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It may have started in Athens, Greece, in 2007 or Madrid, Spain, in 2011. I can't remember exactly. Frank Summers and I were talking with enthusiasm about philosophy, poetry, music, and politics. It was the kind of enthusiasm that hinted of the revolutionary. The conversations also reminded me about what I love to talk about with psychoanalysts when I am not talking about the clinical.
Months pass, maybe years, and I get a call from the newly minted president-elect Frank to meet him for lunch in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There he tells me about his wish for a bold presidential initiative. He wants a task force on it and he wants me to chair it. I remind him that I have not been involved in Division 39 organizational affairs in over a decade and such an initiative needs someone savvy about the current state of the organization. He tells me not to worry. He tells me I have enough savvy. Yet, I still worry. I remember back in 1999 when I was president of the Division and I had a lot of organizational savvy. My initiatives on education were received well but had a short life span. I was so naïve then.
Over southwestern sandwiches we discuss Plato, Heidegger, Lorca, scientism, and the siege of the self in our culture. I know I'm talking to the right man. I agree to what Frank proposes because I feel the matter worthy. He did not have to work hard at convincing me. I liked his Chicago optimism. I love the humanities even though I have no special qualifications. I like taking actions that even indirectly nurture the living values and aesthetics of the humanities and psychoanalysis.
And so it came to be that at its summer meeting in August 2012 the Board of Directors (BoD) agreed to form a Task Force on the Humanities and Psychoanalysis with yours truly as chair. The esteemed, creative, and organizationally savvy Dana Castellano, Marilyn Charles, Heather-Any Indelicato, Henry Seiden, and Frank Summers (ex-officio) joined the Task Force and we went to work—thinking, talking, conduc