APsaA's 2012 National Meeting in January promises to be an exciting time for networking, collaboration, reunion, and learning. From large panel presentations to small discussion groups, there will be a variety of opportunities for our members, mental health professionals, students, educators, and scholars to make connections and expand our skills.
The Two-Day Clinical Workshops have been one of the most popular additions to the program. This year there will be six different workshops to choose from with discussants representing a range of clinical perspectives, including Virginia Ungar, from Buenos Aires; Stefano Bolognini, from Bologna; Rosemary Balsam; Jay Greenberg; Richard Almond; and Kirsten Dahl. Attendance is limited for these workshops and early registration is strongly recommended.
The panel presentations are also a very popular draw and January's five offerings feature both familiar and new faces. Friday afternoon's panel, “On the Use of Pre-Symbolic, Pre-Verbal Material: Where and How Does It Enter a Particular Analyst's Work?” features Virginia Ungar, Howard Levine, and Dominique Scarfone discussing South American, North American, and European perspectives on unrepresentable experiences in patients, with Henry Friedman as chair. Sydney Pulver, chair, Glen Gabbard, Helen Stein, and Steven Roose will explore contemporary approaches to treatment termination in Saturday morning's panel, “How and When Does Treatment End?”
How does desire enter the analytic encounter? How are development, gender, and culture reflected in our theories of desire? How is the analytic couple impacted by desire? These are a few of the questions that will be raised by Marilla Aisenstein from Paris, Carol Gilligan, Deborah Leupnitz, Don Moss, and Melinda Gellman in Saturday afternoon's panel, “Desiring and Being Desired.” Rosemary Balsam chairs Sunday's panel, “Siblings, Identity Development and Clinical Process,” with Christine Kieffer, Jeanine Vivona, Joseph Lichtenberg, and Salman Akhtar examining the influence of siblings in psychological development. The Child and Adolescent Panel, “A Comparison of the Role of Action in Adult and Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis,” will feature presentations of an adult and adolescent analysis for our consideration. Panelists include David Ott, Ruth Graver, Karen Gilmore, Eslee Samberg, and Mark Smaller, with Christine Kieffer as chair.
Now in its second year, the APsaA Artist/Scholar-in-Residence Program brings distinguished individuals to the National Meeting to conduct seminars and other exercises for analysts in attendance. We are especially fortunate this January to have the principals from the award-winning Austin design firm, Danze + Blood Architects as our Artists/Scholars-in-Residence. Elizabeth Danze is an associate professor in the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin. Her interests include contemporary architecture, equitable housing, and the architect's contribution to community and culture. She is the co-author of Psychoanalysis and Architecture (2007) and co-editor of Architecture and Feminism (1997). John Blood is a senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin. In addition to being a licensed architect, Blood also works as a concept artist, set designer, and storyboard artist in the film and video game industries. Danze and Blood will offer a variety of workshops and experiences beginning Friday evening.
The Theban Plays of Sophocles, including Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus, and Antigone, will take center stage in the meeting's University Forum. Psychoanalysts Melvin Lansky and Leon Wurmser will be joined by distinguished academics David Konstan, professor, Department of Classics at New York University, and Elizabeth Brobrick, visiting scholar, Wesleyan University.
Psychoanalytic explorations of film provide a unique window to the human condition and an opportunity to discover psychological and emotional meanings as represented in this artistic medium. Thursday evening's Film Workshop, chaired by Bruce Sklarew, explores love, sexuality, and splitting in a woman's erotic life in Jean Jacques Annaud's The Lover, with presenter Gabriela Goldstein from Buenos Aires. Star Trek: The Next Generation will be screened at Saturday afternoon's Film Workshop, “Trauma, Telepathy, and Alien Mothers,” followed by a presentation by Esther Rashkin on parent/child developmental issues and trauma as reflected in science fiction drama.
