Chicago, Chicago: It could be your kind of town, too. The 101st Annual Meeting of APsaA has much to offer its members, as well as our colleagues and students from other organizations. In addition to a stimulating program to deepen our understanding of psychoanalysis, there will be valuable opportunities to reconnect with colleagues and to make new friends, to network and to collaborate. Opportunities for learning and earning continuing education credits will be offered in large panels, symposia, and the more intimate clinical workshops and discussion groups. The workshops and discussion groups will allow participants to enhance clinical skills and share work experiences with one another across a broad spectrum of colleagues, including allied mental health professionals, candidates, students, educators, and scholars.
At this conference, the Program Committee is experimenting with a mini-theme that will highlight aspects of immigration—theoretical, clinical, and sociocultural—in panels, workshops, and symposia throughout the meeting. We are pleased that the world-renowned scholar, Homi Bhabha, will present his work in the University Forum: “Immigration: Collision, Assimilation or Integration?” In addition to a lecture by Bhabha, there will be a presentation by the cultural anthropologist, Richard Sweder, as well as commentaries by Adrienne Harris, Robert Paul, and Carmela Perez. This University Forum will challenge participants to confront their biases toward foreign customs, as well as examine how the dominant group manages cultural practices of outsiders (immigrants), and will also discuss how minorities resist and adapt to pressures for assimilation.
There will be a panel that focuses on aspects of analyzing the children of immigrants featuring Stanley Coen, Aisha Abbasi, Shahrzad Siassi, Peggy Hutson, and Salman Akhtar. Their presentations will examine how similarities and differences between patient and analyst aid, hinder, or defend against the analytic work. A special panel on child and adolescent psychoanalysis will take place Saturday morning entitled, “Mothers, Children, and Immigration: Psychoanalytic Perspectives on Immigration.” which will feature Monisha Akhtar, Mali Mann, Benjamin Garber, Bhaskar Sripada, and Kerry Kelly Novick. These presenters will offer theoretical speculations on the structure of immigrant parenting and the dynamic of parent-child interaction. The presenters will assert that the challenges faced by an immigrant family may induce the clinician to make modifications and adjustments to clinical technique.
In addition to a stimulating program to deepen our understanding of psychoanalysis, there will be valuable opportunities to reconnect with colleagues and to make new friends, to network and to collaborate.
The large panels that delve into current theoretical controversies and offer a variety of clinical perspectives are enduring features of our conferences. This June, five offerings will highlight some of the cutting-edge issues of contemporary psychoanalysis. Friday afternoon's controversial panel on “Sexual Aberrations: Do We Still Need the Concept? If So, Then When and Why? If Not, Why Not?”, will feature Donald Moss, Sydney Phillips, Richard Simpson, and Avgi Saketopoulou. Each will present position statements, and then examine specific issues in a series of clinical vignettes.
Panel II will examine “Gay Male Desires and Sexualities: Clinical Encounters in the 21st Century” and will feature Gary Grossman, Paul Lynch, Gilbert Cole, and Lynne Zeavin, who will discuss the varied experiences and complaints of gay male patients. This panel will consider the psychological impact of contemporary culture on gay male identity, desires, and sexuality in the context of emotionally challenging analytic encounters.
Christine C. Kieffer, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis, where she teaches and supervises. She also is a member of the APsaA Program Committee as well as a member of the editorial board of JAPA.
As described above, the third large panel will address various technical aspects of analyzing the children of immigrants, with special consideration given to realistic problems of immigration, the need to aid the integration of the patients' origins with that of their new homeland, as well as examine how similarities and differences between patient and analyst may facilitate or interfere with therapeutic action.
Since the third panel takes up a specific class of issues that may even lead to a clinical impasse, perhaps it will prepare us for the fourth panel: “How to Help Get Stuck Analyses Unstuck,” a program that will feature the clinical work and wisdom of Rosemary Balsam, Dionne Powell, Francis Arnold, Stanley Coen, and Mitchell Wilson. The panelists will first focus upon three clinical vignettes of analyses that seem to have reached impasses and will demonstrate the process by which the analyst struggled to get the analytic couple unstuck and moving once again. The panelists will provide frank discussions of what they had to manage in themselves and in their patients in order to move the treatment forward. The fifth panel, also described above, explores the triadic relationship of mother, child, and immigration.
