An Interview with Program Chair Henry Smith

Lawrence Friedman: Many members know you chiefly as the essayist editor of the Psychoanalytic Quarterly, the prolific author of subtle articles on psychoanalytic theory and practice, an extremely popular panel chair, and a speaker in wide demand. What induced you to pile on to these the complicated and largely self-effacing task of program chair?

Henry Smith: I'd been on the Program Committee for many years and had loved the work, but the chair has the very different role of coordinating and facilitating others in achieving their objectives, a bit like being an editor or, for that matter, the director of a play, and that appealed to me immensely. I admired the way my predecessors, Chuck Rothstein, Owen Renik, and Glen Gabbard performed that task. When I first joined the Program Committee years ago, I noticed right away that it must be one of the more exciting places to be in the organization.

Imagine putting 35 people in a room together, each with different approaches to the material, and asking them to talk about a specific topic that might develop into a panel. Some of the conversations were better than the panels themselves. Paul Dewald was the first chair I worked with, if only briefly, after Dick Simons, who was president at the time, appointed me to the committee. Paul used to ask committee members to come up with panel topics that the whole committee would then brainstorm about. It was exciting. Subsequently, Chuck asked that panel proposals be written up ahead of time. This did not cut back on the creative brainstorming but added a more scholarly focus. I loved being a part of all this, especially since I had come from a small institute (the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East) that had no society at the time, so this was my introduction to the larger world of psychoanalysis. Eventually, as chair of various panels, chair of the Workshops for Clinicians, the weekend programs the Association used to put on in different cities, and North American co-chair for the IPA Congress in Santiago, I had the opportunity to help people organize and develop their ideas. So when the chance to chair the Program Committee of the Association was offered to me, I was very excited about it.

LF: I'll bet many members know you most personally from your famous Two-Day Clinical Workshops, where we all appreciated how you faithfully drew out from invited psychoanalytic notables their sometimes unarticulated or unfamiliarly formulated rationales and principles of technique. I suppose that eliciting skill will be useful on a larger and more complicated scale in shaping the overall program. Is that one of the reasons you took the job?

HS: As a matter of fact, when I accepted the program chair it felt like a smooth transition from the Two-Day Workshops that I had coordinated for almost 20 years. The idea for them came out of a workshop Paul Gray led at the meeting in New Orleans in 1991 in an effort to teach his own approach to clinical material. Jack Arlow was there and afterwards spoke with a number of us about how much he disagreed with Paul's approach, finding it mechanistic and unempathic. I remember him saying to Estelle Shane, “You know about empathy. Why didn't you say something?” I asked Jack if he wanted to lead a similar workshop, and he jumped at the chance. I realized this was an opportunity for analysts from different parts of the country to see how our best-known senior teachers work with clinical material—teachers whom we only glimpsed in the literature or on a distant panel. We started with senior people in this country: First Jack Arlow, then Leo Rangell, Charlie Brenner, Leo Stone, Arnie Cooper, Helen Meyers, Roy Schafer, Merton Gill, Ed Levenson, Jim Grotstein and others. Gradually we broadened out to include prominent international analysts, some from the UK, Betty Joseph, Michael Feldman, Ron Britton, John Steiner, Elizabeth Spillius, Edna O'Shaughnessy, Michael Parsons, David Tuckett, and Peter Fonagy, and some from the rest of Europe and Latin America, Andre Green, Paul Denis, Alain Gibeault, Patrick Miller, Nino Ferro, Jorge Canestri, Stefano Bolognini, and Vincenzo Bonaminio, among others. At the meeting this January in New York, Nino Ferro, Michael Parsons, and David Tuckett will all return for a second visit.

In the program as a whole, there is a chance to pursue not just the general mission of helping people realize their ideas, but also some of the same goals that we had for the Two-Day Workshops. In the general program we will continue our effort to involve as many people as possible with different points of view focused on shared clinical material.

We want to see how different analysts and different communities actually work, and how they think about what we see with our own eyes. We know that people can disagree violently about large abstract theoretical ideas, but in the back of my mind there is always the question of whether, examined at the finest level of clinical detail, analysts work similarly or not. I think they do, more than they realize. But we want to identify both similarities and differences in order to challenge familiar stereotypes.

LF: While we're on the subject of the Two-Day Workshops, it's an irony that so many of us regarded them as the high point of the Association's meetings that their necessarily limited enrollment was experienced by those who couldn't get in as another exclusionary feature of the organization, and they threatened mayhem. The popularity of your workshops became a problem for the program chair, and that, now, is you. What do you propose to do about it?

HS: Even before I became chair we had started cloning the Two-Day Clinical Workshops, and now we have three adult and one child Two-Day Workshop, and a psychotherapy workshop. The Adult Two-Day Workshops are chaired by Irene Cairo, Nancy Chodorow, and Sharon Zalusky; Christine Kieffer now chairs the child workshop and Alan Pollack the psychotherapy one. The problem always was that in order to keep the discussion intimate and to control for privacy and confidentiality, we had to limit the enrollment in each workshop. We hope the increased numbers will allow most people to attend the workshops they want.

But we will not confine this sort of close examination of clinical data to workshops. I have noticed in recent years that analysts from different schools are much readier to talk to each other and seek understanding across ideological lines, rather than trying to simply assert, defend, or defeat one position or another. Even analysts who once seemed to share only mutual scorn seem friendlier and more patient with each other, and more willing to regard each other as colleagues with a common task without constantly asking, “Is this really psychoanalysis?” People are surprised to find such good teachers among those they used not to understand at all. Of course, there are many of us trying to make sense of the pluralism in contemporary psychoanalysis. Your own focus, Larry, on the way in which each clinical approach is an attempt to solve certain problems, but leaves others lurking in the room, implicitly puts all theory and technique on a level playing field. And from a programmatic point of view, credit for the current openness must go to the previous program chairs, who insisted that analysts from outside the Association be included in our programs, and to individuals, such as Arnie Richards, for his series of broadly inclusive symposia.

