It seems clear that New York is no longer the center of the American Psychoanalytic world. It might be impossible to actually locate a center now. Our organization has become truly American. Increasingly, our leading voices, our authors, our increasingly diverse membership, emerge from both coasts, from the South and from the Midwest. And yet … New York remains a special place for psychoanalysis.
We began here in New York. We spread out from here. For decades, we met at the iconic Waldorf. Our national office is still here. The city remains the site of a dense, remarkably polymorphous psychoanalytic presence.
And in February 2023, in our second in-person meeting since the beginning of the plague, we will return to New York to reconvene, to celebrate, and to work. It will, I think, be an occasion for excitement, nostalgia, and envisioning. We have to figure out what kind of presence we would like to have—what we want to become, whom we want to be, how we want to be seen. These tasks are enormous. Not only do we face crises of our own, but we are also part of a country in crisis. There is precious little to hold on to. So much is up for grabs. We are in the midst of scrutinizing not only our technical and theoretical underpinnings, but also our ethical, social, and historical ones. Sure, the center does not hold. But let's not lose conviction and instead make sure to take advantage of this center-less opportunity.
Our February program is filled with promise.
A particular highlight will be the summary of the work done by the Holmes Commission on Racial Equality in American Psychoanalysis—presented Friday evening by the leadership team of Dorothy Holmes, Anton Hart, Dionne Powell, and Beverly Stoute.
Other major events include the University Forum's presentation on anti-Asian violence, the DPE's presentation on free association, two plenary addresses, and four panels. The panels form a unit, their titles alone conveying how somber and grave this moment is for all of us and for the world that surrounds us:
Panel 1—“Do Humans Really Want to Survive?”
Panel 2—“Entering Night Country: Lessons from Orpheus”
Panel 3—“The Influence of the Social Unconscious: What is the Analyst to Do?”
Panel 4—“Overturning Roe: Its Aftermath, Repercussions, and Meanings”
Each panel presumes that the consulting room is porous. Its doors remain closed, of course, for privacy. But no longer do our closed doors function as segregating walls. The panels attest to this. They each straddle the consulting room and the external world. Together, they take up clinical and material dimensions of climate change, of death and dying, of the social unconscious, and of the never-ending effort to control the bodies of women. We are in the midst, and we know it.
Our two plenarists will be William Glover with “Psychoanalysis as a Profession” and Peter Goldberg with “Transiting: Thoughts on the Cultural and Connective Functions of the Analytic Frame.”
We will be presenting four two-day clinical workshops. We welcome Joshua Durban, long located in Israel and now in LA, as one discussant. Peter Goldberg, our plenarist, will also be a discussant at one of the workshops. And Anna Schwartz will join Ann Dart in the two-day psychotherapy workshop.
As always, we will be hosting what for many constitute the “guts” of our meetings: approximately fifty discussion groups, where small numbers of us come together for a sustained focus on issues of shared concern.
Anton Hart, working with Dorothy Holmes, Dionne Powell, Justin Shubert, and Samuel Wyche, will chair our two-day Experiential Process Groups—“Living in Diversity and Otherness.”
This issue of TAP is going to press during ongoing political upheavals and debates that will help determine the meaning of the “United States of America.” We are participants in and witnesses to those elections. Inside our consulting rooms, we are unrivaled experts at interpretation, at sensing meanings, at locating determinants. Outside of them, we are learning. We are being tested.
Let's get together in New York to see what we have all been up to, what we have been doing, what we are seeing, what we might think, where we might go, what we might become.
Hoping to see you soon.
—Donald B. Moss, M.D.
Program Committee Chair