their symptoms. Where are the interventions to help people who are self-censoring? Why isn't the field trying to help with that issue? The literature on there is sparse to nothing. So there are other issues like that People who are canceled, people who are attacked with political beliefs, masculinity issues, victims of anti-white racial aggression, faith-based issues. We just like we're starting to map out. We're like there's all of these crucial issues that impact millions of people and their mental health and come up in therapy where the field isn't researching them, isn't training therapists to work with them, and often there's little to no services on those issues. So there's kind of these two sides to the problem. There's the activism that's coming in that is, I think, unethical and hurting patients, and then there's all the overlooked issues, all the blind spots of the field that are really just the other side of the coin of the same bias.
Speaker 1:What has been the receptivity, the reception, I should say, in the field for OTI?
Speaker 2:Like have we had backlash or something like that All?
Speaker 1:the above positive, negative, ambivalent.
Speaker 2:I haven't gotten direct personal attacks yet and I, you know, knock on wood, I feel like I'm tempting fate every time I say that. I also think it's important for people to know that the consequences for speaking up aren't as always as bad as they fear I may have. There may be people who don't like me and don't like my work. I'm pretty careful, you know, to try to be patient, centered in what I write and not unnecessarily attack individuals. But no, I haven't had a negative reaction. I think that I have had some positive reactions. Some people like you and we've got great faculty at Harvard, yale, columbia, top schools who reach out and want to get involved, and then there's a lot of people who are on the fence, obviously.
Speaker 2:I heard a really interesting story from a professor, who will remain anonymous, who said that his colleagues wrote him emails. Colleagues wrote him emails, I guess he condemned a petition that they were signing related to a social justice issue. There's a petition going around his department or his university on a social justice issue. He disagreed with it. He thought this impinged on free speech or open inquiry. So he said that and he got these private emails from people saying we totally support you. Thank you so much for writing what you did. And then they went and signed the petition. They publicly signed something that they're privately saying they disagree with, and I don't know if they're just lying to him. My guess is that they're actually worried that if they don't sign the petition something will happen to them. So I think there's a lot of people like that too, who are in agreement but afraid they don't want to be controversial, they don't want to jeopardize their career, but they are concerned.
Speaker 1:So I'd say there's a whole range um, so there's I'd say there's a whole whole range. You know, that certainly was my experience when I criticized the report from the american psychoanalytic association on quote-unquote racism and psychoanalysis. The entire project, which cost uh, based on some estimates, around a couple hundred thousand in membership dues, um, was scientific shoddiness. I mean, nothing was done properly. Yeah, and I unfortunately read the 421 page report which mentioned white supremacy 151 times, claimed that apsa, historically an organization mainly consisting of jews, many of whom were freedom riders in the south, was a seething extension of white supremacy. Um, and uh, andrew, they wanted to install a dei on budsman in every uh psychoanalytic institute in america right, right which ironically would oversee all of the training and decision making for every non-white candidate.
Speaker 1:My interpretation of that you're actually advocating for segregated education Totally I mean wild. So I submitted a stinging critique of that report based on just methods, that's all just research methods, which it did not employ properly. I had the same experience that you described. I had tons and tons of analysts around the country and around the world emailing me privately. It was wild. A couple were public about it on the listserv, but mainly all private. Everyone's scared. And so I hear you as making a really concerted effort to through oti, to bring into the light reasonable discourse and to help people congregate around having that because there's nothing wrong with it. Is that, at least in part, some of your motivation for creating oti?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean we need a professional community and we need actual institutions. I think it's so hard to try to take this stuff on when you're the lone voice, the single-handedly speaking. It's so much more effective when you're a group of people who are having a conversation and you have some institutional background and you have personal relationships. This was actually part of the workshop on self-censorship. We were thinking what's clinically helpful for people who are self-censoring? And number one connecting to other people. That's just number one, because when you self-censor, people are isolated, even if they have colleagues publicly and they might have friends and all that, the appearance of those things, but they don't know who you really are because they don't know what you think about.
