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How to address a social phenomenon, a genre called conference, or symposium? The two intersect in the purpose, to raise topics of common concern. They differ and vary as much as the expressions “he gathered all the men around table” and “a convivial discussion, especially as held in ancient Greece, after a banquet.” The notion of common concern may, or may not, imply conviviality; the absence of the table and presence of other-than-men may, or may not, occur. Still, someone has to initiate gathering. Guided by his analysand’s (Wilhelm Stekel) prompt, Sigmund Freud formed the Wednesday Psychological Society that met at Berggasse 19 (8:30 pm, after dinner) in the fall of 1902. As Max Graf (1942) reminisced, “First, one of the members would present the paper” (p. 470). Cakes, cigars, coffee were served. Discussion followed; criticism not spared.
The year 1908, when the group was reconstituted as the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society, marks another event meant to be informal. C. G. Jung gave it the name, no longer in use: First Congress for Freudian Psychology. Freud chose the location: Salzburg, Hotel Bristol. The congress—“discussion among delegates within particular discipline”—might be best remembered as the first elaborate explication of the Rat Man. About half of the attendees (of about 40 total) were not officially “disciplined.” We are left to ponder if the Analyst conveyed the case in merely 2 hours, or 5, on that single day, April 27.
Ever since, gatherings have been integral to our profession—a form of practice in which the relative solitude of the clinical endeavor seeks company, if not reassurance. Are there reasons to rethink our forms of sociality and our loyalty to them? Must one read a paper? To what society of fellows? Can we demand that psychoanalytic encounters, even (or especially) when rendered public, should still function psychoanalytically—disturb and enliven, but also, hold—rather than labor at maintaining the deadening safety of status quo?
The logic