Welcome

Dear Colleagues,

I am writing to you this month in the wake of a very successful spring meeting! It was wonderful to see so many new and so many young faces there, as well as some familiar faces. I was asked by APA to write something about how our Society can be a model for other divisions, and so I am sending you what I wrote about our conference.  

Until next month,

Dana

Division 39 (Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology) just held our annual Spring Meeting from April 22-25 in New York City. As the Society’s President I am so thrilled to report that it was a huge success! We had 773 registrants, many of whom were graduate students and early career professionals. This year’s theme was Institutional life: Reclaiming life from institutions. We hosted over 90 panels over the four days, including Friday night panels, one of which went until 1am! It had been two years since we had gathered in person as a group for our conference, as our Society has decided that we will rotate between hosting an in-person event and a virtual meeting. This is a big change for us, as for the forty years we had been holding our spring conferences before COVID we had only held in person events. Like every other professional organization, we had to quickly pivot to this new format (our spring meeting in 2020 was initially scheduled to be held in NYC in late March and was rescheduled for March 2021 and held virtually). 

While many of us are sad about no longer being able to meet together annually, holding virtual meetings also has many advantages. For example, several of our Iranian colleagues were not able to participate in person this year due to travel restrictions impinging on their ability to join us. However, we were able to host them at our pre-conference virtual programming held on Wednesday April 22, and we offered free registration to any Iranian colleague who wished to attend our virtual panels. While we wish that anyone who wants to attend our conferences in person would be able to do so, given the current sociopolitical environment and the barriers to travel for many of our colleagues around the world, we are happy to be able to offer ways for colleagues who cannot or will not enter the States to attend. Of course, it is not just international colleagues who may not be able to travel to our meetings, and we hope that virtual events will encourage broader attendance. And, we are also leaving less of an environmental impact by reducing travel.

Going back to this year’s meeting, it was also wonderful to see so much diversity at this meeting, diversity of so many different kinds. In addition to the extensive number of newer and emerging professionals at our conference, many of whom come from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, as well as embodying various gender expressions, we also had panels that broke out of the traditional format. This included movies, manifestos, spoken word poetry, and music performance, as well as keynotes by interdisciplinary scholars. Many panels focused on the harms done by institutions, and a reckoning with institutional power; others focused on the struggle we all have with institutions, and how our reliance on them often creates a tortured relationship with them. Of course, given that this was a meeting of psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic thinkers, ambivalence is always part and parcel of where our thinking and interest lies. We owe a debt of gratitude to our Conference co-chairs and steering committee who assembled such a generative and thought-provoking intellectual experience. 

We are having to adapt to an ever-changing world, and that absolutely extends to the professional conference landscape. It has become financially untenable to continue hosting annual meetings at corporate hotel locations. We would appreciate hearing about ways in which other divisions have been grappling with this issue, and I encourage any division leader who wants to engage in conversation about how to maintain spaces for intellectual engagement, thought, and community to reach out to me so that we can share insights and challenges. You can reach me through the Division 39 administrative office.

Dana Charatan, PsyD
SPPP President