From the President |
News and Postings from the president about issues relevant to the Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology.
About the President |
| Dana Charatan, PsyD |
Posted March 1, 2026
Dear Colleagues,
One of my primary initiatives as your President is to increase the degree of transparency between SPPP governance and its members. It is too easy for leadership to become siloed from our members, and I believe communication facilitates engagement. Governments of all kinds fare best when they are in continuous conversation with the people whom they represent. To that end, I want to introduce you to our Executive Committee and Board of Directors and share with you a bit about how we go about doing the Division’s business.
Our Executive Committee is comprised of our Division officers and our Council Representatives. For any who don’t know, we run elections for President-Elect every two years. Our Presidents serve a five year term including one year as President-Elect, two years as President, and two years as Past-President. This translates to having a President-Elect in even years and none in odd years, although this year we do not have a President-Elect since I am finishing Stephen Soldz’ term. Next year will be interesting — since Lara Sheehi is finishing her second year as Past President this year, there will be no Past President or President Elect. This means I will be a one woman Presidential Trio! Our other Division officers are Secretary and Treasurer, who serve up to two three year terms. Normally the Division rotates these elections so that we never have a new Treasurer and Secretary at the same time. However, due to transitions happening on our Board, late last year we elected both a new Treasurer and a new Secretary, Greg Stevens and Noemi Ford respectively. I am pleased to report that both Greg and Noemi have been fabulous additions to our Board, and I am thrilled by how quickly they have each been able to acclimate to their roles.
Rounding out our Executive Committee are our Council Representatives. As you may recall we currently have five representatives to APA Council, but next year will only have four as we lost a seat in last year’s apportionment ballot (you will be hearing a lot about the apportionment later in the year when we hold the vote for the 2028 apportionment). We are so fortunate to have such amazingly hard-working and prolific Council Reps!! I want to introduce you to each of them. Ally Merchant is our most seasoned Rep as she is in her sixth and final year on Council. She is a steady and strong voice ensuring that we uphold our commitment to doing no harm and focus on the ways in which power dynamics continue to enter into our sociopolitical arena. Kritika Dwivedi is in her third year on Council and in her short time she has already introduced several important New Business Items on the Council floor. Her warmth and caring nature along with her ability to forge important relationships with other Reps has been a pivotal contribution to SPPP. Dan Livney is also in his third year on Council. Dan is particularly skilled at synthesizing information and analyzing group dynamics, and we are lucky to have his input on the Council floor. Our two newest Representatives are Marilyn Charles and Jordan Dunn. Marilyn is no stranger to SPPP as she has held many positions in our organization, including being a past President. Her wisdom and incisive nature are a gift to the Division, and I for one am thrilled that she is back in Division governance. Jordan Dunn may be a brand new Council member, but he has already shepherded in one of the most important New Business Items passed at the most recent Council meeting last month and is a real boon to us.
Turning to our Board of Directors, which is consisted of our Executive Committee members, nine Members at Large, and our Section Representatives, I want to let you know who they each are. Our Members at Large are Laura Barbanel, Dennis Debiak, Lucia Flores, Sheera Harrell, Steven Huprich, Dan Knauss, Maureen O’Reilly-Landry, Warren Spielberg, and Lu Steinberg. Our Members-at-Large represent all of you and are tasked with various leadership responsibilities based on their interests and the needs of the organization. We also have Section Representatives who are elected by their respective Sections and are charged with bringing the needs and interests of their section to the Board. Currently we have Al Brok representing Section I, Georgette Harrison representing Section II, Ruby Branson representing Section IV, and Moshe Brownstein representing Section IX. Rounding out our Board is Bill MacGillivray as our Parliamentarian. Bill has a long history in Division governance including being a past President and also serves as our Publications Committee chair. Last, but most certainly not least, Ruth Helein has served as our Division administrator for over thirty years!! I can tell you first hand that our organization would not function without Ruth and I am so incredibly grateful for her steady presence and her institutional knowledge.
Now that you know who it is that meets, I am going to share with you our schedule of when we are meeting this year. Going back to where I began talking about transparency, you should know that our Board meetings are open to our members. We meet bimonthly on Sundays over Zoom, except for the in person meeting we have in conjunction with our Spring Meetings when they are held in person. Our meetings are scheduled for the following dates: March 8, April 26 (in NYC), June 14, August 2, October 11, and December 13. If you would like to attend please email me or Ruth. While these meetings are open, we ask that should you attend please know that we have a lot of business to attend to in a short amount of time. Therefore we may not be able to invite discussion from members but will have a chat function available to you to ask questions which we will do our best to be able to answer!
Lastly, we are currently looking for someone to co-chair our Membership committee and our Scholars Committee. These are two essential roles and if any of you are interested in potentially taking this on, please reach out to me! I wish each and every one of you a peaceful month, as hard as peace is to come by these days, and next month I look forward to talking about our 45th annual Spring Meeting!
