Soon we will once again gather at the Waldorf for APsaA's National Meeting. We hope you will join us for a conference that promises to be truly engaging, stimulating and lively—and will highlight many of the clinical, theoretical and socially relevant issues in our professional practice.
Having reviewed the January 2015 meeting program, I am struck once again by the array of talent, expertise and capacity for innovation alongside respect for tradition that is available to all who participate in this meeting. Be sure to examine the preliminary program that is bursting with plenary sessions, panels, discussion groups, scientific papers and the University Forum. We also are proud to offer programs of special interest for candidates, students and trainees.
Here are a few of the many highlights to anticipate.
Plenaries: Adrienne Harris will be our plenary speaker on Friday morning, with an address on '“Language Is There to Bewilder Itself and Others: The Clinical and Theoretical Contributions of Sabina Spielrein.” On Friday afternoon, Jonathan Lear will present a plenary address on “The Fundamental Rule and the Fundamental Value of Psychoanalysis.”
Mark Smaller will address us at the Presidential Symposium on “Psychoanalysis and Diversity: A Means to Move Forward.” As you can see, the range of these sessions will enable us to look back to the past, look to the future, and also examine what has been bedrock in psychoanalytic thought and practice.
Similarly, each large panel will explore an aspect of a fundamental value of psychoanalytic thinking and work:
Panel I, with Mitchell Wilson, Catalina Bronstein, Steven Cooper, Jay Greenberg and Lucy LaFarge, will examine how the analyst's disappointment, grief and sense of limitation affect the analytic process.
Panel II will focus on how collective trauma and transgenerational history play out in the transferential field of the analytic relationship, with contributions from Stephen Seligman, Orna Guralnik, Eyal Rozmarin, Dorothy Holmes and Donald Moss.
Panel III, with Stanley Coen, Peter Goldberg, Aisha Abbasi, Rosemary Balsam and Judith Yanof, asks the questions, “How Much Needs to Change in an Analysis? And How Do We Get There?”
Panel IV, “Three Analysts on Freud's ‘Observation on Transference Love,’” including Ellen Pinsky, Peter Goldberg, Alison Phillips, and Sidney Phillips, reexamines the phenomenon of the patient falling in love with the analyst, noting that this event is no less startlingto contemporary analysts than it was to Freud.
It is noteworthy that each panel looks at crucial aspects of the interplay of the transference-countertransference field.
The Child and Adolescent Panel, which takes place on Saturday morning, will invite the audience to think with several distinguished analysts and academicians about the development of intentionality and its importance to development in general. This panel, proposed by Molly Romer Witten, will feature (in addition to Witten) Arnold Modell, Phyllis Tyson and Alexandra Harrison.
In addition to large panels and plenaries, our program will feature several other sessions that will offer some groundbreaking papers by leading psychoanalysts and professors and opportunities for audience participation.
Symposiums: First, there will be a symposium that highlights the work of Sherry Turkle: “Left to Our Devices: The Impact of Digital Conversation,” in which Turkle will assert that technology affects “not just what we do but who we are.”
William Myerson and Harriet Wolfe will present a symposium that addresses the importance of applying psychoanalytic thinking to organizations in crisis, including psychoanalytic organizations.
Finally, there will be a symposium that will offer perspectives on climate change and our psychological environment with speakers that include Lynne Zeavin, Lindsay Clarkson, W. John Kress and Donald Moss.
Innovations, organized by Bruce Sklarew, includes Joseph Lichtenberg and Peter Loewenberg joining Sklarew in honoring Lucian Freud's remarkable life and innovative artistic style.
And, of course, we can look forward to such favorites as the University Forum and the many new and classic Discussion Groups that are key ingredients of our conference, with opportunities for intimate engagement with psychoanalytic ideas as well as the chance to meet new colleagues and enjoy reunions with old friends.
I urge you to explore the preliminary program and strongly recommend that you register early since many events fill up quickly.
I look forward to seeing you in New York.
Christine C. Kieffer, Ph.D., A.B.P.P., APsaA Program Committee chair, is faculty at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis and Rush University Medical School and Medical Center in Chicago. She is in private practice in Chicago and Winnetka.