The Poisoned Couch: How Second-Wave Feminism Captured Psychology and Institutionalised Covert Misandry

The deliberate shift from neutral inquiry to ideological grievance, and the generational wreckage it left behind.

The Birth in Second-Wave Feminism: Reframing Distress as Political Pathology

The origins lie squarely in the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. As activists like Betty Friedan diagnosed widespread female dissatisfaction in The Feminine Mystique as “the problem that has no name”—attributing it not to personal circumstances or biological realities but to systemic patriarchal oppression—psychology became a primary battleground. Consciousness-raising groups, initially political, evolved into proto-therapeutic spaces where women’s emotional pain was reframed as evidence of male dominance and cultural trauma.

This was not organic evolution toward better science. It was a conscious ideological takeover. Traditional psychology, with its Freudian roots and emerging empirical methods, was attacked as androcentric and oppressive. Feminist activists staged takeovers at American Psychological Association meetings, leading to the formation of the Association for Women in Psychology…