Report to the Board on Professional Standards

THIS REPORT TO THE FELLOWS of the Board on Professional Standards closes my term as Chairman of the Committee on Institutes. My intent is to transmit a distillation of impressions and convictions about the institutes of the American Psychoanalytic Association and their educational processes. The formulations are primarily but not exclusively based on experience gained by site visits to various institutes. Some impressions are derived from statistical data solicited from those institutes which were visited. The other activities (workshops) of the Committee on Institutes also contributed to the development of these ideas.2

Before the visit itself, every statistical aspect of an institute was studied. In addition, minutes of meetings of all committees were carefully scrutinized by the subcommittee. Although the Committee's visit to an institute is relatively brief, it is astonishing how much is usually learned. Both the visitors and institutes were startled by this fact. At the beginning of a visit, an institute often will assume an attitude of "knowing superiority," implying that