The President's Page

“Art. I. Section 2. Purpose. It shall be the purpose of the American Psychoanalytic Association to study and advance psychoanalysis; to establish and maintain standards for the training of psychoanalysts and for the practice of psychoanalysis; to foster the integration of psychoanalysis with other branches of medicine and to encourage research in all fields having to do with the scientific knowledge and welfare of man.”

Periodically we might well review our purposes and our efforts toward their accomplishment. If we are to pursue these aims, every member of the Association should fully understand our organizational structure and what its various components are trying to do. The scope of interest and activity has markedly increased within the last two years, as one can glean from the reports in The Bulletin. All the local Societies and Institutes are extremely busy. (There are 165 training analysts, with 582 candidates in training.) The council of the Association and the many functional and professional committees are concerned with more and more business of the Association.

Your council, composed of twenty members, has had quite a little business done by mail in the last few months. It has tentatively approved an annual budget of $10,000, which is nearly twice the sum spent in previous years. The increase is largely to finance the establishment of the New York office with Mr. Whitney our Executive Assistant, and the publication of the Bulletin of the Association. The major subsidiary of the Council is the Board of Professional Standards made up of two representatives from each of the Institutes, with 24 members and with five sub-committees concerned with specific problems related to Professional Standards.

In addition, the Association is serviced by several standing functional committees — on Arrangements, Program, Public Information, Relationships to the International Psychoanalytic. There are some task committees with specific functions limited in nature,