Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

We refused most emphatically to turn a patient who puts himself into our hands in search of help into our private property, to decide his fate for him, to force our own ideals upon him, and with the pride of a Creator to form him in our own image and see that it is good. Sigmund Freud On April 6, 2021, Dr. Aruna Khilanani, a psychoanalyst, addressed a group of mental health experts at the Yale School of Medicine’s Child Study Center. The invited speaker titled her talk “The Psychopathic Problem of the White Mind” and delivered her remarks from New York City via Zoom. As she settled into her presentation, Khilanani told an audience of psychiatrists, psychologists, and social workers about her murderous impulses. “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step, like I did the world a fucking favor.” Talking with white people, she said, was a “waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero to accept responsibility.” When the Child Study Center invited Khilanani, they knew what they were getting — and many in the audience welcomed it. One black woman thanked Khilanani for giving “voice to us as people of color and what we go through all the time;” a psychologist deemed the talk “absolutely brilliant;” and one man in the Zoom audience said he felt “very shook in a good way.” These details were gleaned from a leaked audio recording of the talk made public by The Free Press two months later. Days later, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and NBC News reported on Khilanani’s talk, citing as well the statement issued by Yale School of Medicine, calling the “tone and content” of the presentation “antithetical to the values of the school.” Having myself been a resident and then a faculty member in the Department of Psychiatry at the Yale School of Medicine, I knew that Khilanani’s lecture, its crass unprofessionalism aside, flouted the very purpose of Grand Rounds, which is to impart scholarship, clinical wisdom, and original analysis.  Around the same time, another New York City psychoanalyst, Donald Moss, came to attention for his article, “On Having Whiteness,” published in the Journal of the American Psycho-
analytic Association. Moss, who is white, wrote that whiteness is “a malignant, parasitic-like condition [that] renders its hosts’ appetites voracious, insatiable, and perverse.” These appetites, once established, “are nearly impossible to eliminate . . . there is not yet a permanent cure.” As one disenchanted reader of the paper remarked, “it is unfortunate that psychoanalysts like Donald Moss, who express their views in a more temperate fashion [than Khilanani], still espouse a kind of racial essentialism to explain extremely complex social realities.”  In the years since Khilanani and Moss held forth, more and more practitioners of psychotherapy — psychoanalysts, psychologists, social workers, and counselors — have become vocal about approaching their work as a primarily political, rather than clinical, undertaking. Indeed, according to the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in the American Psychoanalytic Association, in 2023, both Khilanani and Moss might well be regarded as role models for their boundary-pushing. “To live up to its fuller potential, psychoanalysis must imaginatively, thoughtfully, and self-reflectively move beyond the boundaries set by racism and white supremacy,” said the Commission. (The Holmes report has been criticized for its myriad methodological errors.) Social justice and “decolonizing” psychology are the twin missions of the American Psychological Association, the APA. The association has vowed to “work [to] dismantle racism in important systems and sectors of society.” A 2021 APA report on racism within its own ranks confirmed its commitment to “a critical examination of how the discipline structures opportunity in ways that uphold White supremacy.” Cited in the report was the association’s Chief Science Officer, who stated that “until we can embark on scientific practices that are not dominated by White supremacy, we’re only going to be getting part of the truth.” In a piece last year called “Psychologists Must