Speaker 1:Right, courage comes from the collective. In my view. Right, something has to happen, momentum has to happen, and then individuals can feed off of that collective courage. But it's very difficult to ask people to be courageous in and of themselves. They need examples, they need an organization. They need examples, they need an organization, they need connections. So yeah, I agree with you entirely. In New York, you're surrounded by a hotbed of psychoanalysis I mean center of the world for analysis and for the practice of psychology and so forth and you're a practicing psychologist. I believe in the city, or is it Long Island? I'm in the city, you're in the city, right? I think you went to Long Island University and so you go ahead which was in Brooklyn.
Speaker 1:So I never left the city. Okay, okay, in your immediate vicinity, in the people you you know, your colleagues right around you, what are you seeing and experiencing and getting feedback on in the field and with respect to OTI?
Speaker 2:I think I've actually had a lot of like. One of the best things about founding an organization like the Open Therapy Institute is you get to connect to a ton of people and and so since then, you know, my social network has really changed and a lot. It's gotten much bigger and I've connected to a ton of people who maybe they're not all in the mental health space although some are but who are concerned about open inquiry and heterodox ideas. And so it's been um, there's a lot of people in New York Like I think this was part of what I was thinking when I was starting to OTI is like, okay, new York feels like it's a monoculture. New York city feels like a monoculture. But I think I saw a poll. It was like 30% of the votes went to Trump or something like this. Now, 30 percent of eight million people is a lot of people. You know there's like two million people or whatever. And then even the people. There's a lot of people who didn't vote because they're equally dislike both candidates. And there's lots of people who vote for the Democrat but they don't like the identity politics stuff or they're concerned about free speech. If you kind of pool all the heterodox and basically the non-woke or the you know whatever non-social justice people it's.
Speaker 2:It could be a majority of the city, it's at least a big chunk, and it's like, but every but they all feel isolated. Yeah, so why? How can you be the majority, even in a place like New York, and yet everybody feels so isolated? And, iork, it's been uh, just really enlivening to see, to see people speak up and I've kind of. The sad part is I've kind of lost touch a little bit. Maybe it's not sad, but it's. I've lost a little bit of touch of what's happening at the university. I couldn't handle. I thought that they became incredibly hateful, fanatical places and I don't have as good a tabs about what's happening there. My understanding for people who are in those environments is they're as bad as ever. But I'm just grateful I'm not there. I don't want to be involved with them.
Speaker 1:I understand entirely. I had a really insightful conversation with a brilliant colleague recently where I was asking him about the potential cost of being public and so forth and and you know I've been very public on my positions and, um, you know he said something really striking, which was that in the long run, people are going to want to know that you're steady, right, because people seek psychotherapy, specifically analysts, but all kinds of therapists for the purpose of structural soundness. And you know it's. It occurs to me that there is.
Speaker 1:It's really an illusion that the, the, the media, the, the, something about social media, the media, all of what's going on in the, in the ultra progressive so-called woke space, um, especially in in the education of, of, of therapists, there's something like an illusion that's been going on where we all have believed we meaning the field, just collectively somehow has created this giant belief that you have to tilt leftward in order to be seen as an acceptable figure in the therapy field.
Speaker 1:It doesn't strike me that that's actually true. Actually, I think most people would be perturbed and made anxious knowing that their therapist is going to just go with the wind on whatever kind of highfalutin skin deep. I mean that, literally and metaphorically, social paradigm that's floating through. I actually think that people would like to know that you're solid as an oak, but also listen right that you're not some sort of fickle sagebrush that flows with the wind on whatever you see as the most politically correct position. So, oti, is it in some way striving to help patients, specifically the ones that you'd mentioned, the many millions in New York and everywhere else who are not at least in any way publicly part of these ultra-progressive positions, to assure them and others, hey, there is still a branch of therapy, there's a collection of strong-willed, I'd say, traditional psychotherapists who you can trust to be reasonable.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, my sense is the large majority of therapists would want an open therapist and they'd want somebody who's grounded, like you said, and like a thoughtful, clinical figure. But you know where do they go to find somebody no-transcript, new hampshire.
