REFLECTIONS ON THE 2020 ANNUAL MEETING
Francisco Gonzalez
Francisco J. González, M.D., personal/supervising analyst and community psychoanalysis supervising analyst at the Northern California Psychoanalytic Institute.
When I attended my first APsaA meeting 25 years ago, I swore it would be my last. The erudite speakers, almost all white men, pinned their gaze to a dusty past. Not that I found no value in what they had to say; I just could not find any form of a future that might pertain to me in their discourse. More than rejected or excluded, I felt nothing — little more than bored irritation.
By contrast, this most recent meeting was charged with a restive energy. More inquiry than disquisition: each session, a session of grappling. And turning the wheel of potential change: a palpable sense of catastrophe, the disruptions of dreaming, the potency of Black rage, the avowal of a legacy in institutionalized psychoanalysis that has been constricting and defensive.
Could this meeting constitute a turning point for American psychoanalysis? In the collective convulsion of now — beset by a plague, sheltering in place, and turned inward, even as uprisings explode and catch fire in the streets — will we recognize the power of what lies latent, latent still, in psychoanalysis? will we recover its disavowed histories? Isn’t this our practice for the making of more generative, more inclusive futures?
Mary Margaret McClure
Mary Margaret McClure, DMH, faculty of San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California.
When I Zoomed into the virtual APsaA Conference I was curious, not hopeful. Earbuds in, behind a screen, I was alone again in my own world. There was fog across the canyon, and the redwoods looked beautiful but vulnerable with drought and fires threatening soon. Violence and loss had occupied me since the death of George Floyd, confronted painfully with our terrible history and precarious present. Would our Association be up to addressing any of this? Could we address ourselves?
Then, a generative connection followed, taking shape immediately. Paola Contreras, spoke of magical realism in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude and in psychoanalysis. She asked, “Are we losing our footing “Are we awake or asleep?…Maybe psychoanalysis must die, or almost die, for there to be healing.” Throughout there was a vibrant resonance between speakers: Al Margulies, Francisco Gonzalez, Kathryn McCormick, Beverly Stoute, and more. I found myself listening carefully, and it became an exchange.
Closing the Sunday panel, Jane Kite expressed gratitude to be an analyst “in tandem with all of you.” I felt it, too. I had come to a sense of ally-ship and hopeful collective ready to do the work ahead.
Kathryn McCormick
Kathryn McCormick, MA, LMFT, CMHS, EMMHS, MPH candidate, child analyst/advanced candidate in adult training at Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute; and tribal community clinician.
Ancestral voices speak with clarity, compassion and commitment, urging us to be aware beyond our blinders of disavowal and forgo the safe retreat behind our contemplative gaze. What do we do with the searing awareness that young children exemplify, and those who can’t afford blinders with no choice but to experience, endure and survive …?
What comes with our privilege, yours and mine?
White privilege … can you see it, touch it, know it in your bones what it means to have or not to have it?
We have a choice to continue on with mind-numbing distractions and disavowals of “not me,” and being analysts married to distancing and othering jargon, akin to “we analyze, we don’t act.” What happens when we divorce ourselves from our humanity?
Beverly Stoute’s profound presentation was an exquisite enlivened tapestry that anchored me in her linking of moral injury to slavery, systemic racism, Black rage, love, and the exhaustion in being a moral compass. It left me thinking, what happens when White people and those of White passing privilege get a “pass” from having to identify with the oppressor? It left me questioning why don’t we have an APsaA president of color, and if not now, when?
Warren Poland
Warren Poland, M.D., author of Intimacy and Separateness in Psychoanalysis, and recipient of the 2009 Sigourney Award.
After many years of attending, I approached a scientific meeting for the first time this spring with apprehension. I find remote meetings formalistic and dull, lacking spontaneity. Also, at a moment when the world is afire, I feared psychoanalytic concerns for unconscious processes would be edged out of the room.
I left the meeting deeply moved, amazed by the power of a session that, astonishingly, felt more immediate and engaging than any I recalled. Just as vitally, outer and inner realities were both ever present, their innate unity and thus their inevitable mutual relevance directly exposed.
Current upheavals in the world were examined in a way that enriched both inner and outer understandings. While there was a rare consistency of excellence among all speakers, I mention two to illustrate the rich originality of the contributions. Kathryn McCormick presented her work with an 8-year-old child living on a tribal reservation who was struggling with gender identity. McCormick’s consistent analytic attitude toward inner and outer worlds could be a textbook model of clinical sensitivity at its best. And Beverly Stoute explored Black rage in a depth that significantly adds to our understanding of both psychic functioning and public upheavals.
Yeats spoke of a place where passion and precision are one. This meeting was just such a place, and astonishingly so in a virtual context.