The External Credentialing Process as a Joint Endeavor: Lessons from the Past

I am very honored to participate on this panel this evening and am particularly grateful to Ann Louise Silver for her wisdom in arranging this panel as the opening session of a scientific program of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis. I feel both fortunate and saddened to be on this panel. I feel fortunate for the opportunity to engage in this polylogue and share some of my own thoughts with you, and I feel saddened because Robert Pyles, the president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, could not participate because of a long-standing commitment for this evening. I send you both his greetings and good wishes as well as his sincere regrets that he could not be here. I would also like to stress that my comments here this evening, like at any other scientific discussion, are my own personal opinions and do not reflect any “official” position of the American Psychoanalytic Association. Obviously, I shared my ideas with my colleagues at the American after I wrote them. Thus, these comments are not a joint production nor, in fact, influenced by any discussion with anyone else.

I am stressing this point because my paper has a very simple conclusion—a recommendation, as a matter of fact. My conclusion is that there is only one way to effectively implement a joint endeavor on credentialing psychoanalytic institutions, and eventually individual psychoanalysts. I will argue that for credentialing to occur, all of us will have to shift our focus. We need to shift away from a political orientation to a scientific orientation. It seems to me that up to now we have needed to pay a great deal of attention to political considerations because of the