Committees at Work

Dr. Ernest E. Hadley, Secretary of the Committee on Standards, has been actively engaged in circulating the standards for training which were discussed at the last meeting of the Board of Professional Standards.

Copies of the standards for training of physicians in psychoanalysis were sent to the members of the Board of Professional Standards, to the officers of the American Psychoanalytic Association and to the Secretaries of Institutes during the second week in January, 1949.

In its cover letter, the Committee requested that the standards of training as submitted be carefully studied and exceptions, criticisms and recommendations of important issues were solicited. The Committee suggested that the Institutes return their suggestions for a more satisfactory phrasing of paragraphs one and two regarding admission to training.

By the middle of March, two Institutes had made suggestions for revising these two paragraphs and these recommended changes are being prepared for mailing to the other Institutes for their consideration.

The Committee hopes it may continue to secure the cooperation of the local Committees on Standards of each Institute, since it is only in this way that satisfactory standards can be established to meet the needs of all the Institutes.

Committee for the Study of Social Issues

Dr. Nathan W. Ackerman, Chairman of this Committee, has been carrying through the work of this Committee quite actively. As was pointed out in previous reports, the Committee is functioning in regional groups which meet regularly. The main emphasis in the meetings of the regional group in New York and also the groups in San Francisco and Chicago has been on investigating the methodological problems involved in the study of social phenomena. The immediate objective has been to try to discern in what way psychoanalytic insight can be brought most effectively to bear on some of the crucial problems of our current society.