Interdisciplinary Committee Report

The Interdisciplinary Committee was established to promote greater dialogue between psychoanalysis and other academic discourses, in an attempt to both invigorate psychoanalysis and enrich the thinking of other disciplines. Our main vehicle for accomplishing this aim has been a series of conferences aptly entitled “Out of the Tower, Off of the Couch.” The series has taken different formats over the last several years: paper presentations by academics using psychoanalytic theorizing discussed by clinicians with an academic bent; and a conference on philosophy and psychoanalysis with papers, panels, and discussions.

This last year, the event took a different tack when psychoanalysis went to the movies in a film series entitled “Mistaken Identities,” which took place over four different Saturdays from May to November. Drs. Marilyn Fabe, of the Film Studies Program at Berkeley, and Jed Sekoff, of PINC, opened the forum with stimulating papers on projective identification, the spectator, and identity, providing an intellectual frame for our collective viewing of Fritz Lang's 1944 film noir, Woman in the Window. Celeste Schneider, M. A., provided a thoughtful introduction and moderated the discussion. Homay King, C. Phil., led the second screening of Being John Malkovich, with her analysis of identity and the film star. Fight Club followed in an uncanny proximity to the events of September 11th, with Jeanne Wolff Bernstein, Ph.D., guiding us in a reflective conversation about memory, futurity, and trauma. The final film in the series was Boys Don't Cry, which I moderated in a discussion of fantasy, film, and the traumatic real. In our day-long closing Saturday, the four moderators presented clips of all the films, and Gayle Wheeler, Ph.D., of PINC, presented her views of spectatorship in an engaging paper entitled “The Love of Looking.”

A roundtable discussion involving all presenters and the audience made for a rousing close of a five-month long temporary community of thin