Judith S. Schachter is the new President Elect of the American Psychoanalytic Association. The election, held this fall, saw the selection of Dan H. Buie, Jr. and Henri Parens as Councillors at Large.
The unsuccessful candidates were Sander M. Abend for President Elect, and Richard P. Fox and Ralph E. Roughton for Councillor at Large. Schachter previously was nominated for the presidency in 1985 and served as Treasurer in 1981-82. Since 1987 she has been Director of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute. Prior to the election, attention was focused on her support of opening membership to graduates of component institutes of The American without the requirement of certification. In her position statement (see TAP 25-3) she described delinkage as the “strategically necessary key to engaging both recent graduates and the more than 600 extended associates in the varied and significant programs of our association.”
Speaking recently about the future of The American, she saw the challenge now to be to maintain relevance professionally—the organization to the lives of its members, the members to their patient populations. This does not mean lowering standards. It means promoting public awareness of psychoanalysis, improving our internal communications, providing better support to local institutes and societies, pursuing external certification, improving our relations with other professional organizations, and more. Our intellectual, scientific and clinical strength is our ability to integrate pluralistic views coming from within psychoanalysis and from without. The input from child development research, child analysis, neuroscience, sleep studies, self psychology must be accepted, mulled over. It is our life blood.“
Schachter trained as an analyst at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and as a child and adolescent analyst at the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Institute. She has served on the faculty of the Pittsburgh Institute since 1970 and as a training and supervising analyst since 1971. She has been Director since 1987. In her pre-election statement she said, “I want to serve as the enthusiastic leader, mediator and healing force of an inclusive organization.” James T. McLaughlin, a Pittsburgh colleague writing about her tenure as director there, said, “The problems that our institute faced in 1987 … bore, not too surprisingly, a microcosmic likeness to those now being addressed at the levels of the Board and Council of The American. Paramount were general loss of esprit and affiliation, and stagnation of the upward movement across 11 levels of faculty and candidates… Under Judy's strength and style of leadership, we collectively managed to examine and change many of our modes and perspectives, and to reverse the deterioration.”
Buie, one of the new Councillors at Large, has served in a number of executive positions in the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, including Chair of the Education Committee, 1987-90. He has been a member of the Committee on Institutes of the Board on Professional Standards since 1988 and now is Co-Chair of the BOPS Task Force on Certification. Parens, the other Councillor elect, holds a number of leadership positions in the Philadelphia Psychoanalytic Institute, including Chair of the Committee on Child Psychoanalysis. He is Professor of Psychiatry of the Jefferson University Medical College, and a member of the Committee on Institutes of BOPS.
Buie and Parens will take office this May, and at that time Schachter will become President Elect as Bernard Pacella succeeds George H. Allison as President. She will become President in 1994.