Posted February 1, 2026
Dear Colleagues:
It is with a heavy heart that I write to you this month in the wake of the state sanctioned violence taking place in Minneapolis and Minnesota, as well as elsewhere in our country. I want to start by letting our colleagues in Minnesota know that you are supported and appreciated during this terrible time for your state, only a few years after the reckoning following the murder of George Floyd. We stand with you, and hope that the occupation taking place there ends as soon and as peacefully as possible. It is hard to read and watch the unfolding of events, and yet we must not become desensitized or oblivious to the chaos and the despair.
Over the last decade, our organization has become increasingly polarized and divided, as has the population at large. While of course we are a large group that cannot possibly all hold the same ideas and beliefs, it has been painful to watch just how divisive the splitting has become. As psychoanalytic clinicians, we understand that splitting is a less mature defense against experiencing the self or a beloved attachment figure as malevolent. As climate change and late-stage capitalism wreak their havoc, factionalism has become an understandable and yet maladaptive way to manage the intense anxiety so many of us experience about the state of the world. And yet, the more we cling to our clannishness, the more we Other those who see the world differently from us, the more insulated and isolated we become. This has also led to the seemingly alternate realities that the left and the right each embrace.
This dynamic has played out within our community along familiar fault lines. Whether it be clinical focus versus social justice lens, ego psychology versus the relational school, or pro-Israel versus pro-Palestine, our organization has been grappling with conflict around group identity for a long time. What is new, however, is the intensity and the venom with which our membership seems to struggle with who does and does not belong. There is no doubt that as our Society has become younger and more diverse, we have had to confront the fact that different groups have different perspectives, needs, and desires. What once could be explained away as the narcissism of minor differences has now exploded into a full-blown organizational crisis. These divergences have led to vitriol on our listserv, people feeling disaffected and leaving the organization, and a real debate about what the role of SPPP should and should not be when it comes to sociopolitical issues. Minoritized individuals have been vocal, when they have felt able to do so, about being Othered and discriminated against, while others who identify strongly as pro-Israel have expressed having similar experiences. Alternatively, our pro-Palestine members believe we have not done enough to address the atrocity unfolding in real time on smartphones. In truth, it is embedded in the history of psychoanalysis to be exclusionary, elitist, and pathologizing; we must also acknowledge this fact. And yet, it is also a field that strives toward populism, inclusion, and healing.
In this moment we need to collectively decide what kind of an organization we want to be. For some, that means grieving the way that things were when our Society was more homogenous, more focused on theoretical disagreements, and less politically focused. For others, it means feeling excitement and hope that we are engaging with issues relevant to the world at large, hope from the way in which we are diversifying, and relief that they can attend our Spring Meetings without feeling as ostracized for the color of their skin. There is no making Division 39 “great again;” our Society is a different entity than it was even just a few years ago, thankfully. We have seen the price paid when a society clings to its past instead of embracing its future.
I personally believe that the only possible antidotes to fascism are community and love. The only thing that has made it feasible for me to pay attention to what is going on in Minnesota is to see the extraordinary acts of kindness and kinship that ordinary citizens are extending to one another; it reminds me of living in NYC in the aftermath of the 9/11 where New Yorkers came together in a way that I had never seen before. At the same time, I am not a Pollyanna and do not believe that we must merely find a way to “all just get along.” But, we can come together and try to recognize and acknowledge the goodness in each other. On that note, our upcoming Spring Meeting is an opportunity for such a gathering, which this year will take place at the Hilton Midtown Hotel in New York City from April 22-25. The theme is Institutional Life/Reclaiming Life from Institutions, and we will wrestle together with the ambivalent relationships with which we each have with our institutions. Registration opens this week, so please check out the programming, which promises to be engaging, thought-provoking, playful, and life-affirming. I hope to see as many of you there as possible!
Dana Charatan, Psy.D.
Clinical Psychologist/Psychoanalyst
President, Society for Psychoanalysis and Psychoanalytic Psychology (Division 39, American Psychological Association)
100 Arapahoe Avenue
Suite 7
Boulder, CO 80302
303-818-6144
danacharatanpsyd@gmail.com
danacharatanpsyd.com
Posted January 1, 2026:
Dear Colleagues,
Happy new year! I hope you have all been able to relax with loved ones over the holidays. I want to take this opportunity to introduce myself to you, to let you know a bit of what I hope to accomplish over the next three (!) years as your President. This is the first of a monthly series of letters from me to you in order to keep you informed on various happenings in the Division by highlighting the activities, offerings, and the work of our various committees and task forces. There is much that is bleak right now as authoritarianism seems to be closing in more and more every day.It is not an easy time to head a liberal professional organization, but I hope to lead with equanimity, righteousness, and a guiding light towards what is just.
