Let’s start with Whitman, the American poet, as we begin thinking about our 2019 National Meeting. We are too much, too many, too multitudinous to think this meeting, or any meeting, can define us. Yet, we are singular enough, organized enough, committed enough, so that in this meeting, as in all of those to come, we will be making statements, locating ourselves, positioning American psychoanalysis on the American map.
At this meeting, we will be mapping ourselves in what seems to me at least four distinct zones. Here are some of our 2019 map’s major landmarks.
On the ground and on the streets: In Friday’s Presidential Symposium Lee Jaffe, Gilbert Kliman and Mark Smaller have us “Making a Difference in a Troubled World.” Also on Friday, Beverly Stoute chairs the University Forum’s continuing project, “Racism in America.” Saturday, Brenda Bauer chairs a Special Symposium organized around The Tale, a startling film illuminating sexual abuse and male-female power relations.
In our offices: This is where our trench work happens, where we all sweat the details. Seven separate two-day clinical workshops are dedicated to looking closely at how exactly we sweat. About 40-50 people peering in, listening, as senior discussants slowly reflect on the issues that make our work difficult but, contra the rumor, not impossible.
Panels on “Infantile Sexuality,” chaired by Alexandra Harrison and “Narcissism and its Discontents,” chaired by Jane Kite will likely resonate with the workshops.
Two other panels, “The Analyst’s Anxieties in a Skeptical Culture,” chaired by Glen Gabbard, and “What Can I Say?: Contested Words and Contested Thoughts in the Present Psychoanalytic Moment,” chaired by Mitchell Wilson and Lynne Zeavin, take up some of what makes us all jittery these days. Do we still belong in the American sociocultural scene and, if we do, what kind of language can we use? It is clear we have to muscle our way back to the table, we have to demonstrate we still belong, that our clinical work is precious, our cultural interpretations trenchant, our willingness to get our hands dirty undiluted.
Within our organization: We cannot afford complacency. Information proliferates all around us. Nothing is moving slower than it once did. We are obligated not only to catch up with contemporary theoretical, intellectual and cultural developments, but also to work our way toward the front of the pack, to learn now so as to perhaps lead in the future. Our developing Department of Psychoanalytic Education presents four events consistent with this aim: “Another Look at Therapeutic Action,” chaired by Linda Goodman, and three new programs—”The Child Congress,” organized by Karen Gilmore, “Psychoanalytic Scholarship Forum,” chaired by Erik Gann, and “Idea Incubation Workshop,” chaired by Richard Tuch.
In our discussion groups: These groups function as our small towns and villages, intimate gatherings focusing on particular shared interests, local in the most immediate sense, but national in the cumulative sense: 95 such groups, including 7 new ones, creating a steady buzz at our meetings—gathering sites, where ideas get tested, communities get formed, projects get hatched, plans get made.
Out of the dimness opposite equals advance, always substance and increase, always sex, Always a knit of identity, always distinction, always a breed of life.
—Walt Whitman,
Leaves of Grass
Our international guests will include our plenary speaker Anne Alvarez (London) while Jorge Canestri (Rome) and Irma Brenman Pick (London) will each be a discussant at a two-day clinical workshop.
Freud was famously pessimistic about the prospects for psychoanalysis in the United States. He foresaw an inhospitable environment, too caught up in pragmatic immediacies to bear the less immediate perspectives of the “slow magic” of psychoanalysis. Perhaps he was prescient. Those immediacies certainly impinge on what had once been our place of influence here. Meetings like this one offer all of us the chance to consider our place and to reconsider our changing contexts. The difficulties we face in the American landscape are congruent with the difficulties any of us might face in the clinical landscape. In both landscapes, our confidence gets shaken. We cannot rely on what has gotten us here. We have to respond to the here and now. We have to innovate, think, “learn from experience.” We’re meant to be good at all of that. Our national meeting gives us the chance to see where we stand, see what we face, see what we have, see what we can make, see what we’ll do.
As the new chair of the Program Committee, I would like to welcome all of you to the meeting. I hope to get to know you, and our Association, better, and I hope the program continues to get better at helping all of us grapple innovatively with the clinical and extra-clinical necessities of our American lives.