This year we will be experimenting with both a new month (February) and a new hotel (New York Hilton). Who says psychoanalysts can't be flexible? However, let me add a reassuring note: The format of the 2018 National Meeting will continue the same array of features that have made our meetings so compelling. And, of course, there will be many opportunities to reconnect with cherished colleagues and to meet new ones.
We are fortunate, this February, to have two plenary speakers who have been most influential in their clinical as well as theoretical thinking: Stanley Coen giving a talk titled “Between Action and Inaction: The Space for Analytic Intimacy” and Steven Cooper, who will speak on “Playing in the Darkness: Use of the Object and Use of the Subject.”
Throughout the meeting, there will be four large panels, including one that reexamines psychoanalytic “Reconstruction as Compared with a Two-Person Perspective,” featuring Leon Hoffman, Harold Blum, Richard Lane, Andrew Rosendahl and Donnel Stern. This panel had been originally proposed by the late Richard Gottlieb.
Another innovative panel, “Our Planets/Ourselves,” will be chaired by Lynn Zeavin, and the panelists will include Zeavin as well as Lindsay Clarkson, John Kress and Donald Moss.
There will be a panel on “African-Americans and Psychoanalysis: What's Going on and How Can We Talk about It?” with several prominent speakers, including Kirkland Vaughans, Anton Hart and Dorothy Holmes. Another large panel will examine “Contemporary Conceptualizations of the Analytic Frame,” with outstanding speakers Daria Columbo, Peter Goldberg, Lucy LaFarge, and chaired by Alfred Margulies.
The Child/Adolescent Panel will feature Harvard scholar Maria Tatar, who will present her work on literary and psychoanalytic perspectives on fairy tales, with particular attention paid to the mother-daughter relationship. A group of child/adolescent psychoanalysts—Alexandra Harrison, Jane Hanenberg and I—as well as author John Dau, will be on hand to provide commentary.
We are particularly fortunate this year to offer a special symposium examining the use of music and poetry to give voice to generations silenced by the overwhelming impact of trauma. Spyros Orfanos and Darlene Ehrenberg will examine these phenomena, highlighting means by which the analyst can be tuned into the power of silence in communicating dissociated experience. This will be followed by a short musical performance. Don't miss it!
The Presidential Symposium will focus upon a particularly timely and controversial topic: the role of the psychoanalyst in the public domain and its ethical dimensions. This program will feature an outstanding group of speakers who will include Jonathan Lear, Jerrold Post and Kerry Sulkowicz. Our president, Harriet Wolfe, will chair what is likely to be a most lively meeting.
No APsaA meeting would be complete without our selection of Two-Day Clinical Workshops whose quality has been unsurpassed. APsaA will have a waiting list available, on its website, for any workshops which are closed now. The clinical workshops include: one chaired by Irene Cairo, which will feature discussant Jorge Canestri; Joseph Lichtenberg will chair a workshop in which Arthur Gray will present clinical material to Frank Lachmann; Henry Friedman will chair a workshop on psychotherapy in which Katherine Williams will present a case to Steven Seligman; Richard Zimmer has invited Mitchell Wilson to serve as featured discussant for his clinical workshop; Donald Moss has invited Michael Feldman to serve as featured discussant for his workshop; and Darlene Ehrenberg has invited Spyros Orfanos to serve as featured discussant for her workshop. Monisha Akhtar, chair of the Child/Adolescent Workshop, has invited Frances Arnold to present a case to Charles E. Parks.
The University Forum has long been a much anticipated feature of each APsaA meeting. This February, Stanley Coen has organized Part II of a series on “Racism in America” in a program featuring Michelle Stephens, Jonathan Holloway, Claudia Rankine and Jeffrey Prager.
Meet-the-Authors is another popular feature of our APsaA meeting, and Henry Friedman has organized a compelling line-up of newly published books bound to have an impact upon psychoanalytic thought. There will be books by Steven Seligman, Donald Moss and Arthur Nielsen.
We also are delighted to announce that Mark Solms, along with Charles Fisher, have organized a new series of programs devoted to research, which will be inaugurated at this meeting. They are chairs of a new department devoted to helping us stay abreast of research, both theoretical and applied, thus demonstrating the benefits of integrating a research perspective with our clinical work.
Of course, no meeting could be complete without the many rich discussion groups, symposia and original papers included throughout the meeting. Each of these programs is an indispensable part of our conference, and I encourage you to consider submitting papers and panels for future meetings.
In closing, I would like to congratulate my Program Committee colleagues for organizing another brilliant meeting.