By Steven Kuchuck (USA)
Dear Colleagues,
As I write to you, the weather here in New York City is shifting from the warmth of spring and heat of summer to the beginning crispness that heralds the arrival of fall and the beginning of the new academic season. Children are going back to school, and many of us are back from vacations and once again teaching and resuming the more hectic pace of our practices and work lives. It’s an exciting time for us at IARPP, as committee and board meetings start to resume after the July and August lull, and plans for the coming 2018-2019 year take further shape and start to enter full swing.
Before I say something more about that, I want to note that this is the first time I’m writing to you in the newsletter since our very successful annual conference under the talented, enthusiastic leadership of conference co-chairs Margaret Black (USA) and Hazel Ipp (Canada). We had over 700 attendees from more than 20 countries join us in New York City the weekend of June 14 to 17, 2018, for “Hope and Dread: Therapists and Patients in an Uncertain World,” our conference theme. This was one of our largest turnouts in recent years.
In addition to the many and well-received paper and plenary sessions, time was allotted for early morning process groups, post-plenary discussion groups, our annual membership meeting, and audience discussion following the presentations. Attendees were eager to discuss and process aspects of the conference theme, namely, how to address and contain our own and patients’ emotional and other responses stirred by this period in which the outside world is barging into the clinical setting with seemingly more ferocity than ever before, both in the United States and throughout the world. When the personal, political, and professional become intertwined and overlaid as perhaps never before – or at least our conscious and professional awareness of such – we relational psychotherapists and analysts are faced with particular challenges and opportunities.
This conference also included various in-person IARPP committee meetings and a new workgroup convened by Steven Knoblauch (USA) and Maya Mukamel (UK) to address issues of race in psychoanalysis, especially as was recently raised in the May/June online colloquium, “The Problem of Thinking in Black and White: Race in the South African Clinical Dyad.” The preconference workshops, conference programming, and other meetings – both formal and informal – struck many of the members I had the good fortune to interact with and hear from as an important start in focusing more on the world beyond the confines of our consulting rooms.
Looking forward to the new academic year, I want to direct your attention to the upcoming online colloquium, which will be based on a new paper by Avgi Saketopoulou (USA), “The Draw to Overwhelm: Consent, Risk, and the Re-Translation of Enigma.” It will run from October 29 to November 11, 2018. As always, members who wish to participate will be automatically enrolled. You will receive directions for how to access the paper and participate. This year, for the first time, the colloquium paper will be translated into Spanish as we attempt to make as many of our materials as possible available in languages other than English. We will also be featuring a selection of online web seminars that IARPP members can register to participate in (including at least one non-English webinar), our online archive of past colloquia to peruse, online video interviews with founders and leading figures within relational psychoanalysis, and additional membership benefits that you can read about on our website or learn more about by contacting our Executive Director, Valerie Ghent.
In closing, I want to remind you that by now you should have received the call for papers for our next international conference being held from June 20 to 23, 2019, in Tel Aviv, Israel. Please see the article appearing in this issue of eNews for much more information about the conference. Plans are already underway for a rich and exciting lineup of papers, plenaries, and process groups. Additionally, we hope to be able to represent and make available a wide array of professional voices and opinions, including pre-conference workshops and field trips that will both enlighten our members about the incredibly rich and cutting-edge psychoanalytic scholarship and community in Israel, and engage our community in dialogues about the pain and complexity engendered by the country’s and region’s complex political and socio-cultural realities and challenges.
As always, if there are areas of IARPP/psychoanalytic interest or concern that you would like to discuss with me, please do be in touch directly.
With warm regards,
Steven Kuchuck
Steven Kuchuck, DSW
Email Steven Kuchuck
