The highlight of this year's fall meetings, to be held December 13-17 at New York's Waldorf-Astoria, will be four major panels organized around a single theme: Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: Similarities and Differences. The format, a familiar one in recent years, allows for the in-depth consideration of a topic of major importance to analysts in an age when it is common to use a variety of therapeutic modalities.
Panel I, Conceptual Overview, is to be chaired by Robert Wallerstein and will include Paul Dewald, Leo Rangell and Herbert Schlesinger. Panel II, Indications, Contraindications and Initiation, will be chaired by Henry Bachrach, with John Gedo, Robert Gillman and David Sachs as panelists. Panel III, Therapeutic Technique, will find Phyllis Tyson in the chair, with Melvin Bornstein, Steven Levy, Edward Weinshel and Martin Willick contributing. Mardi Horowitz will chair Panel IV, Termination and Outcome Evaluation, with Judy Kantrowitz, Sydney Pulver and Morton Shane as panelists.
For the plenary sessions Leo Rangell, a perennial provocateur, will deliver the clinical presentation, entitled simply “Castration.” Peter Loewenberg, Ph.D., will give the applied psychoanalysis presentation, “The Creation of a Psychoanalytic Scientific Community: The Burgholzli, Zurich, 1902-1912.” Dr. Lowenberg, a fully trained analyst with a long standing interest in modern European cultural and intellectual history, is a psycho-historian and professor of history at UCLA.
The Meet-the-Author seminar will feature Lawrence Friedman and his recently published book, The Anatomy of Psychotherapy. Melvin Bornstein will moderate, with John Gedo and Theodore Jacobs as discussants. Jacobs describes the book as a “fascinating, original contribution, the product of an original, provocative, and stimulating thinker.”
A number of presentations will address the relevance of infant observation and child and adolescent treatment to adult psychoanalysis. Charles Brenner and Stanley Greenspan will meet in a Psychoanalytic Dialogue to present their views on the subject. Theodore Shapiro, who describes the participants as men with overlapping interests in these issues who should nonetheless provide “a sharpening of differences,” will moderate in what should be a lively squaring off. In addition, Peter Blos, Sr., will address the Psychoanalytic Forum on the topic, “The Place of the Adolescent Process in the Analysis of Adults.” John Munder Ross will moderate. Peter Wolff, appearing before the Association for the first time in several years, will use the Seminar for Psychoanalysts to discuss issues raised in his book Development of Behavioral States and the Expression of Emotions in Early Infancy. Finally, Robert Emde will be joined by Joy Osofsky of New Orleans in the presentation of a videotaped discussion entitled “Observing Emotional Communication in One- to Three-Year-Olds.”
This year, three two-day workshops, available for preregistration, will emphasize in-depth clinical work. Paul Gray will lead one on helping analysands observe and understand their responses to intrapsychic conflict. Stephen Firestein and Joseph Schachter will concentrate on termination issues, and Glen Gabbard and Henry Smith will address the treatment of mental health professionals.
Once again, Bruce Sklarew will present the audio-visual part of the program. Surrealism in Film is this year's topic, and the featured presentation will be a Thursday-night showing of Vigo's Zero for Conduct, a classic film depicting rebellion in a boys' school. Discussion group presentations will take up Cocteau's Orpheus and Bunuel's The Exterminating Angel. Discussants include David Carlson and an invited guest, T. Jefferson Kline, Ph.D., Professor of Modern Foreign Languages and Literature at Boston University and the author of Bertolucci's Dream Loom, a psychoanalytic study of cinema.
In addition, Jon Meyer will continue his Research in Progress working sessions, and Paul Mosher will repeat his popular discussion group on the use of personal computers for psychoanalytic studies. Finally, the Seminar for Psychiatric Residents has been expanded to four meetings, under the direction of Melvin Bornstein. It will address the topic “How Psychotherapy Works: A Psychoanalytic Perspective.”
Members who have not attended meetings of the Association in recent years may be surprised at the many changes initiated by the Program Committee during the five-year tenure of outgoing chairman Paul Dewald. These include the development of “single-theme meetings,” using the four-panel form. The first of these programs, on psychic conflict, has already been published in monograph form as a supplement to the. Journal. The Program has increased the use of primary clinical data in the presentations. In addition, audio-visual presentations have been increased and improved. Scheduling has been adjusted to allow participation in four discussion groups, if desired, rather than two, and determined efforts have been made in the selection of papers, panelists and discussants to broaden the representation of the various theoretical and clinical points of view now current in psychoanalysis. Dr. Dewald is succeeded by Arnold Rothstein, who is already directing preparations for the spring meeting to be held over May 9–13, 1990, again at the Waldorf-Astoria.
Lynne Moritz