Lynne Layton, Ph.D., Past-President of Division 39, Section IX

The following piece was originally shared as an oral presentation at the American Psychological Association, Division 39 Spring Meeting of 2026 – Institutional life: Reclaiming life from institutions. It has been lightly edited for clarity and to provide additional context.

In the early 90s, Div 39 President Jonathan Slavin asked Rachael Peltz to form a “Committee on Public Interest and Social Responsibility.” Rachael Peltz reports that we held our first mini- conference before the division meetings in 1993. It was called Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Good Society: What is our Vision?, featuring Michael Rustin. A panel session at that conference was titled: Reflections on an Uneasy Relationship—Psychoanalysis and Politics.  Then, in 1998, Div 39 president Lewis Aron was troubled, as he put it, “by the fact that since the post–World War II period psychoanalysis in this country had become too much a part of the establishment and had thus lost the radical edge of the early generation of psychoanalysts who had been much more socially and politically active.” He asked Rachael and Neil Altman to form a section within the Division called “Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility.” According to Peltz, the committee’s earlier programs had shown “how psychoanalysis and critical theory could explore everyday life themes in the U.S.” Neil and Rachael hoped the new section would bring together a network of psychoanalysts doing work “off the couch.” Board members included Neil, Rachael, Philip Cushman, Muriel Dimen, Ruth Fallenbaum, Margaret Fulton, Elizabeth Goren, Adrienne Harris, Nancy Hollander, Ronnie Lesser, Karen Rosica, Steve Seligman, and Nina Thomas. Ronnie Lesser was the first editor of our newsletter, The Psychoanalytic Activist, in 1998. Neil and Rachael’s announcement of the plan for the new section stated: 

Current plans include compiling a list of extant projects that seek to apply a psychoanalytic perspective to social problems, or to provide clinical services to underserved groups of people. Through publicizing programs around the country that are already operating successfully, we hope to encourage members of our Division to develop similar projects, or other projects for which there is a need in a particular community. We also plan to select a particular topic for study from a psychoanalytic perspective, such as hatred or racism. We will encourage the formation of study groups around the country on the selected topic, hoping to generate interest and presentations at the Spring Meetings and the APA summer conference. 

Rachael and Neil asked me to join the Board in 2000 and to chair the Section’s Education and Training Committee. We embarked on a project to create a social psychoanalytic clinical syllabus, which included examples of the growing number of clinical papers addressing cultural inequities, unconscious collusions, and social symptoms. In 2005, we held a year-long monthly online discussion with our membership on the readings in the syllabus. We hoped that many of us would propose such a course to our psychoanalytic institutes and the Education and Training Committee did try to “market” it as one of our projects. This project had a later iteration in 2015 as more and more psychosocial articles began to appear in our literature. To reach a wider audience, Section IX also cosponsored, together with the online conference producer PsyBc (www.psybc.com), an annual online seminar called “Ideology and the Clinic.” The 2007 papers and discussion among presenters and participants on PsyBc were published in 2 issues of the British journal Psychotherapy and Politics International. 

As Rachael had hoped, the Section invited several Psychoanalyst/activists to come and present their experiences to us at Div 39 meetings. Nancy Hollander      was one of those invited presenters. Nancy, an analyst as well as a Latin American historian, had written a biography of psychoanalyst and activist Marie Langer. She later served as President and brought to our annual meeting Argentinian analyst Juan Carlos Volnovich, who, with other analysts and workers, had participated in radical movements that had arisen in 1970 after the Argentine economic meltdown – actions that included analysts occupying factories alongside the workers. Rachael invited Robert Jay Lifton, who spoke to us about how Vietnam foreshadowed our policies in Iraq; the Section honored Lifton for his lifelong integration of professional expertise with a commitment to progressive political activism. Nancy also brought us Hedda Bolgar, who, as an eyewitness and psychoanalyst, had examined the erosion of constitutional rule and the rise of European Fascism. Over several years, again as an outgrowth of Nancy and Steve Portuges’ involvement in a yearslong study group, we were able to invite a group of Israeli, Palestinian, and North American Arab and Jewish psychoanalysts who had been working together on themes related to the psychodynamics of trauma in the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, and this led to yearly discussions in the Board about our various and conflicting relations to Israel and to Palestine.

In the early 2010s, we also began doing internal work on the white dominance of our board and membership. Alice Shaw, President from 2010-2012, spoke to our attempts to become more inclusive as a Board and a membership. Along with an already existing Section on Gender and Sexuality, an Early Career Committee, and a Graduate Student Committee, the Division had created several new committees—notably, the Multicultural Concerns Committee and the Committee on Sexualities and Gender Identities. During Frank Summers’ presidency, we worked to diversify our Board, our thinking, and our actions, by creating liaison positions so that these groups would have representation on our Board and so that we could work in coalition to help achieve their priorities in the Division. 

Highlights from Section IX’s History of Political Activism

In the early aughts, Section IX very actively worked in solidarity with the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology and with the Peace Division (48) and others in fighting against the APA’s collusion with the military during the Iraq War. It had come to light that the APA had deceptively provided cover for military psychologist members who had helped design and implement torture techniques used at Guantanamo and other CIA secret prisons. The coalition was instrumental in bringing these activities to public light. In 2007, we were part of a broad coalition calling on APA members to withhold dues. Our Section spearheaded a demonstration on the issue during the 2008 APA Boston Convention. 

I believe that Nancy Hollander was again President of the Section from 2014-2016, god bless her! Among other things, she supported us as we stood out on the streets of NYC advocating for reproductive rights during Division Spring Meetings.

