Five years ago, the Newsletter (Vol. 3, Nos. 1-2) printed a detailed article on the Committee on Institutes by its chairman, Dr. Sylvan Keiser. His article gave a comprehensive presentation of its origins as an outgrowth of the Lewin-Ross survey, and the evolution of its functions up to 1969. Since many of these activities have expanded in the past five years, and since there has been such an increase in new categories of members receiving the Newsletter, it seems worthwhile to open the doors, so to speak, of a semi-annual Committee meeting, to convey a sense of the variety of its present concerns and some notion of the depth of its studies of the psychoanalytic educational process.
On Tuesday, April 30th, thirteen members of the Committee on Institutes will assemble at 9 A.M., as they regularly do on the Tuesday of each Fall and Annual Meeting. First on the agenda will be a review of the site visits of February 1974.
Each year a member of the Committee on Institutes visits one of two cities where there is an analytic institute. A representative from the Child Analysis Committee joins the group, and sometimes a member of another committee of the Board comes to observe, but stays to participate.
For three or four days, from breakfast to bed-time, the Subcommittee attempts to learn everything possible about the institute being visited. Subcommittee members speak to institute personnel including candidates, graduates, teaching analysts, local society members, training analysts, executive officers. They sit in on classes and supervisory sessions, attend current committee meetings, peruse minutes of past meetings, meet with individuals who wish to talk with them, and examine records provided by hospitable executive secretaries.
A site visit ends on Saturday, around noon. After a brief presentation and discussion of their observations with an executive group of the institute, these now weary visitors from the American, no longer regarded, they hope, as inspector-generals, but as colleagues and maybe even new friends, scatter to their homes.
The work of the Committee on Institutes, by no means confined to site visits, is best appreciated if we present a summary of the topics that will be discussed on April 30th in Denver. The following list of topics was submitted to the Newsletter by the current Chairman of the Committee on Institutes, Leon Ferber, M.D. of the Baltimore-D.C. Institute:
A review of the site visits to the Boston and Southern California Psychoanalytic Institutes, which took place in February of 1974.
Reports of previous site visits that have not been finalized. We will discuss some of the preliminary reports that have been sent to the institutes and the institutes' replies to these preliminary reports.
Follow-up meetings with members of the various institutes that have been visited in the past two or three years. We have been encouraging institutes that have had site visits to meet with us during the meetings of the American for further discussion of the site visit, the report, and to bring us up to date about changes that have occurred since the site visit.
There will be a discussion of the value of increasing the time of the site visit by a half day. This year, one of the institutes visited had the site visit time increased by one half day, while the length of the other site visit remained the same as usual. The discussion will give us an opportunity to see if the increased half day makes for a better exchange of ideas and more time for the Committee to consider its observations and to attain better objectivity.
A report of a current survey being made by a subcommittee of the Committee on Institutes, chaired by Dr. George Richardson of Seattle, Washington. This subcommittee is surveying the various institutes throughout the country about the availability of analytic patients for candidates and recent graduates. In many areas of the country there has been a decrease in the number of available patients. The subcommittee will not only conduct the survey, but will consider what recommendations might be made to the Board on Professional Standards to correct this condition.
The Committee on Institutes plans, sponsors and participates in various workshops in order to provide an exchange of information and ideas by institute representatives about the workings, methods and procedures in the various institutes. At the Denver Meeting, there will be five workshops at which representatives from the Committee on Institutes will meet with representatives of institutes from all over the country.
The Workshop on Psychoanalytic Clinics. This will be the third meeting of this workshop, and the topics will include methodological considerations and practical problems of psychoanalytic clinics. Both the Chicago and Baltimore-District of Columbia Institutes will offer specific reports.
The Workshop for Psychoanalytic Institute Libraries will discuss a report on funding and administrative support for psychoanalytic libraries from the National Committee on Libraries. It will also discuss results of a petition to microfilm the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association and the Psychoanalytic Quarterly for library reference only; and there will be a presentation by M. A. O'Mara on Psychiatric Bibliography.
The Workshop for Institute Representatives will discuss recent works of Drs. Daniel Shapiro and Kato Van Leeuwen on Training Analyses. Problems that arise in the training analysis that may require termination, modification of the analysis, or transfer to another analyst will be considered. This workshop will attempt to define some of the problems and to share experiences.
The Workshop for Chairmen of Educational Committees has an open agenda, although I believe at this meeting there will be a discussion of the impact that decisions of certain Board committees, e.g., the Kaufman Committee, have on psychoanalytic education.
The Workshop for Institute Records will be considering the importance of confidentiality of records, the way records are kept by the various institutes, who has access to the records, the purposes of the records, whether or not a coding system can be devised to preserve confidentiality, and other significant topics. The goal of this workshop is not only an exchange of ideas, but also to make specific recommendations to the various institutes.
The Committee on Institutes will continue its general discussion of the philosophy and goals of the site visit, as well as methods of follow-up. Self-observation is probably the one recurrent theme of each Committee on Institutes meeting.