The Committee on Research and Special Training (CORST) launched its first annual essay prize ($1,000) and lecture for distinguished work in psychoanalysis and culture at the December 1997 meeting of The American in New York. Janice Coco, an assistant professor of art history at U.Cal.–Davis, presented the lecture and slide presentation “Exploring the Frontier From the Inside Out: A Psychoanalytic Reading of John Sloan's Nude Studies.” Sloan (1871–1951) was one of the “Ashcan Artists” who, working in New York in the early 1900s, broke with the values of the conservative art establishment to paint realistic scenes of everyday life.
Skillfully and sensitively applying the theories of D. W Winnicott, Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, and Didier Anzieu, Coco led her audience on a journey not through Sloan's familiar New York cityscapes but through the less familiar terrain of Sloan's late nude figures. Showing important connections between Sloan's conflicted family dynamics and his late turn to the nude figure, Coco established the crucial relation of Sloan's nude studies to his dominant presence within the American realist movement. Her work exemplified how psychoanalytic theories give us tools to understand both individual and cultural movements.
Coco's lecture was followed by a panel discussion in which members of CORST spoke of the committee's outreach to academics who are interested in psychoanalysis. This outreach takes form in such programs as the CORST essay prize competition and the newly established CORST training grant. Panel members Deanna Holtzman (outgoing CORST chair), Peter Loewenberg (current chair), Paul Schwaber, and Vera Camden discussed, in light of their individual experiences as clinicians, researchers, and teachers, the fine art of balancing careers in the university and the clinical setting. They repeatedly emphasized the importance of sustaining the interdisciplinarity that has enriched psychoanalysis from its founding. Within The American, this interdisclipinary focus is now nurtured by CORST training and programs.
Coco's lecture promises to be one in a long line of distinguished CORST presentations on psychoanalysis and culture held at the December meetings. These presentations promise also to be a much-needed opportunity for clinically trained academics and those interested in such training to come together in professional affiliation and collaboration.
Vera J. Camden, Ph.D., is an associate professor of English at Kent State University and a senior candidate at the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Institute.