Science and Society in the Time of SAPA (1948–1961)

Abstract

The 1962 splitting of the South African Psychological Association (SAPA) ranks among the most distasteful episodes in the history of psychology in South Africa. While a fair amount has been written on the subsequent founding of the whites-only Psychological Institute of the Republic of South Africa (PIRSA), comparatively little is known about SAPA, which was established in 1948 as the first national association for psychologists in the country. If anything, SAPA has come to be defined by the events of 1962, discussions of which tend to suggest that, whereas the association’s Afrikaner psychologists ended up being mouthpieces for the apartheid state, its Anglophone members remained faithful, more or less, to a non-racial psychology. This chapter suggests, however, that such an assessment of SAPA’s politics simplifies matters to a fault. While it is true that many of the association’s Afrikaner members went on to devote themselves to a brazenly racist formulation of the discipline, the ostensibly progressive politics of their English-speaking counterparts is not beyond interrogation.

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