The Central Office of the American Psychoanalytic Association is roughly analagous to a man's central nervous system. It is absolutely indispensable, but it does its work smoothly, quietly and unobtrusively. The members of the Association are for the most part unaware of its activities and take it very much for granted except in the occasional instance when something goes wrong. The ensuing article about the Central Office is presented with the aim of acquainting the membership of the Association with the anatomy and physiology of this vital portion of their national organization.
In the years immediately after World War II, the American Psychoanalytic Association managed with a minimum of administrative help. For some time Mr. Merrill H. Whitney, who had been appointed Executive Secretary of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute, handled the affairs of the Association as a part-time additional job. When this proved insufficient, Mr. John McVeigh was employed as the first full-time Executive Secretary of the Association, with a very small office in the Bar Association building in midtown New York. This was a one-room affair in which Mr. McVeigh found it difficult to reach his desk because of the space occupied by filing cabinets. After a time he was given an assistant, Mrs. Helen Fischer.
Following Mr. McVeigh's death in 1955 Mrs. Fischer took over the duties of the Executive Secretary, and in time was officially appointed to that position, a post she still holds. In 1957 Mrs. Bess Gerber joined the staff as Mrs. Fischer's assistant and has remained. By 1959 it had become obvious that the growing affairs of the organization could not be dealt with in the small space available in its one-room office, and the Central Office was then moved to its present very comfortable quarters on the top floor of the building at One East Fifty-Seventh Street in New York City. The Association was fortunate in finding a suite of offices whose previous tenant had installed a variety of comforts and luxuries, including wall to wall carpeting and a built-in kitchenette. Other conveniences such as air conditioning were installed later on. The splendid view of Central Park was a built-in feature which has made the office a pleasant place in which to work.
Mrs. Fischer recalls that when she first took on the job of Executive Secretary, the main concerns in the office were the planning and running of the semi-annual meetings; dues collections; formal notices to the membership which were required by the By-Laws; the work of the Membership Committee; and some desultory correspondence with officers and committee members. These activities were at that time handled by a staff of three.
The growth in the size and complexity of the Association has been accompanied by an expansion in the size of the staff and in the multiplicity of its functions. At the present time there are, in addition to Mrs. Fischer and Mrs. Gerber, a secretary, Mrs. Virginia Reminick; a receptionist, Mrs. Jeannette Herczeg; a bookkeeper, Mrs. Dora Yunis; and a number of part-time employes. It is difficult to describe adequately the very large number of operations which this devoted staff under Mrs. Fischer's expert leadership carries out in the course of a year.
The Central Office is the official mailing address of the Association and the repository for and distributing point of all Association materials and communications. The Office functions as a clearing house for Association affairs and works, with some few exceptions, as secretary to all the officers and all the committees of the Association. Mrs. Fischer is in regular communication with all committee chairmen and officers, and is closely conversant with all of the activities, concerns and problems of each one. The work of any active committee necessarily involves a continual flow of letters, memoranda, documents and duplicated material, all of which are funneled through the hands of Mrs. Fischer and her staff. The appointment of any new committee always means an additional allotment of work for the Central Office. The Ad Hoc Committees, which come and go in relation to specific current problems, always mean a special work load over and above the normal complement of work carried on by the Standing Committees.
The Association holds two meetings a year, each lasting a week (the scientific sessions and the Meeting of Members are regularly preceded by several days of administrative meetings). The endless details of arranging for the orderly holding of a convention involving dozens of committee meetings which have to be scheduled and kept out of conflict one with the other; the arrangements with the hotel for meeting rooms, living accommodations and
all the rest are again jobs carried out by the office staff. While the Arrangements Committee and the Program Committee have the responsibility of planning various aspects of the conventions, it is Mrs. Fischer's staff who carry out the plans. Every committee chairman who has had to schedule a meeting of his committee during the convention week is aware that the mere problem of traffic direction in finding time and space for the committees is in itself a job of considerable magnitude.
This year the staff will run three conventions instead of two, since all the arrangements for the Pan-American Congress are being handled by the Central Office.
Another task whose results the membership take for granted is the composition and publication of the yearly Roster. The members, when they receive their copies of the Roster in the mail, understandably do not stop to think of the labor which has to go into its annual publication.
As the mailing address for the Association, One East Fifty-Seventh Street is the recipient of a great variety of inquiries and other communications to the Association from outside sources. These inquiries may be simple requests for information, or complaints about the Association or its members, or requests for information on such things as how to find a psychoanalyst in such and such a community, etc. Many of the inquiries have public relations implications, and necessitate a close working relationship between Mrs. Fischer and Mr. Eugene Kone, the Public Relations Consultant of the Association. The Central Office handles as many of these communications as it feels competent to, and has to know when to route to the appropriate committee or officer an inquiry which it feels it cannot deal with.
Then there are all of the ordinary and mundane activities that fall in the domain of the central office of a large organization — billing, ordering, maintenance of mailing lists, collection of dues, handling of funds, bookkeeping, budgeting, housekeeping problems for the office itself. The Central Office staff have at their disposal an array of modern office equipment that facilitates their handling of all these matters. The Xerox machine, of course, has come to occupy a central position in the activities of the office. Mrs. Fischer, like many administrators, has had reason to wonder whether the communications explosion which she has witnessed, involving requests from all sides for the duplication of material, is not to some extent the result of the acquisition of the miracle of Xerox, rather than its cause.
This cataloguing of the multiple activities of the Central Office staff still leaves out much that is essential in what it does for the Association that it serves. Officers and committees come and go, but the Executive Secretary, as the permanent employee of the Association, supplies a kind of continuity without which a great deal of the work of the officers would become immeasurably more difficult. Mrs. Fischer is a repository of a vast amount of history and information about the Association and its past activities. What she does not carry in her head is tucked away in filing cabinets, and those who have had occasion to be involved in the work of committees of the Association have been regularly surprised and gratified to note how readily the Executive Secretary can put her hands on a particular document when it is needed. The competence of the Executive Secretary and her staff, along with the good will they bring to their job, create a climate which is of inestimable value to the Association in the day-to-day conduct of its affairs.
Officers who have completed a term, or committee chairmen who have submitted a report customarily thank Mrs. Fischer and staff for their indispensable help. It should be understood that these comments are not routine civilities but expressions of sincere feeling.
It is inevitable that the Central Office of an association will be little known and little thought about by its members. The Central Office staff accept this with equanimity, but are nonetheless always pleased when a member of the Association, while visiting New York, has the interest and curiosity to pay a visit to the Central Office. Such visitors have always found a warm welcome.