Notes on the History and Founding of APCS

by Marshall Alcorn

In the summer of 1994 Mark Bracher and I met with lawyers in Washington DC to establish what is now APCS as an interdisciplinary academic organization with ties to the clinical community and ties to the academic community. Two key figures that contributed enormously to our development were Joe Smith then Chair of the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities and a Training and Supervising analyst and psychiatrist with the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute and the late Claudia Tate, Professor of African American Studies first at George Washington University and later at Princeton.

All of us involved wanted an organization that would offer a place for academics and clinicians interested in psychoanalysis to gather together, give papers, publish articles and talk about psychoanalytic understanding and psychoanalytic understandings of culture. Many of us had begun our careers with an interest in the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature, and in the relationship between Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis. It was our hope then, partly because of the Lacanian influence on psychoanalytic thinking, to expand the horizon of psychoanalytic thought. We hoped we could explore and respond to psychoanalytic grounds of social conflict
and social progress.

At our first conference, I have a note regarding a question asked in a large APCS group by the late Claudia Tate. This was a question she asked to a group presentation that was, like my own work at that time, heavily theoretical:  Claudia asked, “Will what we do make any difference to real people who suffer from social injustice?” This anxiety about the usefulness of what we do came up in 1995 and since that time the organization has changed a great deal. Can we say that this change shows progress for real people in the world outside our organization?