Speaker 1:I mean, oh, it's just so bizarre, it's. This person is a um, if I could try to remember, this is a um, jewish, non-zionist um, you know. And then lists all kinds of other, uh, ironic terms, all demographic terms about her race and ethnicity, and then sexuality, and then gives a land acknowledgement to the Abenaki tribe on which the CEU will be taking place. I think most people look at things like that, most patients in the general public and they go.
Speaker 2:I'm not going to talk to a therapist yeah, oh, totally yeah, and it's like it's it's so discrediting of the field. I mean, the land acknowledgments are so interesting to me, in part because they kind of assume that there's this blood and soil ethnic possession of lands based on the ancestral races that inhabit them. It's like it's a very kind of like. There's a lot of kind of like uh, nazi-like assumptions that go into saying lands belong to races and that's a sacred thing that you can't ever disrupt, um it, so it's, it's a weird kind of like. I think there's a lot of like not really thought out ideas with them. I I heard I read a study that was on critical therapy antidote where a patient said her therapist said that every session had to start with a landing knowledge oh my god, you gotta be kidding me.
Speaker 2:But then, but it's like but I think part of what part of it too is like a lot of people that are in therapy not not everybody is like severely, you know, impaired, but like some people are very vulnerable who are in therapy and they're really susceptible to these types of therapist influences. And I think it's an abuse of power that these interventions are not evidence-based, they're not patient-centered and I think a lot of times there's not even really I mean I guess it'd be hard to say how this would come into the land acknowledgments, but some of these interventions there's no informed consent. If you go to a couples therapist and they're using a feminist or queer theory model for their couples therapy and they don't disclose that to you, I think that's absolutely an ethical violation. But I think it happens more than people realize. Background or an individual therapist who's like, by the way, in the background.
Speaker 2:I have this theory. You know I follow this specific, you know critical social justice theory on X, y or Z. They get to. The patient should get to consent about whether or not they want that to be their treatment or not. And I don't. I think most of the time it's not disclosed. That's what I see.
Speaker 1:I love the, the vantage point you take. You take there, um, it's so reasonable as you say it, it's a it's, it's such a useful perspective on this. Um, as you deliver your, your, your thoughts, just there, I'm anticipating the wild reaction. Uh, just you know, from the field writ large, and that is empiricism. The gathering of evidence based on what is observable and hopefully measurable is itself a tool of oppression. I mean, that's, I'm not making that up, that's quite literally an objection that I've experienced. When I brought forth my methods critique to the apsa report, people actually called me racist for using empirical scrutiny.
Speaker 2:Think of that well, there is, like I mean, some of the people that I think for people that make arguments like that, I am, my approach is just I'm not, I'm not interested in engaging. There are a lot of people who have those kinds of views. They have a huge amount of influence in the field, especially through universities and professional bodies and prestigious hospitals and training institutes. They really kind of run most of them, the real extremists. People would be so shocked if they it's like I'll say one thing about their influence and then I want to get back about how to respond to them.
Speaker 2:When I this one has been back in 2020, 2021 or something, I remember trying to tell people things that I was seeing at prestigious hospitals in New York and I said you know, they think that you can call for genocide against people who are in a non-protected group. You can't commit a microaggression against somebody in a protected group. And people would say to me you know, andrew, I'm sure there's bias, but don't overstate your case. What you're saying just isn't believable. You sound like a hothead, you sound like you're blowing things out of proportion and I'd say, you know, I could talk till I'm blue in the face. I'm saying I'm not blowing it out of proportion. I promise you, this is what they think it wasn't, until the university presidents gave their testimony on the Senate floor, where they said exactly that, to a word that.
Speaker 2:I was like I was, like that's what has to happen. It has to be televised on live TV, broadcast from the Senate floor under oath, for people to recognize. And I don't I don't blame the people who didn't trust me because they're right what I was saying was not believable. It's not believable, right, it's true, it's not believable. It's that shocking. And so I think that makes it hard, to hard to communicate about these things.
