President's Page

In many ways our Association is making good progress. Our mid-winter meeting was of very high quality with all credit due the Program and Arrangements Committees and the participants. Our Bulletin is an outstanding success at the cost of an enormous expenditure of time and effort on the part of the Editor and his Associates. At least seven or eight of the standing professional committees met at the mid-winter meeting. They are making good progress.

There are, however, still some further immediate developments which I hope may be accomplished. In my presidential remarks at the May meeting in Washington, I made a series of recommendations. These were briefly presented in the September issue of the Bulletin. They were elaborated and presented to the Council at the December Meeting. Each of the councillors agreed to write me his suggestions about these recommendations; these would then be re-formulated, and because of their importance, distributed to every member of the Association for consideration.

One of the most controversial of these recommendations concerns our membership. It was my recommendation that the By-Laws of The American Psychoanalytic Association be changed to provide that the present active members of the Association be redesignated Fellows; that two new categories of membership be provided — Medical Affiliates and Research Affiliates.

This recommendation was made for several reasons. The theory and application of psychoanalysis has progressed far beyond its sole use as a therapeutic tool. Many of our medical confreres, particularly in psychiatry, utilize psychoanalytic principles in their daily treatment of patients but make no pretense that they are carrying out orthodox psychoanalytic therapy. They are deeply interested in the development of psychoanalysis. Many of our social scientists have become oriented to psychoanalysis and utilize it in their own work. A sufficient number of clinical psychologists has become psychoanalytically trained