As APsaA Program Chair, I was invited by TAP to write my reflections on our June 2022 meeting in Boston—our first in-person meeting in 2.5 years. Rather than do that, I invited four colleagues to write theirs.
I hadn't intended on going to Alice Huang's paper presentation, but I was introduced to her by a mutual friend the night before, and as we sat in the dimly lit hotel lounge—islanded by analysts circulating from the elevators to the revolving doors and back again—the frisson of our conversation convinced me to change my plans.
The next morning, in a narrow room with fewer than fifteen people, Dr. Huang started by placing a small speaker box on the table. Her paper, “Finding Sense in Separation,” concerned how she and her patient navigated the pandemic—more specifically, how they found words inadequate to bridge the physical distance between them. Dr. Huang described picking up echoes through music, movie references, and poetry of what might have been lost. As she spoke about trying to maintain her connection to her patient, I thought of other conference talks where this had been evident: of Usha Tummala-Narra's eyes shining with feeling as she presented her remote therapy with a lonely woman, and of Sidney Phillips's lyrical description of his patient's heartbreak. I thought of how being physically alone with their patients' stories had sharpened their attunement to isolation, and longing.
Back in the narrow room, when Dr. Huang described the ache the separation created, she gestured towards her body, as if she was trying to locate something within. I, too, felt something: a hollowness within my chest—and I wasn't the only audience member to have a corporeal reaction. When Dr. Huang finally pressed play on her speaker, we heard a repetitive electronic song that had inexplicably allowed her to retrieve fragments of what couldn't be said, reminding us of how we have yet to process what being apart from our patients has done to us.
Sameer Khan, M.D.
Candidate, Psychoanalytic Association of New York (PANY)
At the June 2022 Annual Meeting, during a case discussion about skin darkness and identification, a senior analyst prefaced his comment by saying something like, “I'm not sure it's OK for me as a white man to speak here, but …” Hearing this remark, I identified a visceral feeling that accompanied me to this meeting, despite my excitement to see long-missed colleagues: Is this going to be OK? Will it be safe for us to be meeting in person? Around whom can I take off my mask? Can we speak about race candidly without the dialogue breaking down?
To my relief, this analyst's comment did not fracture the discussion, as so often happens when we touch on our discomfort with difference. My colleagues and I remarked on how rare it was to find ourselves in a working group (in Bion's language) on the topic of race. I wondered what made this session work, while so many other sessions aiming to address race ended with the inevitable enactments, big or small, that evade our capacity to reflect. I was struck by the relationship between the session chairs, Dr. Dorothy Holmes and Dr. Donald Moss. It seemed to me, from how they carried themselves, that they had done a lifetime's worth of self-inquiry with regard to race and had been in dialogue with each other. They sat on opposite sides of the room, a Black woman and a white man, two distinguished analysts, structuring the space. This was an ethical structure, to borrow from Jane Kite's plenary address, so yes, the conversation could continue.
At this meeting, the members of the Holmes Commission presented important data on racial inequities in psychoanalysis. But can we hear them? I was left with a mix of hope and doubt. How this data is used depends on our organization as an ethical structure—if we can meet violence with fortitude, ignorance with curiosity, and creativity with a chorus. With regard to issues of race and intersectionality, each member—especially those with influence—ought to be doing what the Holmes Commission modeled in their functioning and what we ask of our candidates and analysts: the work of inquiry into how we relate to ourselves and to the other—with attention to the unconscious. And only if we do this can we truly begin to make it safe to speak and to be heard.
I identified a visceral feeling that accompanied me to this meeting, despite my excitement to see long-missed colleagues: Is this going to be okay? Will it be safe for us to be meeting in person?
Alice Huang, M.D.
Analyst and Chair of Continuing Education, Oregon Psychoanalytic Center Affiliate Associate Professor, Oregon Health Science University
When I was invited to write my reflection on my experience at the 111th annual APsaA meetings, I hesitated, a hesitation not so different from what I have often experienced in public psychoanalytic settings. Before speaking or writing, I invariably ask myself a question: will I be seen as a clinician or as a Black person who happens to be a clinician?
As I entered the Boston Park Plaza, I felt a sense of relief. After two years away because of Covid, I was back. I remembered all the talk about diversity and race at the last in-person meeting in February 2020 in New York. I knew those topics were still up for discussion. I immediately prepared myself to face the same hesitations I had often experienced. I was not sure how I was going to face my ongoing conundrum: seeing myself as a psychoanalytic candidate in my third year in training vs. being seen as something other than that. I know that many individuals only see me as a Black clinician and lose sight of the other many parts of me.
I decided to take a walk outside to see what Boston was all about since it was my first time there. I quickly noticed that the city also was segregated in many ways despite its reputation for being highly educated. After a couple of hours outside, I returned to the Boston Park Plaza and was met by a recent graduate at my institute who introduced me to Sandra Walker, a faculty member of the Seattle Institute. I felt the hesitation again. It was indeed refreshing to engage in a lengthy conversation with her, but still I was wondering: am I being seen as a psychoanalytic candidate in training or a Black person who is in field?
The first meeting I attended on Saturday was Dorothy Holmes's presentation, “Oh, Psychoanalysis: Wherefore art thou? A conversation about tensions, splits, and opportunities in psychoanalytic identity.” In the Q and A, I listened as another candidate stood up and addressed the room full of attendees. She said she wanted the audience to not be scared of her and of her Black colleagues and peers simply because they are
Black. I immediately felt seen, perhaps exposed, perhaps recognized.
I asked the person who spoke up what allowed her to make the statement. She spoke to me of her need for visibility and for working together to eliminate white spaces and to diversify the rooms we work in.
I then attended the panel discussion “But It's Not Psychoanalysis: Expanding our definition of what can and can't be seen as psychoanalysis.” I stood up during the Q and A and gave my reflections on the talk. This time I felt like a psychoanalytic candidate attending my second in-person meeting.
I then attended the meeting labeled “Holmes Commission Report: Equity in Psychoanalysis: What Race has to do with it.” And again I spoke up during the Q and A—I am of darker skin and I am here! I declare my visibility and insist that the needle must move, that diversity is in the works. I yearn to experience the day where my hesitations vanish and I, like all of us, can simply say what is on my mind.
Fredrick Edo-Okuonghae, Psy.D., LMFT
Candidate, New Center for Psychoanalysis
The June 2022 meetings conveyed a zeitgeist pertaining to the social and the psychoanalytic. Events I attended variously focused on ethics, social and racial reality, material conditions, the pandemic, and the intersection of psychoanalysis and other discursive forms (such as autotheory). Taken together, the events raised questions for me of how we analysts might live as citizens, not only within the communities of our institutes or the broader psychoanalytic field, but also within the communities where we reside and participate. What are the allegiances we offer—to our field, our theoretical orientation, our institutes, our colleagues, and our forebears—and what are the protections, the sense of belonging, we receive in exchange? And how should we think about these relationships?
I wondered what our analytic understanding about the inner world and the unconscious might contribute to our communities and what duty we have to contribute, as citizens, to address the issues that we think so deeply about. What responsibilities do we have to be more actively involved in the world, in exchange for the privilege we have in possessing and putting into practice psychoanalytic knowledge, as opposed to staying “neutral” and siloed in our office? Or is individual transformation the primary route to social change, and if so, how can we broaden the reach of our practice beyond the few who can afford this treatment? If our practices are not representative of the society within which we live, how can we reckon with the effects of our insulation from social reality? Do we have a duty to involve ourselves further than with the individuals we treat, or is it presumptuous, or even unethical, to stretch beyond our job description?
An attunement to these issues, pressures, and realities was evident in the clinical presentations I attended. Groups were thoughtful about their processes and ways of treating various aspects of their analysands' identities as well as their social standing and their real, traumatic experiences. A theme that emerged in my clinical presentation was the analysand's curiosity about the analyst: the fault line between that desire to know as a taking possession of the analyst's mind on the one side, and as a generative engagement with reality and difference, on the other. I felt pushed in the discussion to be more open to being known as a real, social being. I have been thinking since then about what it means to be a citizen in the consulting room and the need to embrace my responsibility to learn from my patients about my own allegiances and privileges and how I might make ethical, meaningful, and civic use of them.
Cassie Kaufmann, Ph.D.
Director, Greene Clinic
Candidate, New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute