Examining Mind, Care, and Kinship: Q&A with the 2026 Plenary Speakers
Donnel Stern & Ken Corbett on the evolving landscape of psychoanalytic thought
The 2026 National Meeting plenaries draw both speakers back to the conceptual bedrock of their work—questions that have shaped their thinking throughout their careers and continue to evolve in response to contemporary life. Donnel Stern returns to the terrain of the unconscious and unformulated experience, revisiting and refining ideas he first introduced early in his career. Ken Corbett turns toward the figure of the father, examining how psychoanalysis imagines masculinity, caregiving, and kinship when family structures and cultural expectations are shifting. In conversation, their perspectives illuminate how core psychoanalytic concepts remain alive and deeply relevant. This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.
APsA: Your plenaries explore a foundational concept in psychoanalysis. For Dr. Stern, the meaning of the “unconscious” and unformulated experience. For Dr. Corbett, the primal father and the ethics of care. What drew you to this particular question at this moment in your work?
Donnel Stern: Since 2019, one of the things I have been writing about is a modification of the theory of unformulated experience, which I first presented in 1983. I’ve wanted to bring this new material to as many colleagues as I could. The APsA plenary gives me the opportunity to introduce the original theory to those unfamiliar with it, and also to offer the revision to a large group. For these reasons, I appreciate very much the opportunity the plenary presents.
Ken Corbett: This question follows on my longstanding interest in the psychoanalytic theorization of masculinity along with my equally longstanding interest in child development. At this juncture, I am interested in trying to capture how we theorize fathers – notably, what I term the primal father – and how psychoanalytic theorizing helps to construct men’s engagement with children and childcare. I hold that we are left to bring the primal father into sight. To see him engaged in childcare, soma-to-psyche. To see his provision and preoccupation inflected by the ordinary eros of daily caregiving. To see the heightened sensitivity that underscores his ability to feel himself into his infant’s place. To see the primal father balance containment with the ever-present failures that beset childrearing.
Both of you examine how relationships shape psychic life, whether through the interpersonal field or through kinship and care. How does your current thinking expand or challenge traditional psychoanalytic ideas about how people become who they are?
DS: The tradition in which I was trained was interpersonal psychoanalysis, which has always been defined, since its origin in the 1930s, by its emphasis on the interpersonal field. My thinking grew from that orientation, later broadened to include the relational perspective. When I began thinking about unformulated experience as a psychoanalytic candidate in the 1970s, I wanted to portray experiencing and the mind, both conscious and unconscious, not only as an outcome of the individual, but also of the social world, present and past. I wanted to give the interpersonal its due in a theory of mind that links the interpersonal with the intrapsychic. In one way or another, I have been working on that project ever since. The plenary paper is, in a sense, a progress report.
KC: We need a new myth. Oedipal myth and theorizing are out of step with how families live now (how the world turns now), as we seek to recognize and explore more expansive kinship systems and communal childcare. It has been held that men are the Oedipal key to ordering infantile sexuality. Yet, they do not live within it – a ripe contradiction, to be sure. The paternal body-mind is exclusively framed via the organizing invitation and impact of identification. It is not a mind in search of mind, or a mind holding the going-to-bits of coming into being. It is not a mind pre-occupied with the onslaught of stimuli called infancy. It is not a mind riven and roused by the erotic excess of the infantile. At present there are two modes of erotic transference: the maternal and the Oedipal. I set out to introduce a third mode: the primal paternal.
Psychoanalysis is sometimes portrayed as a historical or “classic” discipline. From your vantage point, why does psychoanalysis matter now, in this cultural moment?
DS: All the greatest dilemmas we have—racism and the warfare rooted in it; sexism; homophobia, transphobia, and all varieties of anti-LGBTQ; classism; the narcissistic and sado-masochistic misuse of our environment—are anchored in unconscious process. How could psychoanalysis not be of central significance in this cultural moment? Ours is the only discipline created to study the whole mind, the only discipline centered around unconscious process, the only field of study devoted to human beings finding their way to a greater acceptance of what is unbearable about themselves and then living more openly with that acceptance.
KC: [Our] mode of mythologizing and practicing is out of step with how families now live. The reason and might of paternal authority have been dwarfed by the bureaucratic state, secular ideology, technology, and evolving kinship systems, along with cultural and historical processes that produce different ways of naming and living gender. It is difficult to find a new ethic of care looking through an Oedipal lens. The aperture cannot open wide enough to encompass care that is based on interdependence more than difference, or to take in the social structures and community systems that do not rest on the reiteration of the nuclear family. Families of color, queer families, including gay dads, single parent families are assimilated and squeezed into an Oedipal frame, and the evidence of the resistance and creativity of these families is ignored or sidelined.
