The most frequently asked question of COPE is, “What is it?” The Committee on Psychoanalytic Education is one of the standing committees of the Board of Professional Standards, and probably the one with the lowest profile. This is due, in part, to its having been assigned relatively few administrative responsibilities. Rather, it is charged with the task of determining approaches to educational problems so as to further “educate the educators.”
The ways in which it has proceeded in this task account for the second reason for its remaining rather unknown. COPE initiates the development of independent subcommittees and, once these form, the Committee's stimulating and overseeing roles often pass into obscurity. Further, the methods which the subcommittees adopt make the sponsoring agency's relationship even more obscure.
For example, more than a decade ago a study on selections chaired by William A. Console was conducted in cooperation with a small number of affiliate institutes. It worked decisively and its efforts bore fruit with several locales modifying or reformulating some selections criteria. However, the study neither offered formal presentations to the membership at large, nor did it collectively publish papers or a monograph cataloging its method and its data. Consequently, after a time, only the participants themselves could recall COPE's supportive role.
In the last few years matters have been moving in a slightly different direction, one which is likely to bring COPE into a more intimate and sustained contact with many of the affiliate institutes. The COPE-sponsored Subcommittee on Training Analysis (Martin Stein, Chairman) is planning to publish a monograph in which it will offer the membership the results of its deliberations and its insights. This Subcommittee has demonstrated—as have others in the past—that the accumulation of data from local centers can be an experience of joint teaching and learning. Several other COPE-sponsored projects are planning to join with affiliate institutes in similar efforts.
In December 1977, COPE will sponsor the first of a series of workshops on the COPER Commissions. Victor Calef will chair a discussion on Commission I: The Tripartite Division. In his study “On the Natural History of Institutes” James Bing hopes, on the basis of a searching questionnaire, to establish a foundation for understanding the planes of tension which can develop within institute organizations or between institutes and their affiliate societies. On another front, Alan J. Eisnitz has agreed to chair a new Selections Subcommittee. He sees as part of its activities the convening of institute representatives to form workshops for the purpose of collective exploration and discovery. In still another area a study of the goals of psychoanalytic education is being designed. It will be chaired by Ed Weinshel and will endeavor to profile graduation criteria and state them in conceptual and practical terms.
Still only gleams in COPE's eye are (1) a new study on the supervisory process; (2) a project involving an attempt to conceptualize the theory and the process of psychoanalytic education; (3) a study of the usefulness of developmental theory in problems of student progression; and (4) the unique training problems of women candidates. At least some, and perhaps all, of these projects will involve direct institute participation as an integral part of the acquisition and dissemination of data.
In general, the development of the relatively autonomous subcommittees of COPE proceeds in an expectable sequence from idea, through pilot project, to well-defined independent study. Pilots and Studies are proceeding smoothly at present, but COPE remains insatiably curious, and if readers have any ideas or suggestions, please forward them to the Committee in care of the central office.
Samuel Abrams
Chairman