Feb. 14 — Here in the Northeast, we've just recovered from a fierce winter storm. Giant snow drifts glisten, bright sunlight and quiet blue skies offer respite. But almanac and radio forecasts remind of the next. Most (skiers excepted) hope it won't be as intense and that strategies and techniques that were helpful in dealing with the last one will work again, maybe even better. We might be wiser for the experience.
Here in the Central Office we're resting and thinking about nonmedical training; and, yes, we're hoping that it won't be as difficult as “membership”, and that what worked before will work again.
I couldn't resist the temptation to offer this homely metaphor, but it is simplistic. It will take more than hope.
Coming discussions about training for nonmedical candidates should, and I hope will, confront issues of fundamental importance for psychoanalysis as a discipline and as a profession, and for the American Psychoanalytic Association as a professional organization — issues weightier and more fundamental than those raised by the membership issue, which has preempted so much of our attention and energy. We may legitimately hope, and even endeavor, to make the experience of the storm less fierce by managing process better. But the issues are exceedingly complex. We cannot afford to mitigate the intensity of the experience by sidestepping and/or underestimating the strength and impact of the core issues.
There is a heterogeneous body of substantive questions about psychoanalysis as a discipline and about psychoanalysis as a profession that cannot be reduced to neat “packages” or “clusters” around which homogeneous groups of like-minded advocates can polarize pro or con; and as a professional association we do not face these questions alone. I very much doubt that any individual member of our profession (inside or outside our association, medical, or nonmedical) would be of only “one mind” about the questions if he or she would (could) confront each of them separately in the context of various relevant interrelated parameters: theory; research; education; clinical process, technique, and professionalism; and social ecology (scientific, intellectual, political, economic, etc.). We all know that conflict resolution is not the same in groups as in individuals. We can and should expect ourselves to be reasonably proficient at it as individuals, but there is no a priori reason to expect the same when we work as a group.
I am sure that I'm as tired of committees as anyone. Certainly there is no magic to be expected from them, but all the same, I have, with Homer Curtis, appointed yet another one. It will be a joint committee of Council and Board. Its charge is “to develop a proposal for a mechanism that could enable outstanding nonmedical candidates to obtain full clinical training in our institutes.” Groundwork for this committee's deliberations has already been laid by the previous committees on: (1) prerequisites, (2) feasibility, and (3) desirability, but their reports have not been fully digested. Tentatively, it is planned for the committee to meet early in the week in Philadelphia and, if possible, come up with a preliminary report to Board and Council during the Philadelphia meetings. The committee consists of Vann Spruiell as Chairman, Kenneth Calder, Philip Holzman, Richard Isay, Charles Kligerman, Robert Michels, and Herbert Schlesinger. The committee will aim to have a written recommendation for consideration by the Coordinating and Executive Committees at their fall meetings in October and then by full Board and Council in December.
Our goals for the committee's work are dual; (1) we hope that the experience of confronting a concrete proposed mechanism will precipitate, enable, and facilitate full debate about the entire range of issues; (2) by making the proposal a product of a joint committee of Council and Board, we hope that the decision process will not get endlessly hung up, and the issues thereby obscured, by inappropriate and/or spurious polarizations.
We hope that every member of the Association will give a good deal of careful, personal thought to these issues.
Morton F. Reiser, M.D.
President