RODNEY HIDE: Psychology on the Couch

Last Friday, at Pipitea Marae in Wellington, the New Zealand Psychological Society and the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists rolled over together, all eight paws in the air, and apologised to Māori for, in the words of their own press release, "the structural racism and monoculturalism inherent within the discipline of psychology, which has its origins in 19th century Europe."

First the crime. It is not that some psychologist, somewhere, did some identifiable wrong to some identifiable person. That would require names, dates and evidence—the tiresome furniture of the old Western way of knowing. No, the sin is original. It lies in the discipline's birth: it came from 19th-century Europe. Wilhelm Wundt opened his laboratory in Leipzig, and the stain has been spreading down the generations ever since.

College president Dr Clare Couch, and I promise I did not make the name up, said: "For this we are deeply sorry and apologise without reservation for the harms done to Māori by the discipline, as well as our failure to prevent these." Without reservation. There is the tell. The scientist lives on reservations. Every finding is provisional, every claim is hedged, and the confidence interval is always on display. To apologise without reservation is to announce, with some ceremony, that you have stopped being a scientist and become a penitent.

Note what was confessed. Dr Couch did not apologise for anything she had done. She apologised for the discipline, which is to say for every psychologist, living, dead and yet to graduate. The young clinician who qualifies next year arrives already in debt, owing for sins committed before she was born against people she has never met. That is not science. It is original sin, handed out by profession and settled by race.

Then came the theology proper. The Society's Kaihautū Professor Waikaremoana Waitoki said: "Western psychology is reproduced globally not because it is better, but because it travels with colonialism." Consider that sentence. Here is a profession that charges fees, holds a state-protected title and treats the depressed, the anxious and the suicidal, and one of its senior office-holders has now declared that its methods spread not because they work but because they hitched a ride on gunboats. If that is true, the honest course is not an apology but a refund. If it is false, it is a remarkable thing for a professor to say on a marae.

Professor Waitoki also told us what she wants instead: "We want to see Māori psychology, Asian psychology, and Indian psychology." I always understood India to be in Asia. But never mind geography, which is presumably colonial too. The point is that the mind, which the old science supposed was much the same organ in Auckland as in Amritsar, is to be carved up by ancestry, like a Treaty settlement.

The Society's president, Iris Fontanilla, supplied the liturgy: "We commit to making meaningful changes and hope this is the beginning of a journey of healing and true partnership." A journey. They are always journeys. Nobody in officialdom ever arrives anywhere; arrival would allow an audit. And the statement itself, the press release tells us, is a "living document" that "will undergo further developments following consultation with Māori." So they have apologised for something whose final wording does not yet exist. That is not contrition. That is a subscription.

Now for the part the press release left out. Earlier this year the College removed from its own journal a peer-reviewed Viewpoint by Dr Arna Mitchell, a clinical psychologist of Māori and Pākehā descent, titled “He Wero Anō: Don't Just Tell Me, Show Me How Science and Psychology Are Racist in New Zealand.” She questioned the evidence in the 2024 WERO report on systemic racism in psychology. That is to say, she asked for proof. The College told Waatea News that "concerns were subsequently raised by members, Māori and non-Māori, and key sector partners regarding the impact of the Viewpoint and its alignment with the values and commitments of the College." By its own account there was no plagiarism, no fabrication, no fraud. She was merely inconvenient.

The Free Speech Union's Jillaine Heather put it with a precision I envy: "A Māori psychologist had her work erased by her own professional body, in the name of protecting Māori." Back in July she asked whether the apology would extend to Dr Mitchell, "or is she the wrong kind of Māori?" Good question. I await the living answer.

So here is the scene. A profession that exists to help individuals see their own minds clearly has decided that minds come in racial job lots. It has erased the work of a Māori member who asked for evidence. And it has apologised, on behalf of members most of whom, the Free Speech Union said in July, had not been shown the text, for a sin it traces to the nineteenth century.

They need their heads read. The trouble is finding anyone left in the profession willing to do the reading without first consulting the living document.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader