To the Editor:

I must apologize to a number of colleagues for unthinkingly neglecting them in my letter to the Editor of the Winter, 1986 issue of the Newsletter, when I noted that our societies do not participate in the growing psychoanalytic activity on college campuses.

Having just received an announcement of a major psychoanalytic event in Los Angeles which was planned and organized by members of psychoanalytic institutes unaffiliated with the American, I reacted with too much vigor and not enough thought.

In reporting that there is a ferment of psychoanalytic activity at UCLA (which is not where the aforementioned event was to take place) which is led by unaffiliated psychoanalysts, I was slighting a number of academic leaders, who have been trained in the two local psychoanalytic institutes, the Los Angeles, and, in greater number, the Southern California. Professors Loewenberg (History), Hutter (English), Wolfenstein (Political Science), Hadda (German Literature), Dallek (History), Morris (Humanities and Law), Johnson (Anthropology), J. Cohen (Social Work), and Fisher (Educational Development and History) are all playing significant roles in the resurgence of interest in psychoanalysis on the non-medical campus of the university.

Taken together, they provide the rationale for a greater involvement in the American in non-medical activities. Now that these academic leaders have been trained by us, we should be actively identifying ourselves with their efforts on their campuses, and assisting them on local and national levels. Psychoanalysis always has been more than only a form of treatment. Our officers and Executive Council need to devote more energy and thought to our relationship to the outside world.

Melvin Mandel, M.D.

Los Angeles