To the Editor:
It has been almost a decade since 12 training and supervising analysts departed from a local institute and announced their intention of applying to the American Psychoanalytic Association in order to found their own institute. The events following this departure are worth recording for they illustrate the phenomenon of a national organization neglecting its humanistic charter by falling prey to its own bureaucratic “establishmentism”.
We are currently in a period of the Association's history when there is considerable pressure toward self-examination and re-evaluation. Such periods can be salutary, though painful or embarrassing. I offer these observations in this spirit of constructive criticism. There will be future situations similar to what I describe here. For the American Psychoanalytic Association to repeat such history, sustained by the delusion that to do so is wise, pragmatic and tested by past experience, would express an arrogant and visionless ignorance.
Our group was well aware of the problematic nature of its mission. The economic times were not propitious; still, we had reason to believe that with an early start we could admit a small, satisfactory first-year class within our first year of franchise. This was not to be. The officers and subcommittees of the Board on Professional Standards delayed action, not heeding the desirable aspects of the split. This had been preceded by years of clinical, personal, ideological and political disagreements that did not yield to determined efforts on both sides to establish a framework in which all pluralistic elements might find a place. Officers of the Board expressed their apprehensions that an additional split in one of their institutes might in some way jeopardize the future of organized psychoanalysis or of the Board itself. A secession had taken place elsewhere only two years earlier, with the usual binary fission into separate institutes; the Board's officials viewed this with extreme disfavor.
Two years after our first meetings with the Board, a sponsoring institute was moved to come forward and offer its assistance, under its leadership and the “Geographical Rule”. The alternative of giving us provisional status under the Board's own auspices had already been rejected by its officers, despite the fact that a slim majority of Fellows of the Board favored our efforts. During those two years of lying fallow, potential applicants for training had gone elsewhere, and friendly colleagues were looking askance at our efforts. We were determined to go on.
Meetings with our sponsors began in a spirit of cordial collegiality; both parties appeared delighted at the prospects for scientific and administrative collaboration. However, we were informed that we would be expected to submit ourselves to the same faculty examination and selection procedures devised for their recent graduates who were being considered for election to training and supervising functions. We were required to prepare brief vignettes of all of our current patients, and to bring process notes of the previous two weeks on an analysand whom we intended to discuss with examiners. To add perspective, I must point out that among our group of training and supervising analysts, tenure ranged from 5 to 25 years, and some were known nationally and internationally.
We quickly learned that this was no pro forma exercise. Half of our group was “deferred”, or “placed under continuance”, or whatever circumlocution was employed. Our group, that is, was depleted to half its original number. Respected and valued colleagues were excluded from the work we had undertaken together. Of those accepted, most were close to mandatory retirement age. Group loyalty, particularly the hope that eventually we could reclaim our lost members, motivated our perseverance. We had applications for training, but the administrative issues were many. We had, throughout our waiting period, conducted scientific meetings among ourselves, inviting selected guests to present papers, offering our own presentations and welcoming those local analysts and candidates who were interested in attending. But the actions of our sponsor, directly and indirectly, affected these functions. Our meetings foundered, devolving into administrative sessions, those knells, too often, of established psychoanalysis. We dissolved our ill-fated connection with the sponsoring institute, and retired individually to civilian life.
I have been emphasizing the effect on the members of WAPE, not to evoke sympathy and outrage, nor to divide the individual actors in this morality tale into good guys and bad guys; this would be naive and fruitless. I wish, rather, to call attention to the actions of the Board as they culminated in betrayal of excellence, neglect of humanistic values and rationalizing of entrenched powers.
The mission of the organization I have referred to was and is to train candidates, maintain standards, conduct scientific meetings, etc. In psychoanalytic shorthand, these are superego standards, elevated, shall we say, to group action and coincidentally accruing
further authoritarian weight and sanction. Such functions are routinely institutionalized and depersonalized, in the pejorative sense that the integrity of standards outweighs the welfare and needs of members and candidates, especially when those individuals are not personally known or physically present. The execution of standards by any governing board becomes a mission made sancrosanct by the misguided devotion of elected and appointed officials. In fairness and actuality, this attentiveness to mission rather than to individuals and individualized issues may sometimes conflict with personal feelings, but the overarching issues take precedence. Finally, what is rememered depends on who writes the history, and this is an additional factor in the corroding of personal values that power may bring in its wake.
This has been a cautionary tale. The conclusion is inescapable that in its self-congratulatory, plodding way, or, if preferred, shortsightedly and with the noblest intentions, the national organization failed its members, its candidates and its own mission. It must not happen again.
Stanley L. Olinick, M.D.
Washington, D.C.