The tenor of the Division 39 Spring Meeting in Chicago in April was one of promise and renewal.  Our co-chairs, Scott Pytluk and Andy Suth, did a marvelous job of organizing the meeting and reaching out to graduate students and early career professionals.  With almost 800 attendees including over 175 graduate students, along with many ECP’s and analytic candidates, this spring meeting was the largest meeting to be held outside of New York.  For those of us with considerable gray in our hair, the large turnout by people new to our field gave us hope that psychoanalysis is being embraced by the next generation of professionals.

We began the meeting with a special Wednesday night presentation by Jonathan Shedler whose article in the American Psychologist (2009) summarized the evidence for the efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy.  His presentation reviewed the meta-analyses he had cited in his paper and demonstrated their significance in terms that non-researchers could understand.  For the first time many of us gained an appreciation of the concept “effect size” as a measure of a treatment’s efficacy.  Later in the meeting our two keynote speakers, Frank Summers and Muriel Dimen, addressed the meeting theme “Wild Analysis Then (1910) and Now (2010)” with interesting historical and clinical perspectives.  In addition, there were many fine presentations by both senior and junior members of the Division.  

While in Chicago we were introduced to the theme of the 2011 Spring Meeting to be held in New York from April 13 to 17.  The theme is “How We Matter:  Psychoanalysis in the 21^st Century” and will feature keynote speakers Lewis Aron and Neville Symington.  The committee co-chairs, Jill Bresler and Andy Eig, encourage you to submit proposals for presentations by the September 3 deadline. This year the submissions can be made electronically through the Division 39 web site.  Make your plans now to join us in 2011.

As the large audience attending Jonathan Shedler’s presentation indicates, our community has become increasingly interested in learning about and connecting our clinical experience with psychodynamic research.  As a Division we need to consider how we can be supportive of psychoanalytic research and bridge the gap between clinicians and researchers.  For several years now we have sponsored a poster session of research projects at the Spring Meeting, providing an opportunity for graduate students and other researchers to share their current projects with us.  Bill Gottdiener has been instrumental in selecting the projects to be featured and arranging for their display.  Other suggestions for supporting and disseminating research findings have included offering more research presentations during spring meetings to supplement the meeting’s clinical presentations.  To explore this topic more carefully and provide a plan for the Division’s support of research, I have asked Marilyn Charles to chair a task force on psychoanalytic research.  We are in the process of writing a charge for the task force and recruiting task force members.  I look forward to the task force’s report and to sharing its proposals with you.

While the spring meetings are the highlights of our Division activities each year, communication with our members and scholarly activity are our concern throughout the year.  Our Publications Committee, under the chairmanship of Henry Seiden, has begun a renewal and revamping of our printed and electronic communications to bring us forward into the 21^st century.  The process is an exciting one that requires letting go of current formats in favor of newer ones.  This transition was brought home to me as I was writing this column.  This is the last issue of the newsletter as we currently know it and thus the last President’s Column that I will be writing as a printed front-page feature for the newsletter. 

As Henry aptly described in his Publications Committee report in the last issue of the Psychologist-Psychoanalyst newsletter (2010), we have divided the newsletter into two new publications, one an electronic newsletter titled InSight edited by Tamara McClintock Greenberg and the other a printed collection of essays and book reviews titled Division/Review edited by David Lichtenstein.  The first edition of InSight was published online in early April, and you will now be seeing this newsletter with many timely features on a monthly basis.  Much of the information about the Division, including the President’s Column and committee reports, will now be disseminated online through InSight and our web site.  In the second half of this year, we will receive the first edition of David’s quarterly review.  In addition, Elliot Jurist will continue to publish our highly regarded journal Psychoanalytic Psychology.

In setting up an online newsletter we are taking an important step toward electronic communication.  It is, however, a step that requires change in how we as a
Division communicate with ourselves and others.  For one thing, in order to successfully receive this new publication our members need to provide us with their current email addresses.  In addition, as our newsletter provides links to our web site and other online material, we have needed to look more closely at our web site itself.  The Division 39 web site is at the center of communication to both our members and the public.  Since its inception Larry Zelnick has almost single-handedly overseen our web site and has worked with our web designer to expand its functions and make it more responsive to our needs as a Division.  Now is the right time to revisit our web site to see how we can improve its functioning and provide our Division and psychoanalysis with a larger presence on the web.  Larry and I will shortly be setting up a task force with internet-savvy members to help us devise a strategy to expand our web site for the benefit of both our members and the public we wish to reach.

The Division/Review publication is shaping up to be another opportunity for communication among our members.  Over the years, Bill MacGillivray expanded the scope of our current newsletter by including book reviews and other scholarly articles.  David Lichtenstein will be proceeding from that foundation by focusing on articles written by our members and others to highlight psychoanalytic themes.  I am sure we will all find material of interest in this new publication when it arrives later this year.

In sum, the Division is expanding in new directions to meet your needs as a Division member and to provide a home for new professionals who want to learn more about psychoanalysis.  I encourage your participation and support in these endeavors.

References

Shedler, J.  (2009). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist 65: 98-109.

Seiden, H. (2010). Publications. Psychologist-Psychoanalyst, XXX (1), 38.