President's Report

Bion reminds us that turbulence is the inevitable by-product of movement and change. Just beneath the placid surface of the stream, there's a branch or a stone that breaks the laminar flow and makes the current visible. On the world's stage, the past year has been a year of branches and stones. Movement and change has been not just visible but overwhelming, torrential. “Biblical” became the adjective of choice in newspaper stories about great floods and wars.

I recently attended a lecture by Ray Kurzweil, the MIT-based inventor and techno-wizard, in which he spoke (quickly, without notes, and accompanied by endless graphs) about his next big idea: “the singularity.” Technology, Kurzweil argues, has always been accelerating at an exponential rate, but whereas no human would have really taken in the change from the Stone Age to the Bronze, today revolutions are televised. By the time we have absorbed that we can carry around 1000 tunes on an iPod the size of a Post-It note, it starts playing movies. The curve of technological acceleration will take such a sharp turn upwards that by mid-century, according to Kurzweil, it will appear to human eyes as virtually vertical: infinite acceleration, incomprehensible change. “The singularity,” he calls it. Maybe it will be like dropping off the bottom of Bion's grid.

How are we in the psychoanalytic community to keep pace with such catastrophic change? It will, I think, take ever more collaboration, flexibility, and a willingness to bring our institutions up-to-date. As I reported in the last fort da, this year we undertook a restructuring of the organization by adding two divisions: the Outreach, Membership, and Liaison Division (OML) and the Program Division. The goal of this restructuring is to provide a much-needed middle layer of coordination. NCSPP has grown significantly in the past five years, making the two main functions of the Board — governance and strategic direction — somewhat unwieldy. The new divisions should allo