Congratulations to you and to the Editorial Board for transforming the Newsletter of The American into an even more attractive, interesting, and informative bulletin for members of the Association. The special supplement giving opinions about the membership/certification delinkage issue was particularly useful, and I hope TAP will give similar attention to other important and controversial issues that may occur in the future.
An otherwise excellent historical perspective on the relationship between the Board and Council by Robert Bergman in the last issue unfortunately conveys a mistaken impression that needs correction. The term certification was not introduced by the Board in 1977 as a defensive measure after another group sought recognition as the accrediting agency for schools of psychoanalysis, as the article seems to imply. In fact, the possibility of establishing an independent certifying board for psychoanalysis had been considered no less than four times—in 1939, 1948, 1955, and 1960 before the fifth effort was successful in 1977. This occurred after a Joint Ad Hoc Committee on Certification, appointed in 1973, had fully explored all the possibilities and had obtained expert outside opinion from authorities in national certifying bodies that the structure of The American was suitable for accrediting and certifying functions because such functions could be discharged by committees of the Board on Professional Standards, which is autonomous. Since the committees are composed of representatives from diverse institutes, evaluations are less likely to be influenced by personal considerations or conflicts of interest such as may occur when a candidate is evaluated by his own training institute.
When the new Certification Committee was established in 1977, it followed the already well-developed procedures of the previous Membership Committee, which had provided a so-called equivalent of certification. The expectation, of course, was that such procedures would be continuously refined and developed. Certification as a prerequisite for membership was generally viewed at that time as a temporary, transitional stage.
Incidentally, the two-tier membership deplored by some in the December settlement of the membership/certification delinkage has an actual advantage in emphasizing the fact that the autonomous Board does have a different constituency from the Association as a whole.
Burness E. Moore