As many of you know, Stephen Soldz stepped down as President in May, which according to our bylaws meant that our immediate Past President, Lara Sheehi, became President again. Once I was elected in June, I immediately became the de facto President-Elect, and I am taking over as President for what would have been Stephen’s second year in his Presidency. I am grateful that Lara was willing to step back in and I want to thank her for doing so in what has been a particularly challenging time for our Division. We have much to thank Dr. Sheehi for, particularly her ability to recruit and engage younger and more diverse members within our organization. I also want to recognize Stephen ’s many contributions. As a longtime vocal opponent of the torture issue in APA that became public a decade ago, Dr. Soldz fought back against several attempts to cover up our parent organization ’s involvement in the abuse and torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other military black sites. I have learned much from both of my predecessors about how essential it is for us to speak truth to power, especially when it is inconvenient to do so.
Since many of you don ’t know me, let me tell you a bit about how I got here. I am a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst in private practice in Boulder, CO. I attended my first SPPP Spring Meeting as a graduate student in 2008. In 2011 I joined the Early Career Committee and was elected to be the SPPP Secretary the following year. After two terms in that role, I served as a Member at Large for one year before being elected as one of your Council Representatives to APA. During the six years in that role, I had the chance to advocate on behalf of psychoanalysis and social justice issues. In that role, I collaborated with APA and challenged them when they were not supporting equitable and fair treatment for everyone. My experience on Council has shown me that having a platform means we have an obligation to make a positive impact. As a psychoanalyst, I ’ve also learned that much of our behavior is shaped by unconscious influences, which do not always have the best intentions. The work of course is to recognize the inherent ambivalences with which we all must contend and do our best to act in ways that reflect our morals.
I have been on the Division 39 Board of Directors since 2013, and in that time, I learned a great deal about how this organization functions well and also how it struggles. As most of you are well aware, SPPP has had a rough few years. Many of our challenges are not unique to us; professional organizations at large are struggling to recruit and retain members. Younger colleagues are less and less interested in giving their time and money without clarity around what those precious resources are supporting. Older colleagues are increasingly disaffected and feeling discarded. COVID exposed many cracks and schisms between different political factions in a way that has become harder and harder to gloss over. Our Division Forum collapsed under the pressure of the disinhibition that asynchronous online interactions tend to potentiate. Many of our members belonging to marginalized communities expressed feeling regularly attacked and violated by the discourse, and any illusions of psychological safety made the listserv no longer viable. And while it has been replaced by the Discussion listserv, the harms from its forbearer have rendered it virtually lifeless.
In addition, SPPP has been experiencing significant financial distress for the past few years. For a number of reasons, the Spring Meetings which would typically generate income for the Division now cost us money. We are working on solutions, but in the meantime it has become de rigueur for the Board to be presented with Spring Meeting budgets that predict significant financial losses. Furthermore, obtaining precise and current membership figures from the APA has become challenging, which often leaves us uncertain about our revenue from membership dues. Our membership is aging, and almost a third of you are now considered Life Members, which means you are no longer asked to contribute dues to our organization; simultaneously, our new grad student and ECP members pay reduced dues. The Scholars program—which has been instrumental in engaging graduate students and early career professionals, including individuals from historically marginalized groups—no longer operates under the initial (generous) grant that was provided to the Division at its inception; we must now fully fund this essential and expensive program. This year, for the first time, we were forced to tap into our long-term reserves to meet our expenses. Put all this together, and it is not difficult to see how fewer resources combined with increased political hostility and tension has made it challenging for SPPP to operate the way that it once did.
Finally, to name the elephant in the room, conflict around beliefs related to the war in Gaza has exploded to the point of what often feels like an all-out war of its own (if you will excuse the bit of hyperbole). We are all aware that psychoanalysis has its origin as a largely Jewish field. As we have expanded to be more inclusive, we have also had to reckon with very different ideas about Islamophobia, antisemitism, and Jew-hatred and address how these things do and do not exist in the modern geopolitical sphere. I am not naive enough to believe that I can solve these problems. But, as your President, I am committing to name the tensions and conflicts without claiming to have answers, much like what we do with our patients. I am aware that this will be insufficient for some of you. My hope is that by reckoning with these quagmires, we will be able to make some progress towards having a more functional organization that can feel like a professional home to as many psychodynamic and psychoanalytic professionals as possible.
If you have read this far, thank you! While we are a group with many obstacles facing us, we also have many, many strengths; namely, all of YOU! One of the best parts of being involved in Division and APA governance has been the opportunity to meet so many talented, intelligent, decent-hearted, and like-minded peers and mentors. I know firsthand how many exceptional resources we have in our membership, and I aim to harness as much of that talent as possible. SPPP is a professional home to so many of us, and while it certainly has its warts and weaknesses, it is a home worth fighting for. Please join me in fighting that good fight.
Sincerely,
Dana Charatan
SPPP President
