The old ways are over, the rules in flux. We are repositioned, more overtly in the world now, a little less elite, suddenly scrambling like everyone else to find our way in a thickly mediated contemporary reality. No one knows what's next, what shapes our practices will take, what new frames, new thoughts, new ways of participating in our social and natural surroundings.
The sudden emergence of the Omicron variant necessitates that once again our February meeting will be a virtual one. Nature intrudes, as though insisting that, along with protecting ourselves, we also attend more carefully to her demands, to her needs for care.
In Saturday afternoon's program, the University Forum will host Bryan Stevenson, author of the internationally acclaimed Just Mercy, and founder and executive director of the Equal Justice Institute, who will be speaking of “The Mass Incarceration Crisis: The Hidden Racial Narrative.” Heather Ann Thompson, professor of history at University of Michigan and the author of the multiple-prizes-winning Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Aftermath, will be one discussant while Beverly Stoute the other, offering her psychoanalytic reflections on Stevenson's talk.
Another featured program is Kenneth Eisold's panel on “The Analyst in Group Life: How Our Group Identities and Memberships Affect Our Ability to Work Together,” featuring James Barron, Lama Khouri, John Lundgren, and Angela Sowa. Ann Pellegrini will also chair a panel on “The Turn to the Social,” featuring Francisco Gonzalez, Dorothy Holmes, and Jyoti Rao.
The weekend will end with a special session chaired by Bill Glover and Kerry Sulkowicz—“Reimagining APsaA: Psychoanalysis & Social Engagement Today.” Britt-Maria Schiller, head of APsaA's Department of Psychoanalytic Education (DPE), and Maria Nardone, co-head of the Social Issues Department, will speak. Our president and president-elect will share their views then open the session for interaction with members and guests.
In spite of the unexpected vitality of meetings taking place on the Zoom platform, many of us yearn for real contact with friends and colleagues from across the country.
Planning has begun for our June meeting. Date, place, and format remain to be determined. The past 20 months have given us the opportunity to rethink the structures of our meetings. We no longer feel bound to our traditional four big three-hour panels. We have the chance to rethink and to reimagine how to best convene. The Program Committee is again open to review proposals—not only for large panels but for any idea, any setup, anything that may provide relevant exciting opportunities for us to start shaping our next decade(s). Along those lines, we are now thinking of “pop-up” meetings: two-hour events that will emerge between our traditional large Winter and Spring Meetings. We welcome any other program ideas. We hope to make the boundary separating the Program Committee from the membership more porous, to open programming ideas to a more diverse, less predictable cohort. Please pitch in. Now's the time. Traditional impediments to participation are dissolving. See you in February.
—Donald B. Moss, M.D.
Program Committee Chair