You’ve each contributed substantially to psychoanalytic scholarship over many years. How have your perspectives evolved, and what questions continue to challenge or inspire you?
DS: There are many ways to answer this question. I could certainly say that I am inspired by the social turn in psychoanalysis, which continues and deepens the social critique that was begun by my teachers, and their teachers. How do we create a psychoanalysis that remains clinically immediate (and that is crucial to our future), while bringing into the consulting room the unconscious social influences that circulate in our daily lives, and that have an even greater role in what we are, and what we become, than we have acknowledged? Or I could answer the question, from a very different vantage point, by saying that I am inspired today, and have been inspired for my whole life, by any developments, clinical or theoretical, that break down the boundaries between disciplines, so that psychoanalysis can profit from, and offer profit to, philosophy, social criticism, art, literature, linguistics, sociology, neuroscience, and so on.
KC: First, I would say that I have always been interested in the social, or what we are now calling the social turn. I am eager to see how queer theory, critical race studies, disability studies, and social philosophy help to create a modern psychoanalysis as much as Freudian tenets, postwar British object-relations theory, American ego psychology, or Relational theory. Arguably, the most influential work undertaken in psychoanalysis in the last half-century has been in the spaces between psychoanalysis and social theory. Second, I grow more and more interested in the work of psychotherapeutic action, in particular the work of play, and how we bring patients into an intermediate area where they can play, dream, grow, and change. I thread my thoughts about my work with my three-year-old patient throughout my [plenary] talk as a way to explore the interimplication of the social and psychotherapeutic action.
For those attending your plenary in 2026, what do you hope they carry with them into their clinical practice, teaching, writing, or daily life?
DS: I hope people will carry away a renewed sense of the significance of imagination and vitality. If we are doing what we can to encourage and recognize imagination and vitality in our clinical work, and in our reading, writing, and teaching, then it is safe to say that we are expanding the possibilities for experiencing; and it is in our pursuit of that goal—the expansion of experience that corresponds to what I have called expressivism in my presentation, after philosopher Charles Taylor—that we have our greatest opportunities to make a difference. I take the position that, if the psychoanalytic session really feels alive—and especially if it comes to feel alive when it had not felt alive in the moments before —the nature of what is being said is seldom the primary consideration. If the session is alive, whatever the content, the outcome is liable to be growthful.
KC: I hope that they recognize the primal father who I am seeking to bring into mind, theory and practice. And through that recognition work with me to seek a deeper understanding as to how the primal father affords us not only a more complex understanding of men and children, but also the interdependence of childcare and the need for community. I hold that we must remain interested in the transformative effect that children have on parents. Call me optimistic, if you must.
Join Stern and Corbett in January at the 2026 National Meeting
To hear these plenaries in full, we invite you to join us in San Francisco this winter. Donnel Stern will present What Does “Unconscious” Mean? Unformulated Experience and the Interpersonal Field on Friday, January 30, 2026 at 9:30 a.m., and Ken Corbett will present Who’s Your Daddy? The Primal Father, Kinship, and the Ethics of Care on Saturday, January 31, 2026 at 4:30 p.m. Registration is now open, and we look forward to welcoming you to a wonderful week of workshops and sessions culminating with our Plenaries, which continue to push psychoanalysis into new terrain.
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Dr. Donnel Stern, PhD, had his first psychoanalytic article, on unformulated experience, appear in 1983, and he has been writing, teaching, and editing ever since. He has addressed such topics as the interpersonal field, relational freedom, and witnessing. His most recent book is On Coming into Possession of Oneself: Transformations of the Interpersonal Field (2024). He has written four other books, co-edited four more, and published more than 100 psychoanalytic articles and book chapters. He is the former Editor-in-Chief of Contemporary Psychoanalysis, and is the Founder and Editor of the book series Psychoanalysis in a New Key at Routledge, which has over 90 titles in print. Dr. Stern teaches, supervises, and speaks worldwide, maintains a private practice in New York City, and leads private study groups.
Dr. Ken Corbett, PhD, is a Professor at New York University Program in Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, and Faculty, The Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. He has authored numerous articles and two bestselling books. In Boy Hoods: Rethinking Masculinities, Dr. Corbett advocates for a new psychology of masculinity that moves beyond normative expectations, emphasizing that “no two boys, no two boyhoods are the same.” His book A Murder Over a Girl – named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice – is a story about a murdered girl, a murdering boy, community, families, friends and teachers that unfolds into a wrenching drama about the human psyche. He is a member of the New York Institute for the Humanities, and a consultant on the Showtime docu-series Couples Therapy.
