The Forum's History
Formed in 1974 under the auspices of the Washington School of Psychiatry and inspired by the interdisciplinary thought of Harry Stack Sullivan, the predecessor organization of the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities was guided in its early years by the leadership of Joseph Smith, MD from 1974 to 2002 and Gordon Kirschner, MD, from 2002 to 2017 and Marshall Alcorn, Ph.D. from 2018 to the present.
For over 60 years the Forum has sponsored conferences, study groups, and edited collections on subjects important to psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and the humanities. Study groups are developed through the planning in yearly meetings by the board of directors.
​
​
Many of the study groups and conferences have led to edited volumes.
​
Major Conferences
​
2010 Conference
Trauma: Intersections among Narrative, Neuroscience, and Psychoanalysis
George Washington University March 4-6, 2010
Co-sponored by the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities and by the Departments of English and Psychiatry, The George Washington University
​
2016 Conference
Listening to Trauma
George Washington University Oct 2016
Co-sponored by the Forum on Psychiatry and the Humanities and by the Departments of English and Psychiatry, The George Washington University
​
The study of trauma, Judith Herman has argued, has a history of “episodic amnesia.” Knowledge gained is periodically forgotten and must be periodically reclaimed. After almost 15 years of constant combat in the middle east, American culture, its media, academic attention and clinical practices, have become increasing responsive to the diverse nature and complexity of traumatic experience. Our second Washington Conference on trauma worked to recover and also advance an understanding of traumatic experience through interdisciplinary explorations. Our presenters included scholars and clinicians from psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychiatry, psychology, public policy, literature, history, political science, journalism, linguistics and others from the human sciences.
​
​
​
Francoise Davoine talking to Conference participants 2016
Publishing History
Forum on PSYCHIATRY AND THE HUMANITIES
​
The Forum has published in distinguished university presses a series of interdisciplinary volumes presenting psychoanalytic and humanist commentaries on subjects of pivotal concern to both analysts and humanist scholars. The work of the Forum Study Groups has contributed to edited volumes.
​
Volume I Festschrift for Edith Weigert (1976)
Volume II Thought, Consciousness and Reality (1977)
Volume III Psychoanalysis and Language (1978)
Volume IV The Literary Freud: Mechanisms of Defense and the Poetic Will
(1980)
Volume V Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self (1981)
Volume VI Interpreting Lacan (1983)
Volume VII Taking Chances: Derrida, Psychoanalysis and Literature (1984)
Volume VIII Opening Texts: Psychoanalysis and the Culture of the Child (1985)
Volume IX Pragmatism’s Freud: The Moral Disposition of Psychoanalysis (1986)
Volume X Images in Our Souls: Cavell, Psychoanalysis and Cinema (1987)
Volume XI Psychoanalysis and Religion (1990)
Volume XII The World of Samuel Beckett (1991)
Volume XIII Tellings Facts (1992)
Volume XIV Psychoanalysis, Feminism and The Future of Gender (1994)