The American has begun to face its double challenge: we need to renew the organization through responsive change while maintaining high standards in education, clinical practice, and scientific study. These are compatible goals provided they are pursued with diligence.
The Task Force on Board and Council Structure and Function is working toward these goals. It will offer suggestions for developing a functional symmetry between Board and Council so as to strengthen and harmonize the overall organization. Certainly the Board cannot be effective without an effective Council, and the two work best when they work together in areas of common concern.
Our membership is our greatest asset. The Board must do its part to nourish both graduate members and candidates. As a member of the Committee on Institutes conducting site visits, I have had it brought home to me that candidates are the future of our Association and that young faculty are the immediate future of our institutes. I have found that both candidates and young faculty are astonishingly committed and well informed. We must plan for the futures of candidates and young faculty and help them in developing their careers.
I fully support the Task Force on Membership and Educational Issues recommendation that every candidate become eligible for affiliate membership immediately upon matriculation instead of having to wait until taking on a case. I fully endorse several other recommendations made by the task force. Candidates should be placed on the Board, on the Council, and on their committees. In order to replenish our ranks, we should establish a membership or affiliation status for medical students, psychiatric residents, and psychology and social work graduate students. Lastly, we must find ways to encourage and financially support candidates and students who wish to attend our national meetings. This year the San Francisco candidates are offering their homes to fellow candidates from around the country, a good example of what we can do more of.
As Lee Brauer's recent survey well documents, psychoanalytic identity is best secured and sustained by a vigorous psychoanalytic practice. The Board should work alongside the Council in finding and effecting ways to promote private practice. Our national organization must work for the inclusion of psychotherapies, including analysis, in the mandated benefits to be recommended by Hillary Rodham Clinton's task force. Attention also must be paid to helping candidates develop, very early on, practices that can evolve into primarily psychoanalytic careers.
The Board cannot leave unattended our members' aspirations toward advancement as educators in the institutes. There is a legacy of elitism to be dealt with here, despite recent changes permitting fuller participation for those who are qualified and put in the work. More and more our institutes are extending their efforts at faculty development, including advancement to training analyst status. Currently, through the Committee on Institutes, the Board is encouraging further development of this trend, but even more can be done to encourage those who aspire to training positions.
I believe The American can and must grow. The current leadership has pointed the way. A national effort has been mounted to develop psychoanalytic study groups in cities that do not have an institute or society. The Board must stand ready to support all groups that hold the potential for evolving into institutes. The Committee on Research and Special Training is studying ways to increase the number of academics in full or partial training. I am wholeheartedly in favor of the Task Force on Child
Analysis, which is being appointed to review practice and research issues in an often neglected but vitally important sector of our Association.
Amid all this change we must always maintain the high standards of The American. The Board protects quality through the hard work of its committees. As chair I would continue recent efforts to ensure that the membership of Board committees represents the institutes in all their diversity. It is in the dialogue between the institutes, Fellows of the Board, and the chairs of committees that our standards are monitored and improved. This open and engaged colloquy will prove fruitful. A notable example is the work of the Committee on Certification, which has responded to this open exchange with important improvements in its guidelines. Through the Task Force on Certification, which I co-chaired, this colloquy brought clarification and ideas for change that the committee is now discussing.
We must recognize and adapt to the rapidly changing nature of our membership, which poses both challenges and opportunities for our institutes. Today there are more women and nonmedical candidates and faculty, and more competing points of view. We must fully explore and understand this diversity in order to be strengthened by it.