In each of these panels, there will be ample opportunity for discussion with panelists, with the formal presentations serving as a springboard for spontaneous dialogue among the panelists as well as engagement with the audience.
The Two-Day Clinical Workshops continue to be among the meeting's most popular and well-attended events. This June, we will feature three clinical workshops that are part of a “Series in Analytic Process and Technique” and one workshop on “Psychotherapeutic Technique and Process.” The first workshop will be chaired by Irene Cairo; the presenter will be Alison Philips and the discussant will be Danielle Quinodoz. The second workshop will be chaired by Sharon Blum; the presenter and discussant are yet to be determined as TAP goes to press. The remaining workshop in the analytic series will be chaired by Richard Zimmer, and the discussant will be Steven Cooper (the presenter is yet to be determined). The clinical workshop on “Psychotherapy Technique and Process” will be chaired by Alan Pollack; Dale Gody will present clinical material and the discussant will be Jose Saporta.
I will chair the Child and Adolescent Two-Day Clinical Workshop. Daniel Prezant will present case material and Phyllis Tyson will serve as the discussant.
This June, Warren Procci will chair the Presidential Symposium that features Congressman Patrick J. Kennedy and the “One Mind for Research Campaign.” The project's current mission is to improve treatment of traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder among veterans. To learn more about this effort see the box below and visit .
We are proud to present as this year's plenarist, Stuart Twemlow, who will give an address on “Community-Based Psychoanalysis.” Twemlow will discuss the history of community-based psychoanalysis and will examine the commonalities and differences between clinical psychoanalysis and community-based interventions. He will make a case for the utility and relevance for this subspecialty of psychoanalysis.
Jonathan Lear, a distinguished philosopher and psychoanalyst, will discuss his recent book, A Case For Irony. He will consider how humans unconsciously pursue life plans that are of essential importance to them but which are often at odds with their conscious understanding of what matters. Lear also will explore the concept of irony and how it can be clinically useful.
A special Candidates Forum, “Developing a Psychoanalytic Mind and Identity” will offer reflections by Carlos Almeida, Deisy Boscan, Robin Deutsch, Ilene Dyller, Navah Kaplan, and Vanessa Sinclair. The panelists will describe personal and clinical experiences that were central in shaping their identity as analysts.
We are pleased to feature a film workshop that examines the Ingmar Bergman film, Persona, and includes a discussion by Kenneth Newman and Bruce Sklarew. The presenters will look at the variety of defenses against merger and homoeroticism.
We also will offer a symposium on psychoanalysis and neuroscience, “How a Comprehensive Psychoanalytic Theory Can Integrate Clinical Observations and Neuroscience Experiments in the Investigation of Unconscious Processes and Primary Process Thinking.” This symposium, chaired by George Fishman, will feature a presentation by Howard Shevrin that will demonstrate how two basic assumptions—the existence of the unconscious and that unconscious processes follow different rules of thought from conscious processes—are supported by experimental evidence.
In addition, there will be a workshop, “Website Marketing to Grow Your Practice,” with Mark Smaller, William Braun, Gail Saltz, and Greer Van Dyck. This workshop will offer participants a basic understanding of website marketing and how to make use of it.
The Committee on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Issues will present a workshop, “Gender Shock: Do Not Believe What You Think,” co-chaired by Susan McNamara and Patrick Haggard. The presenters will be Robert Galatzer-Levy and Heidi Nast.
Nathan Szajnberg has been chosen to give this year's Ticho Memorial Lecture. His talk is entitled “Mimesis: Representations of Inner Life in Western Literature and Their Contributions to Psychoanalytic Views of Humankind.”
And, of course, there will be 48 discussion groups available, where participants can explore a wide array of topics relevant to practice, theory, and applied psychoanalysis. These will take place during Wednesday and Thursday of the meeting, throughout the day and evening.
The Annual Meeting includes much more than these highlights and we urge you to examine the entire meeting brochure which is available online, through the APsaA website. Please note that pre-registration closes on May 21. If this will be your first time at an APsaA meeting, we recommend that you visit , which offers a useful guide for new attendees.