While the ink of the By-Laws of the American Psychoanalytic Association Inc. was drying, a wide variety of individuals outside the medical profession began making requests for exemptions from the minimal standards required for training in psychoanalysis, so that they too could be credited with membership.
Soliciting such waivers has long since ceased to be founded on particular, individual, distinguished, and hence deserved, merit. As the volume of such requests has steadily increased from a trickle to a torrent and now promises to be a flood, it has become evident that the pressing motivation for gaining membership was the power of endorsement as a clinical psychoanalyst.
The narrow criteria for considering exceptions was meant to give particular recognition to those individuals who, by virtue of their special earned qualifications intimately related to psychoanalysis, were considered of noteworthy regard. However, the persistent and greater demands for waivers of the minimal requirements of the Board on Professional Standards has notably failed to reveal in this broadly diversified group of petitioners either special merit or unique qualifications as individuals that the Board could weigh as exceptional.
The truth, which the informed seem hesitant to disclose and which the ognorant are amazed to discover, is this: those who petitioned and were granted a waiver of the minimal proefssional standards for the clinical practice of psychoanalysis have brought no compelling evidence of exceptional contributions to psychoanalytic knowledge. Yet, their most powerfully and frequently voiced assertion has claimed some unique endowment that would enrich psychoanalysis. This benefit has still to be received. It is a calculus which proposes that lesser qualification assures greater gain.
The recent trend of reasons for granting a waiver does not appear to be based on a foundation of credit. As a result, it obscures and even risks the validity of the requests of exceptional individuals for whom special consideration by way of a waiver is intended. These new claimants, whose special pleading turns on their promise to enrich psychoanalysis through their efforts, in actuality have merely a wish to practice clinical psychoanalysis as a calling. Moreover, with their own lack of clinical qualifications (that physicians are obliged to acquire) they level attacks at the fundamental merits of medical education. Such an education and training, they contend, is tedious, arduous and coupled with the demands of a lengthy curriculum and thus, they reason, it is neither immediately nor often demonstrably pertinent to the strictly didactic techniques of psychoanalytic practice. Much of medical education is therefore, they assert, irrelevent to the complex, clinical psychoanalytic treatment of emotional disorders.
The years of clinical experience demanded for minimal qualifications, first as a physician, then as a psychiatrist, and finally as a psychoanalyst, are discounted. This long preparation necessary to the practice of clinical psychoanalysis is held by the unqualified who solicit a waiver of such training for membership to be a mere tortuous route slavishly followed more by habit than credible purpose. A small number of psychoanalysts have always shared these notions and have supported the petitions of the waiver seekers.
The By-Laws of the American are plainly and sufficiently set forth. And the Board is clearly charged to carry its particular share of them forward. The rising flood of demands that the American, through its Board, should abandon its clear purposes in establishing and maintaining minimum professional standards for the practice of psychoanalysis in order that a particular class of individuals be favored forces the issue. Who benefits? Does psychoanalysis? Does the public?
Gregory Rochlin