Welcome

Welcome to the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, Division 39 of the American Psychological Association. Since its creation, the Society has taken a leading role in preserving interest in psychoanalytically informed treatments and theories in psychology and the other mental health professions. In recent years we have increasingly focused on integrating social and cultural perspectives into psychoanalytic theory and therapies. The coming years will challenge us to work to preserve the delicate private spaces that allow us to hear our and our patients’ inner impulses and to respond in growth promoting ways.

I believe that psychoanalysis has a vital role to play in preserving the humanity under threat from neoliberal capitalism, bureaucratic organization, artificial intelligence, the surveillance society, and rising authoritarianism.  We must remind people of the importance of individual and collective love, based upon self-reflection joined with collective caring. Together we have resisted the commodification of mental health by insurance companies and corporate healthcare conglomerates. Now, we may be called upon to resist the authoritarian impulses to crush dissenting thoughts and activities designed to improve the common good.

Over my two years as president, I hope to draw upon my varied background to reduce tensions between various subgroups of our Society, between practitioners and researchers, between our newer members and those long-time members who built the Society over the previous decades, and between Society members and leadership. These tensions reduce our abilities to carry out our primary mission of preserving and strengthening the role of psychoanalytic thought and practices in the APA and in the wider mental health, academic, social, and cultural fields. As an activist I know that we are stronger when we act cohesively, while not ignoring but rather nurturing the diversity of thought and practice among us. 

For those who don’t know me, I’d like to briefly introduce myself and give an account of how I ended up here. Like many of our members, in addition to being a psychologist, I am a psychoanalyst and teach on the faculty of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, a training analyst, and have been a researcher and program evaluator for the last 35 years. Additionally, I have been a social activist since I participated in the anti-Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s. Most notably, I was one of the leaders of the movement to stop the Bush era torture program by the CIA and the military at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, and elsewhere. The primary focus of my colleagues and my antitorture efforts was to end the participation of psychologists and other health professionals in those programs, including the complicity of some APA leaders, and to strengthen the ethical constraints on psychologists contributing to individual harm. After a decade of effort, we achieved major successes with the release of the Hoffman Report in 2015 and the resultant major changes in APA leadership and policies.

This background in multiple roles prepared me for leadership in the Society, where we are faced with integrating, or at least reducing the tensions between, the varied perspectives on psychoanalysis. I served six years on the APA Council, which provided me the opportunity to work to protect the interests of psychoanalytic psychology in the APA and the broader mental health arena. I organized a briefing for the new APA CEO and other senior APA practice staff on the research evidence supporting psychoanalytic psychotherapy and participated in efforts on Council to get psychodynamic psychotherapy represented in the emerging Clinical Guidelines. We need increased efforts to preserve psychoanalytic psychology in an era of managed care and “evidenced-based” practice, based on limited concepts of what constitutes “evidence.”

I look forward to engaging with you all, hearing your ideas, and working together to advance our division's mission. Whether it's through conferences, workshops, emails, or informal gatherings, I am committed to ensuring that our division remains a place where we share knowledge, support one another, and grow both personally and professionally.

Warm regards,

Stephen Soldz

President, Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology, APA Division 39