Our virtual meeting in June was a wonderful surprise to many of us. We found a way to be together and to hear and see an extraordinary group of presenters whose shared engagement in the contemporary moment made vital an exercise that might have otherwise proved only novel.
Our February meeting will also be virtual. The meeting will not only replicate the three-day structure of the June meeting, but will also add the two following weekends, which will be devoted to Discussion Groups and other regular programming: seven meeting days spread over three weekends.
We will have three stand-alone Plenary Sessions on the Friday-Saturday-Sunday of the first weekend. In addition, on that first Sunday Lee Jaffe will give his Presidential Plenary: Freud Redux: Six Psychotherapeutic Actions, with an introduction from William C. Glover.
The three plenary sessions will be thematically grouped — “On the Street/In the Office: Psychoanalysis Now.” Friday's opening Plenary Session will take place under the auspices of the University Forum. Entitled “Racism in America IV: Are We Ready to Interrogate Whiteness?” the session will feature Carol Anderson (White Rage) and Jonathan Michel Metzl (Dying of Whiteness) chaired by Beverly J. Stoute. The second Plenary Session, “Power/Powerlessness” will feature Avgi Saketopoulou, Lara Sheehi, and Mitchell David Wilson. The third, “Neutrality as a White Lie,” will have Dorothy E. Holmes, Stephen H. Portuges, and Glen Gabbard as participants and Anton H. Hart as chair.
The second section of Friday's and Saturday's programs will consist of eight Special Sessions each day. Included will be two “One-Day Clinical Workshops,” one with Michael M. Feldman, the other with Lesley Caldwell. Nancy Kulish will present a modified version of her scheduled Plenary Address, with two discussants. In the Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience Symposium, Mark Solms will present his “Revision of the Theory of the Oedipus Complex.” Anton H. Hart and I will work together in a session entitled “On Being Downed by Race.” Harriet L. Wolfe and colleagues will present their work on “Historical and Institutional Trauma in Psychoanalysis: An International Perspective on Resistance and Reconciliation.” Stephen Seligman will chair a presentation on “Isolation, Insulation and Emotional Engagement: Explorations of Winnicott's Transitional Space and Transitional Object.” Jeffrey Taxman will present, with colleagues, on the “Stuart Twemlow Symposium on Psychoanalysis in the Community: Community Effects of Coronavirus Pandemic in Four Countries,” and Lynne M. Zeavin, with Lindsay L. Clarkson and Sally Weintrobe, on “Entitled Dominion: A Conversation about the Intersections of Environmental and Racial Justice.”
Daria Colombo will present a modified version of her scheduled Ernst and Gertrude Ticho Memorial Lecture, organized around the theme of “Displacement/Disruption: Reconsidering Psychoanalytic “Placement” During the Pandemic. William C. Glover will deliver his Presidential Symposium. Justin Shubert has organized a session on “Understanding Gender: How psychoanalysis is grappling with societies' new gender norms,” while Susan Donner's session, with colleagues, will focus on “Children as Collateral Damage in Political Wars.” Amber Nemeth will chair a Candidates Session: “Not that I'm a racist, but…”: Working in the realm of racial and ethnic dynamics with clinical material from Himanshu Agrawal discussed by Beverly J. Stoute, Michael Moskowitz, and Aisha Abbasi. Jennifer Stuart's Special Session will focus on novel pedagogic programs and interventions at our institutes. Mary Margaret McClure will chair a session on “Psychoanalytic Activism.”
The program on the subsequent weekends are as packed with stellar sessions, with some familiar names, and some emerging ones. The complete three-day program will be listed on APsaA's meeting website: .
We hope we are on track. No one could possibly have wished for the kind of disruption we and our patients have experienced. Regardless, the disruptions are upon us. And given that, none of us can any longer reasonably lean on traditional frames, traditional formats, traditional ways of working, traditional notions of what constitutes the psychoanalytic field. We do not yet know how, in the future, we will look back on the effects of this massive disruption to our habits of being. Will we see loss or opportunity? Will we yearn for restoration or will we be excited by possibilities? For now, this moment is too unstable, too fluid to be historicized. We can only ride it out, see where it takes us.
Regardless of where we end up, though, what is clear for now is that this moment, this massive disruption, has generated an equally massive outburst of creative thought and action, both from within the psychoanalytic field and upon it.
We are not only deprived of our traditional forms; we are also freed of them. We have the chance to re-think our project, to reconceptualize, to choose what we must keep, what we must leave behind, and what we must newly construct.
We hope this — the 2021 National Meeting and all that follow — will function as experiments in how we can optimally construct our ever-expanding community, how we can best work, how we can think, what we can do, what we can hope for, and what we can become.
Donald B. Moss, M.D., is the chair of the Program Committee.