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In this 2016 presidential election year for both the American Psychoanalytic Association and the United States, it seemed fitting to address a panel at the January APsA meetings in New York with this question: “What is American in American psychoanalysis?” Our effort to understand our ever evolving identity seems a distinctly American activity. Perhaps our need to understand our identity is heightened in election years, when we size up ourselves as Americans and tackle what it means to identify ourselves as such. It might be that a new American identity has emerged in this election cycle. Psychoanalysts seem to have a stake, too, in knowing who we are and where we are from, because as Americans we imagine that who we become is within our own making.
The panelists, Donald Moss, Glen Gabbard, and Bonnie Litowitz, together with Shelley Orgel as chair, responded to the panel title, “What Is American about American Psychoanalysis?” as both a statement and a question. The panelists were bold in their statements, defining the American character as a mix of cowboy and pragmatist. They also took a scholarly tack in defining the “American” nature of American psychoanalysis, by weaving together the early strands of American literary culture (Twain's Huck Finn), philosophy (Emersonian transcendentalism, the pragmatism of James, Dewey, and Peirce), and the observations made by Tocqueville on his 1831 visit to America, when he identified many aspects of our national character.