Dear Editor:
As some of you know, I have just undergone the successful matriculation to achieve certification with the American. I thank many of you and many others who helped and encouraged me, and I am glad that I persisted and finally succeeded. I learned a great deal from this effort and I know it has made me a better psychoanalyst. I will encourage all graduates to pursue this additional step in the ongoing developmental process of becoming and being a psychoanalyst. [Ongoing faculty and individual psychoanalytic society member development is an important area in which we need more clear guidelines and better systematic support.]
I am, however, very much in favor of supporting our motion, and the similarly approved LAPSI motion, to separate certification from full membership in the APsaA and consequently from full membership in the IPA. We must help the APsaA KEEP UP WITH THE TIMES! After graduation from an APsaA approved institute a psychoanalyst should be able to be a full voting member of his parent organization just as he is now able to be a full voting member of his local society. Certification should be, as it now is in psychiatry, an added prestigious accomplishment that is encouraged and assisted by all levels of our professional organizations. [It might also be that recertification every so many years could be another means of encouraging continued excellence.]
We who support this motion are not opposed to the American, but on the contrary, want to keep it a viable national organization. But our APsaA, like any established organization, is resistent to change. The American's recent costly mistake with the psychologist membership is an example. The current new rules which resulted from that psychologist lawsuit, allow for full IPA membership by other psychoanalytic organizations, and this, in my opinion, mandates that the American change the current restrictive certification requirement for full membership in the IPA. If not, we will lose many good graduates to other institutes where this policy will not be required.
The opposition arguments are correct when they state that we should continue to maintain high standards and to keep a close affiliation with the American Psychoanalytic in order to remain a top quality training institute. Their conclusion, however, to continue the certification requirement for full membership in the APsaA is, in my opinion, VERY WRONG in the context of our current situation. The present certification requirement is and has been very restrictive and it is and has been very destructive to the ongoing psychoanalytic identity of many of our fine graduates. The opposition agrees with us in abhoring the demeaning restrictiveness of the certification requirement as it has been implemented in the past because this requirement has caused far less than half of our own members to be full voting members of the APsaA (38 percent, according to Marv Osman's figures). I am sure they also abhor, as we do, the fact that less than 20 percent of the past ten years' graduates (according to LAPSI figures) are being certified and consequently becoming full members of the American. This restrictiveness has resulted in the APsaA being a small organization of old people where one-third of the members are life members, or nondues-paying over 65. Also more than one-third are “affiliate” or non-certified, nonvoting, but dues-paying, “second class” members.
Marv Osman assures us that the “winds of the APsaA are currently blowing in a kinder and gentler manner.” I believe this is true, but winds can change, and the future of our graduates whom we recognize as psychoanalysts, and the future of our national and international organizations should not be based on such unpredictability. They must be guided by a continuously updated set of rules that promote fairness and high standards for all of the graduates of our institutes. I urge all of us to vote in favor of this motion to suggest that the APsaA update its constitution and separate full membership from certification.
Respectfully,
Scott L. Carder, M.D., Ph.D.