Psychoanalysis and APsaA in the Twenty-First Century: Their Fates May Be Different

It is a decided pleasure to stand before you today and discuss the current state of our field and our professional organization. What I will say comes from a very direct and personal base of experience. Let me acknowledge at the outset that this is of course very much my own point of view. I have spent fourteen years of my professional life, from 1998 to 2012, intimately immersed in the affairs of APsaA. I have held elected office in APsaA for all of those years, first as a councilor-at-large and then for ten years as an officer. I have participated in the decision making of the Executive Committee and of the Executive Council, our board of trustees. I have always considered myself a progressive and support the necessity of appropriate change, even if it means drastic change. But I also consider myself an optimist, believing that the body of knowledge and skills that psychoanalysis confers will lead to good outcomes for us, our patients, and the world more generally. However, after fourteen years of struggling with our organization's difficulties, I have come to modify this ever cheerful view. What I now believe is that there is a major divergence in the health, vitality, and viability of psychoanalysis as a field and a body of knowledge and that of our professional organization, which faces the threat of serious deterioration.

First let me address the health of psychoanalysis as an intellectual discipline. In my view, our field remains vital. It continues to have more than a modicum of life and is, unlike APsaA, not even close to life support.