The Wild Thoughts conference was first conceived in September 2023. I was sitting in the auditorium at Goldsmiths University, at a conference marking The Site's 25th Anniversary, listening to three of the matriarchs of The Site – Angela Kreeger, Haya Oakley and Joanna Ryan – as they retold the history of The Site's origins.
All three have been formative feminist figures for me during my time at The Site. In December, we lost Angela Kreeger, whom we remember with enormous love and affection. Angela leaves a remarkable legacy as a feminist, psychoanalyst, teacher, supervisor, and mentor to so many of us at The Site and beyond.
As the three founder members recounted their memories of the traumatic split from the Philadelphia Association, they brought into view the shadow of an absence at the heart of The Site's project – the lack of feminist debates, the lack of a strong feminist challenge within The Site's discourse and positioning.
It struck me that we could, and should, wonder about a connection between the specificities of The Site's founding story and origins, and this subsequent silence over the following 25 years; and about what the implications have been of such a gap.
Like all institutions shaped under patriarchy, The Site has been a space of difficulty, of repression and exclusion around the feminine, the feminist, and female voices.
Recognising this stirred an anger in me that long predated that moment. As a female member of The Site, as a feminist in the consulting room, and as a woman living in a patriarchal world, these were voices that I had been waiting to hear for a very long time.
But in their retelling of The Site's story, I also heard a rallying cry. How could we not, now, finally confront this silence? And how might we do so, not only with anger and outrage, but with creativity and curiosity?
Because for all its inevitable complexities, I have found The Site to be a space of considerable freedom and generativity, where I have been able to express myself and take risks – not least in undertaking this project.
And so in June 2024, nine months after its conception, Wild Thoughts was brought into being, thanks to a talented and inspiring feminist Site collective: Luisa Bloom, Ana Minozzo, Chrysanthi Nigianni, Shireen Noor, and Angie Voela.
Over 200 people participated over the course of two extraordinary days at Birkbeck, University of London. Much of the feedback focused on the electric atmosphere; the collaborative nature of the debate; the variety and texture provided by the mix of media, including film, performance and visual art; and the diversity of voices. We heard from women based all over the world, including Brazil, Chile, the USA and Iran.
The Wild Thoughts conference – and the publishing of some of its papers in this edition of Sitegeist – are not a conclusion, but a beginning. They mark the start of a long overdue conversation within The Site – one whose reverberations will, I hope, reach far into the psychoanalytic community and beyond.
Andie Newman