Jon Mills
Philosopher, psychoanalyst and author
Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst Jon Mills was blacklisted from a professional organisation — not for clinical wrongdoing, but for an unfashionable opinion. His case is a direct warning for European clinicians: ideological enforcement has arrived inside the institutions meant to protect analytical independence and patient care.
Jon Mills is a Canadian philosopher and psychoanalyst whose career spans academic philosophy, clinical practice and a substantial body of published work on psychoanalytic theory, ontology and the philosophy of mind. Widely published and internationally read, he represents a tradition of rigorous, evidence-grounded inquiry that once defined the psychological professions — and that is now, he argues, under sustained institutional pressure.
In the Beyond Gender episode BLACKLISTED For Having An Opinion! (23 July 2026), hosts Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman hear a striking account: Mills was labelled a racist and effectively expelled from a psychoanalytic organisation — not because of any harm to a patient, not for any breach of clinical ethics, but because he held and expressed an opinion the organisation's leadership found ideologically unacceptable. His response was not to capitulate but to write a book. The episode traces how that experience reflects a broader pattern: professional bodies in psychoanalysis and psychology increasingly functioning as enforcers of ideological orthodoxy rather than guardians of clinical excellence.
For European listeners, the pattern Mills describes is far from alien. Psychoanalytic and psychological associations across Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and France operate under comparable membership structures, ethics committees and reputational levers. The mechanisms he encountered — social labelling, institutional exclusion, career damage — are readily available to any professional body on this continent. His account raises a pointed question for European clinicians and the EU institutions that set professional standards: how much dissent can a practitioner afford to voice, and who now decides what is acceptable to think?
Beyond Gender has examined the capture of medical and psychological institutions from multiple angles; the conversation with Mills adds a philosophical and psychoanalytic dimension that European practitioners rarely hear articulated so plainly. If the institutions charged with sustaining analytical thinking have themselves abandoned it, it is patients — not only professionals — who ultimately pay the price.