My own presidency began in 2016-2018, which coincided with Trump I. Matt LeRoy, editor of The Activist, launched a “first 100 Days” of the Trump administration project, inviting Section members to write short pieces on what we were seeing as immediate effects and future threats. Little did we know how much worse it would become. During my time as President, the Society of Indian Psychologists asked the APA to offer an apology to Native American, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian Peoples. The APA refused, although they have more recently issued an apology. But the refusal mobilized one of our members, Catherine Adler, to approach me and suggest the Section take on that apology project. We drafted the apology, organized to get 10 other Divisions and Sections to sign on, and offered the apology to representatives from SIP in an apology ceremony at the National Multicultural Summit and Conference, which was filmed by our wonderful psychoanalytic psychologist and documentary filmmaker member, Jan Haaken. For me, this was an early lesson in the power of organizing within and outside the Section.

Around this time, 2018, we also started working on educating, activating, and organizing around reparations for African Americans. With Carnella Gordon-Brown, Chris Schmidt,  Natasha Holmes, and others, we co-sponsored reparations events and webinars held by the Black-led Grassroots Reparations Campaign and the Truth-Telling Project of Ferguson (go Cori Bush), created our own Reparations Sundays programs and put on panels at Division 39 conferences. During Matt LeRoy’s presidency, 2022-2024, the Section established a Reparations Committee—Ruth Fallenbaum, Jane Hassinger, and myself–and we created a Section IX Black and Indigenous Scholarship Award that, for the past 3 years, has awarded $1250 each to two Black graduate students. The award comes with the offer of a year of mentorship, free registration to the conference, a PEP-web subscription for a year, and free membership in the Division and the Section.

While membership had increased during my presidency, probably because of Trump, Jane Hassinger, President from 2018-2020, faced an increasingly fractious membership. Jane cites conflict around racism and the kinds of programs we were putting on, but my memory is that most of the fractiousness was about Israel and Palestine. As I mentioned, we’d been having yearly conversations about conditions on the ground there, and while several of us were becoming or always were very critical of Israel, others were decidedly not. When IARPP decided to hold its biannual international conference in Tel Aviv, many of us in the Section supported the Palestinian call to NOT hold the conference there. We lost several members around this issue, which, to me, evokes the Progressive “Except for Palestine” problem that many groups, inside and outside the field, face.

Carter Carter, president from 2020-2022, was our first president of color, and, as the “anti-woke” faction was starting to make itself loudly heard after that brief period of racial reckoning that followed the murder of George Floyd, Carter and Mary Kim Brewster took a ton of shit on the listserv and elsewhere for the radical Spring Meeting program that they created. Not to mention Covid as a factor in the general cultural insanity. As Carter writes: 

Section IX was increasingly evolving in a way where the listserv played an outsized role in the life of the organization right at the moment when everyone (particularly older people at high risk of Covid) were forced into hiding and spent vast amounts of time online.  The listserv was a tether to the outside world, and therefore reflected all of the conflicts of the world, and the kind of uneasy liberal-left brackish waters of our membership.

Speaking of that uneasy liberal-left thing: I have long wondered how much the amazing work that others have described about torture had the effect of unifying a liberal-left coalition of members that then wasn’t sustainable when faced with a different suite of issues (particularly around imperialism, American racism, Palestine).  

Carter says, and I agree, that a very important thing that he accomplished during his presidency was to bring on a new generation of brilliant and diverse member/activists to our Board. He also notes that the labor required of this younger and severely overtaxed group led to productive thinking about how to compensate people for their labor. As he puts it: “If our profession only functions because people do unpaid work, all the leaders will be the people who can afford to do unpaid work, which will just reinscribe all the hierarchies we’re trying to disrupt.”

During Matt LeRoy’s presidency, 2022-2024, Hamas attacked Israel, and Israel began its brutal and genocidal ongoing retaliation. The Section divisions around Palestine heated up, especially after the Board, in a careful and considered process, put out a statement that was quite controversial. I’ll let Matt speak to this in his words: 

The letter was controversial to some of our membership, and also was controversial to APA in general. APA forced us to take it down for a period of time, citing a policy that statements such as this had to be approved by their legal counsel, which we had not done. We had never heard of this requirement in the past around anything Section IX had done. Eventually Molly Merson (then president-elect of Section IX) and I sorted it out with APA and were allowed to post it with a disclaimer, but it was work that I think was largely behind the scenes, and was certainly frustrating (and felt fairly silencing in its intent).

We also received feedback from some members that the letter felt misattuned, hurtful and antisemitic. On the board, too, there were some split feelings about how to deal with the members’ discontent.

Molly Merson, President from 2024-2026, adds that she is “proud of our board and what we were able to do, …to write this letter, facilitate a film screening on Palestine and the encampments (by Section member Jan Haaken!), and a few other things, including restructuring The Activist to create an editorial board collective, and revamping Education and Training. Overall, it was a lot of internal work for the board and I think it gave Brianna a great jumping off point to be able to actually do a lot of fantastic things with real world impact.”

Along with several other Divisions, our Section and Division just achieved an important success at APA of which we should be very proud. In preparation for the February APA Council meetings, members of Section IX, Division 39, Division 48, Psychologists for Justice in Palestine, Jewish Psychologists for Justice, AMENA-Psy, and several other groups worked in coalition to secure the passage, at that meeting, of an updated APA definition of antisemitism that specifically protects free speech by contesting any equation of antisemitism with criticism of Israel. The same coalition worked to pass an updated human rights policy as well.

There is of course much more work to be done in this time of fascism and genocide. I think we are in good hands with the current President, Brianna Suslovic, and the current amazing Board.