You’re invited to attend our June meeting in San Diego, a border town in which our program will, naturally, highlight border issues.
Maybe our entire discipline can be conceptualized as a careful, sustained way of working at borders—Freud’s famous “frontiers”—of cataloguing what we have seen there and what we have been able to do. We have, I think, become expert in the various kinds of deformations, distortions, and mappings, that private border madness produces. These private madnesses, these private expressions of xenophobia, link with the public ones, each oriented by a felt necessity to preserve, at all costs, the Order of Things.
What, after all, is neurosis, but a madly conceived project whose aim is to protect an infantile conception of the proper Order of Things? And, at every level in which it is invoked, the Order of Things is always preserved, first by imagined, and then by enacted border violence.
And here we will be in June, in San Diego, close up to one of those borders. Coming to San Diego will give us all not only the chance, but, perhaps even present us with an unavoidable opportunity to think, reflect, and work together on the place of borders within psychoanalysis and, by indirection, the place of psychoanalysts within a world whose every contemporary border seems increasingly packed with xenophobic zealots on one side and their beseeching sufferers on the other.
Both the opening and closing sessions of our June meeting will be explicitly focused on borders. The opening session will be primarily conceptual; the closing one more clinical.
Chaired by Harry Polkinhorn, president of the San Diego Psychoanalytic Center, the opening session is entitled “The Border: A Conceptual Framework” and will feature Deyanira Torres Martin from Tijuana, William A. Nericcio, from San Diego and Laredo, and Victor Clark-Alfaro from Tijuana.
Chaired by Stephen Portuges, the closing session, entitled “Psychoanalysis at the Border in a Time of Hate,” will feature Paula Waisman and Mariela Shibley from San Diego, Silvia Rodriquez from Tijuana, Maureen Katz from Berkeley, and Nancy Hollander from Oakland.
Of course, we will have much more to offer than these special border-related programs. Judy Yanof, widely celebrated for her innovative clinical work and her galvanizing public presentations, will be giving us her Clinical Plenary address. The title of her paper is “The Edge of Chaos: Play in the Analytic Setting.” The discussants are Paula Bernstein and Alan Sugarman. The Ernst and Gertrude Ticho Memorial Lecture will be given by Jane Tillman, an assistant clinical professor
at the Yale Child Study Center and a teaching associate in psychiatry at the Cambridge Health Alliance of Harvard Medical School. The title of her paper is “In the Shadow of Suicide: Ethical Loneliness, Moral Injury, and the Mysterious Object.”
Ann Dart will chair a psychotherapy 2-day clinical workshop while Henry Friedman will chair a 2-day psychoanalytic one. There will be 20 discussion groups, which many of us feel provide the essential grit for all of our meetings.
I enthusiastically invite you to come to San Diego, to get a closer look at borders and border issues, to spend a few days in a great and thriving multicultural American city, and to meet with friends and colleagues as we all try to find our way forward on the slippery, often treacherous, ground of our contemporary American realities.