Honoring Roy Grinker, Sr.

It gives me great pleasure to participate in this salute to Roy Grinker, Sr. to whom we owe so much of the spirit that motivated and vitalized the first 20 years of our Academy's existence. The American Academy of Psychoanalysis was born when the discipline of psychoanalysis needed to break out of its ideological confines, which made it more of a religion than a science, when it began to feel the urgent need to belong to and participate in the community of the behavioral sciences, stimulated and stimulating, influenced and influencing, deeply believing that progress and change are intertwined.

Roy and others of our founders were not at all interested in just another psychoanalytic organization. They passionately believed that psychoanalysis could only grow and mature if it truly embraced and functioned as a member of the scientific community. Isolation spelled rigidity and decline. This belief became the tangible credo of the essential activity of the Academy that is of the forum. The Academy forum was to be a forum for our multidimensional education and for sharpening our knowledge and experiences in the process of challenging debates with other scientists.

The American Academy is again confronting critical times. Outside forces are creating crucial shifts in emphasis in psychiatry in general, and the field of mental health in particular. Psychoanalysis has steadily lost its eminence. Its most valuable contributions have been absorbed in the broader realm of dynamic psychotherapy. Nonmedical therapists have flourished. We face changes in availability of patients, and in the economics of practice. The dearth of psychiatric candidates threatens the viability of our psychoanalytic institutes.

I wish Roy were here to help clarify our perspective, to review the reason for our existence, and help us to chart a new course that is appropriate to our basic concerns as mental health professionals and one that responds to the exigencies of the time. Roy Grinker would have had a