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You are about to have the pleasure of reading a wonderfully integrative essay on discussions of Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady from the January 2014 University Forum at the ApsaA meetings in New York. University Forums aim to bridge academia and psychoanalysis. The Portrait of a Lady was discussed by Colm Tóibín, novelist, short story writer, playwright, and critic, by Jean Strouse, biographer, critic, and director of the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, and by Shelley Orgel and Lucy LaFarge, esteemed psychoanalysts and avid Jamesians. Leslie Keith, the essay's author, brings literary knowledge and skill to her writing (she holds a Ph.D. in English language and literature from the University of Chicago), as well as an enthusiasm for psychoanalysis. You will see her shift thoughtfully between literary and psychoanalytic perspectives. Her excitement about writing and about psychoanalysis will prove contagious for her readers.
Since Bonnie Litowitz's early involvement in developing the University Forums at APsaA, she has encouraged JAPA to delight in multidisciplinary writing. She found Leslie Keith (a candidate at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis) and encouraged her participation in the January 2014 forum. Keith's essay is not a report but a commentary on James, Tóibín, Strouse, Orgel, and LaFarge, and on the aims and goals of novels and of psychoanalysis. I hope it will be followed by similar essays on this January's forum—“Terrorism/Violence,” with Jessica Stern, author of Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, Stephen Xenakis, retired brigadier general, psychiatrist, and psychological evaluator of Guantanamo “terrorist” detainees, and the psychoanalysts M. Gerard Fromm and Jane Tillman—and on two planned for June 2015 and January 2016. “The Unseen/Unheard: A Social Science Perspective” will be held in San Francisco in June, with the South African sociologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, author of A H