Après-Coup (D’état): A Report and Analysis on an Emerging Psychoanalytic Activism

In February 2026, a coalition of psychoanalytic activists launched a letter campaign in protest against the inclusion of David Bell at a joint event organized by the Contemporary Freudian Society (CFS) and the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research (IPTAR). The campaign focused on Bell’s political activism against transition-related health care for transgender youth. Because of the protest organized through the campaign, CFS and IPTAR canceled the event as planned. In the following, two of the organizers, Farr and Harrold, and one member of IPTAR, Polyak, narrate events from their perspectives. In addition to these narrations, Farr and Harrold interrogate institutional psychoanalysis as fomenting a psychoanalytic innocence that hides regressive and reactionary politics, and provide a reading of the campaign as an emerging psychoanalytic activism and the deployment of an exigent sadism. The events at CFS and IPTAR demonstrate key issues for an analysis of institutional power and psychoanalytic activism that can be engaged across institutions in the struggle against anti-trans and zionist politics within psychoanalysis.