Frontline: Toward a New Name, Toward a New Mission

In 2001, the members of this 45-year-old society of several hundred psychoanalytically trained and psychodynamically oriented psychiatrists voted to refit themselves with a new name. The membership decided The American Academy of Psychoanalysis would become The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry. Unfortunately, authorization for the name change is working its way through government agencies more slowly than expected. We had hoped that the new name would be reflected here, at the Journal, as we begin a new volume year and install a new editor. Despite this delay, we intend to affirm and work toward realizing our new mission. If, remarkably, our name change is not approved, we hope our readership will join us in a chuckle at a bit of life's comedy as we roll up our sleeves and try again.

The new name (when and if authorized) flows from our recognition of how the Academy's identity has shifted. Frankly, we wish we had found a name that was less of a mouthful. We did try. The American Academy of Psychoanalysis and Dynamic Psychiatry does not come off as trippingly as its more elegant predecessor. Yet we wanted a name that does speak for the reaffirmation of the Academy as medical. The name speaks, too, for the Academy as less limited by the formalities of psychoanalysis and as additionally concerned with the belief that in psychiatric care listening to patients, understanding them, and talking to them, matters. How to do that well, how to do it even better—and how to incorporate new knowledge of pharmacotherapy and neuroscience into our treatment—have become targets of the Academy even more than before. The Academy reaches out, foremost, to those psychiatrists who hold to a thumpingly persistent vision that their patients' well-being depends on a quality of psychoanalytic and psychodynamic understanding that reaches from deep within the humanity of the clinicians themselves. While appreciating those in other mental health disciplines who share this