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The summer 2017 meetings of the American Psychoanalytic Association, held in Austin, Texas, opened with a flourish: a town hall discussion titled “Race and Borders: Crisis in Contemporary American Identity.” Even twenty years ago it would have been unthinkable to frame the meetings with such an overtly political message for members to deliberate and discuss. That it was done now attests the fact that psychoanalysis (and APsaA with it) is growing and changing along with the world around it, a world in which issues of multiple social identities and cultural forces are increasingly being recognized as inescapable dimensions of life and, consequently, of our clinical work.
Psychoanalysis has long been criticized, not always fairly, for being indifferent to the way social reality impinges on psychic life. One is reminded of Bowlby's description, at a 1987 colloquium at the University of Virginia, of his early work with the child of a psychotic mother (see Bretherton 1992). Melanie Klein, who supervised the case, had been so singularly focused on the child's fantasy production that she was unable to see what Bowlby saw quite readily—that fluctuations in the mother's psychosis (which he witnessed in the waiting room) were reflected in the child's psychic functioning. This difference led eventually to Bowlby's ostracism from the psychoanalytic fold and the loss to the field of a brilliant mind. One might argue that contemporary psychoanalysis is much more open to the idea that “real” relationships and broader social contexts influence and shape psychological experience and, indeed,