The success and failure of our Winter and Spring Meetings depend entirely on how they are experienced by those who attend them. We on the Program Committee can plan them, create panels for them, and afterwards collate everyone’s evaluation forms. But what counts most is what actually happens on the ground, what occurs when people ask themselves whether the meeting was good and worth it, whether there should be more of them or fewer, and whether the ones to come should or should not resemble this one.
What follows are four voices, each reflecting on our recent San Diego meeting.
For all future meetings, I invite any attendee to email their reflections so I can gather some or all of them together as voices “from the ground” in this regular post-meeting TAP column.
A recording of “Los Lobos” was rocking the room as attendees entered the opening panel of the APsaA Spring Meeting in San Diego. Along with remarkable artistically crafted montages and photos projected onto the screens, we found ourselves transported to the nearby Mexico/U.S. border. With humor, poetics, and deeply evocative personal stories, the panelists told us of the experience of crossing the border daily to teach in the U.S., about treating analytic patients in the vibrant community of Tijuana, and about a rich, unique mixed Mexican and American cultural imaginative world created around the border. It was an inspired experiential and intellectual exploration.
I was privileged to be on part two of the panel for the closing session. Five of us explored the clinical work with bicultural bilingual patients and the relationship of psychoanalysis to this historical political moment along the border today. While I spoke of working with children in detention, and the importance of psychoanalytic ethics in the face of euphemistically named detention facilities on the border, other panelists spoke of the challenges of working bilingually and with patients from Mexico and Central and South America. The program reminded us of how essential the sense of physical and psychic home and place is for each of us to live.
Our profession can be lonely. We know it helps to take risks, engage creatively, and really talk to one another, especially in the midst of distressing feelings. A psychoanalytic conference should be an environment where such conversations occur. While the underlying framework of the Spring Meeting was the examination of trauma and separation, most poignantly situated at the United States-Mexico border, the meeting was also about deepening personal connections. I saw it occur spontaneously between people and thoughtfully articulated in presentations. One evocative instance occurred in the discussion group, “A Conversation with a Distinguished Analyst,” where Mitchell Wilson read a moving account of his path to becoming a psychoanalyst. We, the listeners, then shared moments that moved us toward becoming analysts: the pebbles in the river that unexpectedly shifted our life course. We remarked at how these turning points were all unforeseen conversations that viscerally altered how we imagined our lives. As the group ended we agreed that a meaningful conversation had just transpired, and from it we understood each other and ourselves a little better.
This meeting demonstrated that psychoanalysis has a place in constructing strategies relevant to the complex reality of lives lived on the San Diego-Tijuana border.
In our panel, “Psychoanalysis in a Time of Hate,” we reflected on how psychoanalytic ideas can help us, clinicians, find meaning and possibilities for conceptual freedom in exchanges characterized by fixed and dehumanized ideas of victim and perpetrator. We have learned time and empathy are required to introduce possibility into otherwise repetitive stories of pain. External change can only be maintained when this sense of possibility has become internalized. Only then might future generations be able to turn today’s stories into tomorrow’s new realities.
The general theme of the meetings was around immigration and the U.S.-Mexico border in particular. I sensed people’s genuine desire to make a difference and help the underserved, and that alone signifies a change in the right direction. It saddens me that it took dramatic scenes of children being separated from their parents and held in cages to bring this important issue to light. Immigrants and their U.S. citizen loved ones have been struggling with family separations for decades! Even though the numbers were much smaller, ripping children from their parents at the border has also been going on for years. As mental health professionals, we are bound to encounter families that have been disrupted by our immigration system, so understanding some of the hardships these family members go through helps us help them better. That is why I chose to focus my panel presentation on undocumented individuals who were brought to the United States as children. I felt it was very well received by the roughly 150 attendees, and I sensed a strong interest in these issues. Perhaps developing a discussion group centered around immigration issues might be a good way to continue this much needed conversation.