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I immediately felt the bubbling energy when I stepped into the Washington, DC, hotel at which our most recent Spring Meeting, SEX (co-chaired by Jessica Joseph and Jessica Chavez), was being held. It was a familiar energy, a buzzing one that communicated excitement, anticipation, and even some trepidation as distant colleagues and dear friends gathered to perform this yearly ritual. The feeling had etched itself into me for a decade prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, making it impossible for us to meet in person for many consecutive years.
And yet, I was aware of a distinctly new vector of affect present this year. I wondered internally and then later had my hunch confirmed by many members who spoke to me throughout our time together at the conference: being in Washington, DC, only a few blocks from the White House during a live-televised genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza felt unnerving. After all, it was this Democrat-led White House that had been funding, aiding, and supporting the genocide; the same White House that had allowed Roe v. Wade to be overturned; the same White House that stood idly by as countless civil liberties had been stripped from US citizens, let alone the continued atrocities against immigrants and asylee seekers; the same White House that seemed to care very little about trans children and their futures, despite the Party's rainbow pins.
What, if anything, could our profession at large, Psychoanalysis in specific or our SPPP have to offer against this bleak backdrop? While many possible answers to these questions emerged at the conference, based on the request from this Special Issue's co-editors, I will focus my thoughts as an engagement with Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou's much anticipated and densely attended keynote, entitled, Sadisms: The Risk and the Ruse. This feels appropriate, as her rousing call was to lean into a psychoanalysis of which we demand a lot more and which, in turn, demands a lot more of us.
I have been thinking a lot lately a