David Bell: Transgenderism Cult Deprogrammer?

Update 24th April: Julian Vigo has now removed my comment under her podcast with David Bell, formerly of the Tavistock Clinic, stating that my comments were ‘personal’. Julian seems to have become yet another free speech warrior who censors inconvenient criticism.

Julian has herself published multiple ‘personal’ criticisms. In a November 2022 podcast she accused Julie Bindel and Jane Clare Jones of ‘racist’ behaviour, and of wanting to impose themselves as a ‘feminist politburo’. I agree that this was all ‘fair comment’, although I think the reasoning used in the ‘racist’ behaviour charge was not especially strong. Other highly ‘personal’ criticisms include those made against Sally Hines, Jessica Taylor and ‘Stephen’ Whittle.

David Bell, Marcus Evans, and his wife Susan Evans, have positioned themselves as ‘the Tavistock whistleblowers’, while carefully avoiding questions which might challenge this narrative. For example, in the podcast with Julian, Bell mentions Sonia Appleby’s employment tribunal case, but not the fact that in the tribunal Appleby criticised Bell on two grounds. Firstly, in his internal report (which was later leaked) he ‘led colleagues to suppose that she adopted his views.’ Secondly, she disagreed with ‘the tone of his report, which came across as an attack on the management of the service.’

Sonia Appleby’s criticisms of Bell suggest that he was substantially motivated to promote himself, and perhaps his own faction among psychoanalysts. They undermine Bell’s claim to oppose misogyny.

It is ironic that Julian, who claims to be a careful ‘reader of texts’ in her own campaigns against misogyny and ‘male entitlement‘, has missed (or chosen to ignore) this clear evidence of a male psychoanalyst’s entitlement. Bell’s behaviour could have been very damaging to Appleby.

In recent email correspondence, Julian has not denied that she is now ‘cheerleading‘ for David Bell and Marcus Evans. It seems clear that she is also doing so for the most influential misogynist of modern times: Freud himself.

My comment of 22nd April:

David Bell says that ‘neoliberalism and misogyny’ drive transgenderism. Hardly original views. And very disappointing that Julian did not ask even the softest of questions about the neoliberalism of psychoanalysts, and the key role that Freud, Lacan and others had in shaping and promoting twentieth century misogyny, which endures today.

‘When did women stop wanting penises?’, for example. Psychoanalysts have never answered Frank Cioffi’s question: they just quietly airbrushed ‘penis envy’ away. If you read psychoanalyst-approved histories, you get the impression that this happened way back in the very early pioneering years of Freud, Jung and co, but it was actually stated as official ‘clinically proven fact’ well into the 1960s.

Bell’s self-serving ‘lack of insight’ when he compares transgenderism to a cult, but offers psychoanalysis as a remedy, is remarkable. I wrote to him at the Institute of Psychoanalysis, but received no response. His colleague Marcus Evans told me he was ‘too busy’ to privately discuss my concerns about psychoanalysis and transgenderism, some of which I had set out in a piece published by Julian five months ago: https://savageminds.substack.com/p/psychoanalytic-abuse

When I raised those concerns in public, potentially threatening Marcus Evans’ private practice, he blocked me: https://twitter.com/NMacFa/status/1647922895144775680?s=20

So much for Bell’s claim (at thirty minutes) that psychoanalysts are in favour of open ‘debate’.

In her 2020 podcast with Stella O’Malley, Julian said that she had, decades earlier, ‘benefitted greatly from psychoanalysis. I had a great analyst in New York…everyone should have an analyst’. It appears that spending hundreds of hours and large sums of money on a supposedly time-limited sojourn, within this particular cult, can lead to an enduring allegiance.

The history of homosexuality was also touched on but, of course, there was no mention that psychoanalysts were the main opponents to the American Psychiatric Association removing it from their list of mental disorders. That episode is just one of the more notable examples of psychoanalysts preaching against ‘commodification’, while practising it as neoliberally as any pharmaceutical company, or transgenderist surgeon.

At least ‘psychoanalytic psychotherapy’ does not directly lead to physical harms, but as psychoanalysts have always avoided and deflected from independent evaluation of what they do, proper understanding of psychological harms is lacking. The financial harms are, thankfully, fairly widely appreciated.

I advise patients, parents and families to seek other modalities of psychosocial support and intervention. Those others all have their pitfalls, but the dishonesty of ‘Freud and His Followers’ was and is, I believe, more systematic and more dangerous.