Fall Meeting—December 14–18, 1988

The Fall Meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association was held at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York City, December 14–18, 1988. Abstracts of the Business Meeting of Members, including reports of the Secretary of the Executive Council, the Treasurer of the Association, the Secretary of the Board on Professional Standards, the Editor of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Chairman of the Fund for Psychoanalytic Research are published in this issue of the Bulletin. Members who desire to obtain copies of the Official Minutes of any of these bodies may do so by communicating with the Administrative Director, Mrs. Helen Fischer, 309 East 49th Street, New York, NY 10017.

Being an analyst means choosing a life of daily wonderful, terrifying adventures. Rather than steer for the calm harbors of equilibrium among psychic institutions in peaceful alliance with one's patient companion on the voyage, the psychoanalyst must willingly defy the elemental tendencies of ordinary human nature in order to eschew rapid healing, premature synthesizing, and the masterful therapeutic activity of which he is quite capable. One's pact with one's patient includes a promise to try to live with him or her in continuous conflict, both internal and external, until it is all over—no, even after it is over.

I think any discussion of the meaning of the Board on Professional Standards, its value and its conflicts, must begin here—with the stresses of our lives as analysts—the guilts, the fears, the shifting moods, the dangerous joys of feeling competent in one hour, and, in another, observing potential insights and movement in the wake of the temporary abject realization that we can be sure of possessing only ineptness. All this, we have been instructed, and we come to realize, has to be borne. And when we analysts approach