In January 2011, just one week before the American Psychoanalytic Association gathers in New York to celebrate its 100th anniversary, another historic milestone will be marked at the convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Los Angeles, when for the first time APsaA will officially sponsor a session in its capacity as an Allied Organization of the nation's foremost professional body of language and literature scholars, founded in 1883 and with 30,000 members in 100 countries.
The designation of APsaA as an Allied Organization of MLA is the culmination of an initiative arising from the Committee on Psychoanalysis and the Academy, which I have the honor of co-chairing with Jeffrey Prager, professor of sociology at UCLA and co-dean of the New Center for Psychoanalysis in Los Angeles. Our committee, an outgrowth of past president Prudence Gourguechon's “10,000 Minds Project,” is one of 10 committees that constitute the recently established Education Department of APsaA, headed by Stephen Sonnenberg. The successful outcome of our application to the MLA would not have been possible without Debra Steinke Wardell, APsaA's manager of Education and Membership Services, who compiled and submitted the voluminous required materials.
As an Allied Organization of MLA, APsaA is guaranteed one 75-minute session on the program of the annual convention, held on a rotating basis in major American cities. Because the convention will take place this year in Los Angeles, we invited APsaA member Elyn Saks, of the Gould School of Law at the University of Southern California, to be our inaugural featured speaker. Saks, the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship, will discuss her riveting book, The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey through Madness, about her experiences as a person with schizophrenia and the benefits she has derived from being a patient in psychoanalysis. By an auspicious coincidence, APsaA president Warren R. Procci lives in Pasadena and has graciously agreed to offer welcoming remarks to the MLA members who will undoubtedly flock to hear Saks.
Photo: Edward Savaria, Jr., courtesy of the Modern Language Association
In addition to one guaranteed session, Allied Organizations can propose up to two jointly sponsored sessions at MLA conventions. Almost immediately, the president of the Dickens Society of America contacted me to inquire whether APsaA would be interested in collaborating on a session on “Dickens and Psychoanalysis.” The latter proposal was accepted, so besides the principal APsaA session, which I will chair, APsaA will also appear in the MLA program as a co-sponsor of the Dickens session, to be chaired by John Jordan of the University of California, Santa Cruz, at which I will give a paper alongside experts in Dickens from the University of Toronto and the University of California, Santa Barbara.
In order for an organization to qualify for allied status, it must have held special sessions in at least two previous MLA conventions. APsaA was able to meet this requirement because, over the past decade, in 2002, 2004, 2006, 2008, and 2009, I chaired a series of such sessions to bring together the academic and clinical worlds of psychoanalysis. Also at the 2009 meeting, the executive director, Rosemary Feal, invited me to organize a Creative Conversation, “Between Psychoanalysis and Poetry,” where Salman Akhtar, a poet as well as a psychoanalyst, appeared with poet and critic Alicia Ostriker, a two-time
Peter L. Rudnytsky, Ph.D., L.C.S.W., is an Honorary Member of APsaA, corresponding member of the Institute of Contemporary Psychoanalysis in L.A., and candidate at Emory. He is professor of English at the University of Florida and the editor of American Imago.
National Book Award finalist. In the Creative Conversation, first Ostriker read her poem, “The Exchange,” on which Akhtar offered an impromptu commentary, and then Akhtar read his poem, “A World Without Seasons,” to which Ostriker responded—neither having seen the other's poem beforehand—followed by a lively give-and-take with the audience. [See “Poetry: From the Unconscious,” on this page.]
To ensure that both the privilege and the responsibility of representing APsaA at future MLA conventions will be shared, the Academy Committee has formed a subcommittee of its members who are literature scholars. At present, the other members of this subcommittee are Vera J. Camden, Mari Ruti, and Paul Schwaber, and we would be glad to know of anyone else who might be interested in working with us. I would like to take this opportunity to thank not only Jeffrey Prager and Stephen Sonnenberg for their good counsel and steadfast support but also Dean Stein, APsaA executive director, and the members of the Finance Committee and the Executive Council who, by approving our budget request, have demonstrated a visionary commitment to the long-term success of this unprecedented initiative.
Although a landmark event for APsaA, this affiliation with the Modern Language Association is but one of the many activities of the Committee on Psychoanalysis and the Academy, and of the Education Department as a whole, that aim to “widen the scope” of psychoanalysis in our second century by pioneering new forms of both outreach and “inreach” to bridge the gap that has in the past too often divided clinical practitioners of psychoanalysis from our colleagues in the humanities and the social sciences. A goodly number of these might well be induced to join our ranks, whether as Educator Associates or even as candidates at our institutes, once they realize that we have set before them an open door.