Two weeks after taking office as president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, Jon Meyer was speaking about the passion he and his wife, Ellie, have for prairie wildflowers. In Milwaukee, where he was a psychoanalytic pioneer for 20 years, helping establish a new APsaA institute, they started a “prairie flower garden as part of prairie reclamation.” The cup plant is a favorite. It grows to a height of 10 feet, with a huge spray of yellow blooms. The leaves around the stem are organized in such a way, Meyer said, that they collect water, water that settlers could drink when no other sources were to be found.
“Fortunately,” he added in an e-mail message that afternoon, “although [prairie wildflowers] are not native to Baltimore,” where he returned last year, reestablishing a psychoanalytic practice, “many do grow here, so I'm going at it now with cone flowers and bee balm to start, along with some butterfly weed.”
Native to Meyer are works to nurture, to transplant, to pioneer, and to re-imagine. He spoke of his passion for landscape photography. Getting to “where the photograph can be taken” with his Hasselblad camera is part of the joy. He has been represented by the Lakeshore Gallery in Milwaukee, where he has shown images taken out West, in canyon lands and in the Grand Tetons. He hiked to the spot where Ansel Adams set up his camera for his famous image, “The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.” It was “awe-inspiring,” Meyer said, “to go to the site where he did that and get your own version of it.” (Meyer's image, revisiting Adams, is printed above.)
His artist's respect for tradition re-imagined, as seen in his passion for wildflowers and for photography, addresses Meyer's psychoanalytic values. Although there is “some science” and “some technique” in psychoanalysis, he said, “the art of psychoanalysis is a very, very precious commodity.” The analytic hour must be engaged with creativity to “get some of those juices flowing…with another human being.” There is reason, he believes, “so many analysts do things that are creative and artistic.”
Sunset: Grand Teton and Snake River.
Two weeks earlier, the day he took office, Meyer emphasized to TAP that it is essential for APsaA to offer significant roles to those still in training. “I have long felt we need to put muscle behind and give respect to our associate programs.” He has initiated a public service internship, whose first recipient, Lynn Stormon, a student associate, has just completed her degree in clinical psychology. Stormon has been a key aide on Meyer's Ad Hoc Task Force on Access to Care.
He pointed with pride to the success of Brenda Bauer, a colleague from Milwaukee now in New York, who has been co-chair of the Student Associates Committee as well as of the Community Clinics Committee. Bauer is a student associate finishing the internship component of her degree in clinical psychology. She began as an administrator in the Department of Psychiatry at the Medical College of Wisconsin.
Meyer has also appointed Michael Slevin, an academic associate at the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis with a background in journalism, editor of The American Psychoanalyst. And he has arranged a position on the Steering Committee, “the president's cabinet,” for Julio Calderon, president-elect of the Affiliate Council, representing 25 to 30 percent of the APsaA membership. He emphasized that “we have a vast pool of talent and energy and expertise and dedication among our associates and affiliates,” which ought to be used.
Meyer supported the compromise bylaw amendment on membership. Asked in San Francisco about historical figures who inform his leadership style, he noted that he grew up in Abraham Lincoln's hometown of Springfield, Illinois. “Sometimes,” he said, “I have kept in mind his words before he was president…”that ‘a house divided against itself cannot stand.’ And I would like to be sure that those words never have to be uttered at APsaA.”
“One of the things we love” about growing wildflowers, Meyers said with his customary optimism, is “the butterflies that come with them.” In Baltimore, he said, they are starting to come along.