We can look forward to our December meeting encouraged that The American has geared up and is running smoothly on your behalf after a few false starts and stops. New and successful initiatives abound. Our office, under the experienced and firm hand of Ellen Fertig, is rejuvenated and active. She has worked with a scrupulous and demanding Budget and Finance Committee—composed of Allan Compton, Newell Fischer, Leon Hoffman, Nadine Levinson, and Jonah Schein, assisted by Stephen Firestein, who is leaving us as treasurer to take up that position with the IPA— to bring the societies a timely, detailed, and clear budget for their review and for the instruction of their Executive Councilors. The Executive Council, increasingly self-assured, self-directed, and aware of its status as the entity legally charged with responsibility for the organization, will thus be well prepared to debate the priorities of our budget for 1996.
We are engaging a new legislative representative, and have already engaged a public relations consultant to evaluate our needs and give us direction. We have established an Internet “members only” forum for the discussion of topics of interest to the over two hundred fifty members who have E-mail, and find that our World Wide Web home page is increasingly sought out, with more than two thousand “visits” in October. Selected TAP articles, About Psychoanalysis, letters and editorials prepared by our members, JOURLIT, and information on the Fellowship Program, as well as precirculated papers for our scientific meetings, are constantly on view and being read worldwide.
Unfortunately, the healthy disagreements and doubts that move us from complacency and smugness toward creative solutions are frequently undercut by contentiousness in our daily organizational life. I began my first column as president with a plea for expansion of “the large area of common ground that exists between the fissures that have developed in our organization.” I noted that the chasm that once had yawned between the certified and the uncertified, a rift that had appeared to be healing, had now reopened, proliferating into multiple rifts “along a number of fault lines: Board vs. Council; members of CAPS groups vs. the uninvited; writers-thinkers vs. practitioners; training analysts vs. faculty; CGRI vs. CPR; attendees at small conferences and parties vs. the excluded; and young, often HMO-involved practitioners vs. established analysts.”
Today we all agree that our major task is to support the analytic enterprise—our institutes, our societies, and the practices of our members—through an invigorated campaign of public information and through legislative oversight and action. Internally, however, we often divide over views of structure and lines of responsibility, engaging in covert arguments over interpretations of governance. These consume valuable time and energy in territorial disputes, disrupt our internal operations, and distract us from our focus on meeting external threats and reaching out both to the public and to colleagues in related disciplines. It was awareness of these organizational stresses that produced the Kris-Pyles restructuring proposal. To evaluate our options we must all share a knowledge of our history, even when we dispute it in its particulars, so that we can choose and face outward, united, in mutually empowering compromises.
A major impediment to the clear definition of powers and functions may be traced to two very different views of the relationship between the Executive Council and BOPS, based in tum on divergent views of The American's history. These divergences, to be found among the very people most committed to serving the organization, often function as organizing principles; each side's adherents encompass institute directors and chairs of education committees, training analysts and faculty, and both the certified and those who have chosen not to engage with that process.
This association was incorporated in the State of New York and therefore functions with a board of directors, the Executive Council, which has vested in it the power to manage the property, affairs, and business of the association. One interpretation of The American's history is that in the minds of our founders BOPS was the primary entity, with the Council created only as an afterthought to meet the needs of legal incorporation. The alternative view, which I support, is that the Council, originally formed as a membership organization, intended BOPS to serve it as a committee charged with overseeing the training of those who might ultimately be admitted to membership. In this capacity, BOPS found that it needed to set standards and accredit institutes. Thus it became the accrediting and credentialing committee of the Council and has flourished in pursuing its charge. No one questions that BOPS has the significant role of ensuring that candidates in our institutes receive an appropriately thorough education, with safeguards to their analyses, their courses, their supervision, and to the continuity and security of their student lives.
To clarify the relation between the Board and the Executive Council, Bernard Bandler, who in the 1950s served The American both as president and as chair of BOPS, insisted that the Board meet on the Wednesday prior to the Thursday meeting of the Executive Council, so that BOPS could report to that body. Decisions taken by BOPS, for which the Council becomes legally responsible—site visits, certification, new institutes, changes in standards, training analyst appointments, etc.—are then acted upon by the legally constituted board of directors, the Executive Council. When the decisions of BOPS committees pursuing their charge are met with threats of legal action, these matters are directed to The American and received by the president, who then refers them to the Executive Committee, the Executive Council, and our lawyers. Thus, BOPS is protected by the legal responsibility the Executive Council assumes for all BOPS actions.
Whichever view of history and original intent we prefer, BOPS, under the corporate structure of The American, is not an independent body: the institutes do not “belong” to it alone, and its committees are not freestanding. Its work is financed by membership dues and other levies raised by and allocated through the office of the treasurer at the direction of the Executive Council. The proposed budget clearly supports candidate recruitment—and BOPS—through funding such joint committees as the Fellowship Subcommittee of CUME and the new Diversity and Student Membership committees. The participation of current candidates is encouraged through support for the Affiliates Council, including its Handbook (soon to be published) and receptions at the meetings. BOPS surrenders none of its prerogatives but only grows when it dedicates itself to exploring the usefulness and validity of innovations in psychoanalytic education. These include the creative use of E-mail, small group on-line activities, the sharing of curricula and bibliographies,
and video conferencing to enhance satellite institutes.
The Executive Council will have an opportunity this month to discuss budget priorities and, during the delayed consideration of the Kris-Pyles proposal, the structure of our association. We must consider, as an organization, whether BOPS, with its unique opportunities and heavy responsibilities, should expend its energies on matters that are quite capably handled by a revitalized and hardworking Executive Council. Recommendations from BOPS, as from all components and individuals in The American, will always be discussed and considered. Our task is to harness promising initiatives from every quarter, without developing inefficient, competitive sites of power. We can do that by cultivating a spirit of cooperation and compromise within existing procedures and structures to meet the immense challenges facing psychoanalysis today. Any modification of our organizational structure should come about through thoughtful reflection and planned change, not by means of divisive, legalistic reinterpretation of the basis of our functioning. Our bylaws, which define a path whereby strife may be avoided, should be relied on as we continue our progress. I look forward to our meeting this month, certain that an informed Executive Council will address these vital issues to our benefit.