Speaker 2:But I, even though they have a lot of influence, I I try not to have a direct argument with them. I think that there's a certain amount of extremism where dialogue, where I could persuade them, it doesn't really seem very likely to me. I think a better way is to try to reach the people who are reachable, anyone in the field who wants to be open, who wants to do this work or be better in this area. They can connect to a community, not be isolated, be who they are, you know, not have to be fake anymore. I think there's appeal to that. And then for patients, just go directly to the patients, these people that are nuts, that are running these nuts training programs. Or do you want a therapist who's grounded and open? And if they want the grounded and open therapists come to us. I think going directly to the patients is the way to be most successful and have this movement grow best I couldn't agree more, and I I hope that the openy Institute grows in leaps and bounds.
Speaker 1:Have you been in touch with Do no Harm Medicine yet?
Speaker 2:Yeah, I gave a talk there. I gave an online talk with them. It was very nice.
Speaker 1:Oh great. They seem to be naturally allied with the positions of OTI in many ways, in many ways.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there's a little bit of a difference because they're more of an advocacy organization. We're just structured differently. We're about research, training and services, and so we just have a slightly different structure to how we're built. But yeah, there's totally. I really like a lot of what they're doing and I think they're a good partner.
Speaker 1:Is OTI hopefully going to rival psychology today at some point?
Speaker 2:As like a therapist listing service.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so, for people listening, psychology Today is a website. It's the largest website where you can search for a therapist anywhere in the United States, and it's how a large number of people find psychologists, and so I wonder if OTI is going to try to rival that.
Speaker 2:You know, I had a lot of conversations with people about what the best way to structure the clinical services is. Building a therapist listing service, like Psychology Today, is a lot like building a social media network. To get people to want to use it, you've got to have a lot of therapists and to get therapists you have to have a lot of people using it. Right Starting it is very hard and then the marketing and overhead is really expensive and they don't. They don't bring in the income from even if even if therapists are paying 20 bucks a month and we've got it's like it doesn't line up I. So it's very hard to build that type of business. We've looked at a bunch of other models. There's another one your readers probably is going to put everybody to sleep, but there's something called the management service organization which is more like a national. Uh, we could be more like. It's not a direct service provider, but we basically would um, it's more like what better help is? It doesn doesn't have to be a, but it could be very high quality services where we're pairing people with therapists but we're actually running the operation. We probably couldn't do that under the open therapy institute, cause we're nonprofit. We have to create a for-profit entity.
Speaker 2:All this is just to say. The business structure of how to make this succeed is a very complicated question. We are actively looking for and interviewing MBA people who can build that organization and work with us to build that. Because we've got we get emailed every day from patients who want this and we have basically no marketing budget. We still just from podcasts like this. We get emailed pretty much every day and then we get contacted all the time from therapists who want to provide the services. Like, we have the therapists, we have the patients. We don't have the business structure in place to do this. So right now we just make the referral as best we can, but I think long termterm we need to build it into something more sustainable and that's actually difficult.
Speaker 1:I hear you entirely there. It's a huge operation that you're taking on and I'm glad that you're. You're getting so much traffic. Uh, by the way, I'm licensed in New York, connecticut, oregon and California for referrals.
Speaker 2:Thank you very much.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much. Both professionals and patients waiting to be activated and there needs to be various sort of signal codes that get struck through the country where they realize they can grab onto something.
Speaker 2:you know this is that is such a good way of putting it my, uh, my, when we're like we did this workshop. So I'll go back to the last workshop we did, which was so, since my sense is most people who are at a university or a business you know, I hear people self-censoring their writers in Hollywood. They work for a bank, they work for a big law firm or a hospital, whatever it is. They're high school teachers, lots of people. There are these very politicized environments. They feel really like their values are really attacked and they self-censor a lot and they feel isolated. My sense is the overwhelming majority of people with that experience don't, it doesn't even occur to them that maybe talking to a therapist would be a good idea, Because, first of all, where would they find somebody who would be, who would be good to talk to in the field, but also what would the therapist even do for them? You know, it's not necessarily I think there's kind of this, the dots aren't being connected but if you think about it for a second, the ideal place to speak to somebody. It's a confidential space where you can figure out what you think, with somebody who's understanding and somebody who has tools available to think about what the best response is based on you.
