The Fund for Psychoanalytic Research seems on the road to being a solidly established part of organized American psychoanalysis. In its first year the letter of appeal to all members of the Association for an annual voluntary contribution of $25 or more netted a total of $36,750, including accrued interest, from approximately 77% of the membership. Of this amount, a total of $15,000 was awarded to three successful applicants at the December 1976 meeting of the Board, leaving a balance at the end of the initial organizing year of $21,750. Thus far in this current second operating year, a comparable percentage of the responding membership has contributed $28,157, which is just about the same amount as had been raised last year to this point.
Since the December 1976 meeting, there have been a total of eight inquiries for funds, five of which eventuated in formal applications. The three grants awarded in Quebec were as follows: 1) $6,000 to Hartvig Dahl and Virginia Sterba at the Downstate Medical Center in New York for a study of countertransferences as discerned via the syntactic expressions in the analyst's verbal interventions (a study requiring the collaboration of psychoanalytic clinicians and a psycholinguist); 2) $5,000 to Merton Gill and Irwin Hoffman of the University of Illinois School of Medicine in Chicago for a study of mechanisms of coding explicit and implicit transference references in psychoanalysis in order to test some hypotheses about the importance of early consistent interpretation of the transference; and 3) $6,000 to Hal Sampson and Joe Weiss of the Mt. Zion Hospital and Medical Center in San Francisco in collaboration with the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute for the comparative study of divergent hypotheses about how warded off mental contents are brought to consciousness in the course of analytic work. With these awards of $17,000 in May, the Fund balance now stands at $32,907.
In Quebec, the Board of the Fund formally adopted the application guidelines and application forms drawn up by Philip Holzman with input from various Board members. There was precise clarification of two potentially nettlesome issues in regard to the fiscal and ethical accountability of the supported investigators. It was reiterated that grants will not be handled by the investigator but by the sponsoring instituiton of the grantee's choice: the academic or clinical institution under whose auspices the research would be performed; the psychoanalytic society or institute with which the grantee is affiliated; or, where neither the first nor the second option is feasible, the Central Office of the American. A comparable arrangement was evolved in regard to the issues of human experimentation that will of course arise in almost all the research funded under our auspices. Before receipt of any Fund monies, the investigator will have to furnish a written statement of having been found in compliance with the guidelines of the sponsoring institution's committee for human experimentation.
If the pattern of membership giving to the Fund established thus far can be maintained on an annual basis (about $35,000 per year), the Fund will just barely have enough money to cover the flow of approved projects, three at each of the two meetings per year, averaging about $6,000 each. If the Fund is to be able to give more grants or larger grants or to extend its activities into other areas of research, additional monies will be needed.
Robert S. Wallerstein
Chairman, Board of Directors, Fund for Psychoanalytic Research