LF: Does that mean that you intend to convert meetings of the Association into a specialized study of process across ideological lines, Harry? Will we no longer have panel discussions? Will there be no more theoretical discussions? Will you shun comfortable discussion among like-minded analysts? Will the program forget about society at large, other academic disciplines, and the humanities? Will we have only a clinical focus?

HS: No. Not at all. The meetings of the Association have become increasingly broad in an effort to represent the interests of all segments of the organization. The challenge is to maintain this breadth without losing a core focus on the clinical psychoanalytic work that draws analysts to our meetings from both inside the organization and outside of it. In terms of our broader efforts, I plan to elaborate the important focus on research that we have introduced into the programs with research symposia and panels, poster sessions, and prizes. The job of coordinating these efforts falls to Steve Roose, who is our research coordinator on the Program Committee.

Our symposia, coordinated by Stuart Twemlow, are a very successful feature designed to focus on psychoanalysis outside of the consulting room, psychoanalysis in the community and in the world at large. We have a Presidential Symposium at each meeting that, along with other aspects of the program, features speakers who address matters of major national import. Our University Forum, coordinated by Stan Coen, brings together analysts and members of the academic community to focus on topics of shared interest. Psychoanalysis is very much alive in university classrooms, but the discourse is different, and this challenges us to have conversations across these different frames of reference so that we can try to understand and perhaps revitalize each other. And I have not even mentioned our Meet-the-Author formats and plenaries that Bonnie Litowitz helps shape, Glen Gabbard's Special Symposia, and our special programs for candidates, fellows, trainees, and students, different parts of which Joan Wheelis, Jenny Stuart, Kim Leary, Hilli Dagony-Clark, and Phoebe Cirio have all developed in recent years.

LF: That sounds like a full load. How do you keep track of it all?

HS: I couldn't do it without Carolyn Gatto in the National Office. She is amazing.

LF: What about the format of our meetings? I have the impression that members are not as ready to sit motionless for hour after hour of being talked at about something they might understand better in print. People seem to want to hear and participate in live discussion.

HS: I inherit a mandate, which I enthusiastically support, to break up the old ritual of speaker after speaker droning on and on. We have introduced such interactive formats as interviews, chairmen who challenge panelists with live questions, features of really short presentations followed by “break-out” sessions of small group discussions in a room full of roundtables. These have all been successful. But there is still room for panels in which papers are limited to 15-20 minutes, as long as the sequence of papers is broken up with plenty of discussion time among the panelists and with the audience. Despite my feeling that the close examination of clinical material is what keeps us honest and challenges traditional assumptions, there is room for panels that focus on the careful examination of theory. We are a theoretical, practical, speculative, scientific, humanistic, and philosophical profession, and our programs should reflect that rich tapestry. I look forward to a wide variety of formats, and see no reason why we shouldn't experiment widely—if not wildly. I think meetings are the heart and soul of our organization. We cannot afford to be boring. I hope the members will let me know when we're not succeeding.

LF: Speaking of heart and soul, are we going to continue to have two meetings per year in January and June?

HS: It depends to some extent on whether we can afford it, and that, in turn, depends on the membership. This coming June we have a very exciting program planned for Washington, DC, and we are working on one for June 2011. These two spring meetings will give those members who want two meetings a year a chance to vote with their feet. If the registration is large enough, it will make a real statement in terms of the membership's wishes and its willingness to support the June meeting financially.

LF: How else can the membership let you know about programs they want?

HS: Very simply by handing in their evaluation forms. That's not just for CME credits, but to let us know whether they are getting their money's worth, to let us know what they want to see, and to give us new ideas.

LF: What about directly suggesting items for the program? Is that something everybody should consider?

HS: Absolutely. I would like everyone to consider submitting papers for individual presentation and panel proposals. Guidelines for submission are on the Association Web site (). Papers should be 40 minutes reading time. Panel proposals should be one or two pages, outlining the topic to be covered, the format, and some suggested panelists. We are currently working with four panel formats: (1) short 15-20 minute papers with discussion time built in throughout the panel, (2) a clinical case with several formal discussants, (3) a series of questions on a particular topic, posed by a chair with 5-7 minute answers from panelists, and (4) combinations of the above.

All panel proposals are distributed to the committee and voted on. Those with the highest number of votes are discussed a year in advance of any given meeting, and four are chosen by blind vote. The person who proposes a panel is encouraged to come to the program committee meeting if his or her panel is going to be discussed. But it is important to bear in mind that all panel proposals are shaped in discussion by the committee, including the choosing of panelists, in an effort to build the best and most wide-ranging panel. In all formats we will try to get the audience involved early, with as much spontaneous discussion among panelists as possible. We want our programs to be more interactive. And as I have said, we hope to people it with participants from all over the world.

LF: You seem to be talking about large events. Isn't that kind of boring in itself?

HS: It could be, but keep in mind that for many people the heart of the program is the time when they get to meet in small ongoing discussion groups on particular topics. We try to accommodate as many discussion groups as possible within the limits set by available hotel space. At the last New York meeting we had 100 discussion groups. I think this highlights, again, the value of conversation in advancing our field. Intellectual and social conversation is inseparable at our meetings and is probably the greatest value our meetings hold for us and for the future of psychoanalysis.

LF: Thank you. I'm more enthusiastic than ever: See you in January in New York.

HS: Thank you, Larry.