Speaker 2:People are really different. Some people, some people self-censor because they have an anger issue. They're worried if they start opening this up they're going to lose their cool and then they'll get fired or something like. That's one thing. Other people they're anxious or they're depressed and they're maybe or they have a different reason for being, and sometimes you have, you have to self-censor because that's literally you will get fired for disagreeing and so maybe you need to think about quitting. But other people, they don't have the communication skills. You can just think of the different ways that people could get hung up and stuck on this issue and how useful it could be to have somebody who's actually helping you figure out how to respond in a way that's true to your values. But most people in that experience, I think, aren't even considering. Maybe I should talk to a therapist, or maybe a therapist could help.
Speaker 1:Isn't it wild how society has managed to reverse the Freudian maxim and the freudian imperative, that our profession, our profession, has managed to suppress people, to make the conscious unconscious right, where the imperative of freud and jung and rank was to make the unconscious conscious, just in a basic, um, you know, initial model sense, and we've managed, as a collective of carrying on, uh, the freudian tradition to quiet people, to suppress them.
Speaker 2:And it's wild when I I will talk to people and they're not necessarily self-censoring all the time, but I was just at a at a conference related to gender medicine last week and people who are.
Speaker 2:We'll leave aside for a moment the oxymoronic term you brought up, but go ahead well, it was evidence society for evidence-based gender medicine and, um, it is a great group of like, really thoughtful scholars and they're doing work that's often like not you know, look down upon I activists, at least on on this issue, but I'll be talking to somebody and they'll it's. The emotions start to come. They've just been holding back these feelings so consistently for so long that you just start talking about some of the things they've been through and it's like it's flooding because they just haven't haven't had face-to-face interactions where they've gotten to say what they really feel about this stuff, and you can feel the intensity of the emotions that people are holding back all the time. It really wears on people and it's like, even if you know I think a lot of times people go into therapy and they're like well, why do I need to talk about that? I'm here for sleep issues or I'm here for anxiety, or I'm here for this.
Speaker 1:It's like you don't think this might have a role in well, the society-wide demoralization, right now that you're describing cannot be overstated as a problem central to any individual in it. Demoralization occurs, of course, as we all know, when you can't say things that you know to be true, when you have to go in and and um attest to concepts that you really think are wrongheaded and pay lip service to these things. It results in demoralization. So I think that what you're describing with OTI makes perfect sense and I hope that I hope it gains a foothold. Dr Hartz, I know you've got to run to another meeting at some point here soon, so let's wrap it up here. Where can people find you and the Open Therapy Institute? How can they get involved?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's great. So our website is OpenTherapyInstituteorg and at the bottom left of the front page you'll see all our social media. We're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, we're on Instagram. I have a weekly YouTube podcast I do with Leslie Elliott Boyce. That link is down there. You can also find it on her YouTube channel, the Radical Center. Our podcast series is called Open Therapy.
Speaker 2:We have a sub stack which we'll have articles soon, but for now it's just our mailing list. If you sign up again at the bottom of the homepage you'll see the sub stack to see the places on the mailing list. Now, if you're a patient and you want a therapist, just hit the contact button on the upper left of every page Contact. Hit contact check therapy and we'll get an email. Or you can email us directly at info at opentherapyinstituteorg.
Speaker 2:If you're a therapist and you want to get involved, we have CE credit workshops for social workers, psychologists and counselors. There's about one a month. You're speaking at one coming up, that's right. Yeah, what's the date on that? I should double check the 27th of October at 12 pm Eastern. You can find that on. Just go to the website OpenTherapyInstituteorg, click workshops and you'll see we have another one coming up. I think you can still get a 30% off discount workshop if you do it soon. And then we have another thing too for therapists, which is a membership. So if you become a member, it's $99 for the year. You get 10 10 an additional 10 of all workshops and you get access to monthly members only meetings that are about an hour and a half which are vital, and you're helping build something important for the country and for our profession.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, dr andrew hearts, the founder, and I assume director of the Open Therapy Institute. I hope everyone visits and pays homage. Have a great day. Thanks for joining us. So much, dr Hartz. Thank you.