To the Editor:
The American stubbed its toe at the meeting of the Executive Council in Puerto Rico in May when it declined to grant the Irving B. Harris Media Award this year. The Harris Media Award, an annual prize for the previous year's best newspaper or magazine article about psychoanalysis, is a substantial sum of money contributed by Mr. Irving B. Harris of Chicago, a long-time friend of psychoanalysis.
This year, the Council's Media Award Committee recommended that the prize for 1980 go to Janet Malcolm for her New Yorker profile, “The Impossible Profession.” Most analysts we have talked with about Malcolm's article were impressed by her grasp of psychoanalysis and by her considerable skill in presenting an enormous amount of complicated and esoteric material in a readable and understandable way. Her approach seemed sensitive and sympathetic, and at the same time objective and candid.
The profile evidently stirred new interest in analysis. It was reported to the Council that as a result of the essay there had been an increase in the number of potential patients seeking clinic analysis at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. It seems that some of these patients had learned for the first time about institutes and analytic clinics through reading the article. This is a heartening effect, especially since it comes at a time when we tend to see ourselves as withering away in an atmosphere of public indifference that we ourselves have surely in part helped to create. It also suggests a partial answer to a question raised in this Newsletter before: Where have the patients gone? Maybe they are still where they always have been.
Despite this, the article came under heated attack in the Council meeting. For instance, Malcolm was criticized for using patient material and for her account of her experiences with the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. But we need to remember that she
is a journalist and not an analyst; her ethics are those of journalism and not those of analysis. Her job is to describe what she sees. If her journalistic mirror reflects back to us some frailties along with our strengths, if it shows us more than we care to see, then the problem is ours, not hers.
The discussion which led to the Council's decision to withhold the award seemed to center around three points. One, a “book version of the article” is in the works (Newsletter, March 1981), and maybe we should wait to see what else she is going to say about us (there is, in fact, to be some new material in the book). Yet, the Award is for work already published, not for future work. Two, if the award is made to Malcolm, then it would be taken to be the Association's imprimatur of her as-yet-unseen book and would doubtless be exploited in publicity releases. The third, and probably the clinching, argument was that if the whole thing is going to be divisive, let's punt! If we can't be unanimous in this, then let's not make the award!
However justifiable these arguments may seem at first glance, they leave us with a sense of a missed opportunity, of something not squarely faced and worked through, of something prematurely closed over for the sake of keeping the peace.
When the matter came to a vote, twenty-two votes were cast in all—ten for the award and twelve against. The count was announced vocally. Abstentions, if any, were not asked for. Where were all the councilors when the vote was taken? (Thirty-three societies have one vote each, and eight councilors-at-large and eleven ex-officio members each have a vote.) One wonders what the outcome would have been if Council attendance and voting had been more representative and not so sparse.
This opportunity to encourage good writing about analysis has been lost. A fine piece of work was denied well-deserved recognition, and the prize money has been returned to the donor. There will be other opportunities in the future, however, and we hope that the American will make better use of them than it did in San Juan.
Robert L. Stewart, M.D.
James L. Titchener, M.D.
Cincinnati