Also, be sure to visit the exhibit: The Psychoanalyst as Photographer and Artist, featuring photography, painting, sculpture, and jewelry by APsaA members, affiliates, associates, and IPA and IPSO members. This is the fourth annual exhibit organized by past-president Jon K. Meyer.
Gary Grossman, Ph.D., is a member and faculty at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis, where he also serves as chair of the Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy Education Division, and is a member of APsaA's Program Committee.
In his Friday morning plenary address, “Core Issues in the Treatment of Personality Disordered Patients,” distinguished psychoanalyst Dan H. Buie discusses the capacities necessary for maintaining basic self-stability that are typically lacking in our patients with personality disorders. Judith Chused will focus on the narcissistic vulnerabilities of the analyst that are inherent in the practice of psychoanalysis in her Friday afternoon plenary address, “The Analyst's Narcissism.” Use of the analyst's vulnerabilities to narcissistic injury and grandiose thinking in furthering the course of an analysis will be discussed.
Symposia explore the interface between psychoanalysis, society, and related disciplines and offer psychoanalysts an opportunity to dialogue with our colleagues in other fields. This year's National Meeting has a multitude of offerings, beginning with the Presidential Symposium, “Minding the Markets: How Psychoanalysis Can Help to Build New Economics and Finance Thinking.” Professor David Tuckett, a British analyst and former economist, will be in conversation with Robert Johnson, executive director of the Institute of New Economic Thinking, and APsaA president Warren Procci. The Community Symposium, “Psychodynamic Explorations of Power, Sexuality, and Identity in Twenty-First Century Variants of the ‘Black Nanny–White Master’ Syndrome,” features presentations by Dorothy Holmes and Carlotta Miles.
El Sistema is a Venezuelan music education program founded by José Antonio Abreu in 1978. The program began with 11 music students and has grown into a vibrant institution teaching 300,000 of Venezuela's poorest children, and has had a profound impact on the youth and their communities. In 2010 the New England School of Music founded the Abreu Fellows Program with the mission of establishing El Sistema-like programs throughout the United States. Abreu Fellows Marie Montilla and Patrick Slevin join psychoanalyst/musician Julie Jaffee Nagel for the symposium, “El Sistema/Abreu Fellows and Psychoanalysis: Beyond the Concert Hall and Consulting,” in an exploration of the transformative effect of ensemble music, study, and performance.
The Educators Symposium, “Executive Function Disorders and Disorders of the Self: Exploring No Man's Land,” chaired by Tillie Garfinkel, investigates the connection between neuropsychological deficits and deficits in the sense of self. Joseph Palombo, founding dean of Chicago's Institute for Clinical Social Work and faculty at Rush Neurobehavioral Center will present a new paradigm incorporating neuropsychological, relational, and intrapsychic dimensions of neurological disorders in children, with discussion by analyst and school consultant Stephen Kerzner.
Although the majority of APsaA's members are not directly involved in conducting empirical research, the scientific meetings offer a unique and rich opportunity for clinicians to learn about cutting-edge research relevant to our work. The research programs in January are too numerous to describe in detail here but include the Eighth Annual Scientific Paper Prize for Psychoanalytic Research: “Changes of brain activation pre-and post-short-term psychodynamic inpatient psychotherapy: An fMRI study of panic disorder patients”; the Eleventh Annual Poster Session: “Research Relevant to Theory and Practice in Psychoanalysis”; and the RAAPA-PPRS all-day Research Forum offering three distinct sessions on defense mechanisms, the placebo effect in psychoanalytic treatments, and psychodynamic psychotherapeutic approaches to psychosis. In addition, there is the Neuroscience Symposium, “Empirical Social Cognitive Neuroscience Research as a Basis for a Comprehensive Theory of Psychotherapeutic Change.”
The National Meeting includes much more than these highlights, so be sure to review the Preliminary Program, which is available on APsaA's Web site. Registration closes at midnight on Monday, December 19. For more information about attending a scientific meeting, especially if this will be your first time, I strongly recommend this Web page: .