Having over the past several years addressed a number of issues of national concern, the leadership of BOPS has made substantial progress toward practical solutions. We have planned toward the changes necessary for our future needs while maintaining the educational values that distinguish The American. Our vision has focused on the welfare of patients and candidates, which is best ensured by our standing firmly in support of excellence in education and practice. Our most significant contribution has been to highlight the need for a major media effort geared toward educating the public and, to that end, the engagement of a public relations consultant who even now is preparing a Strategic Communications Plan. Integral to efforts to protect patients and educate the public has been our support of CPR in its work of educating legislators about the requirements of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. To broaden the dialogue in our efforts to arciculate these serious concerns, we have included candidate members on various Board committees, and candidate leaders have participated in the work and deliberations of the Coordinating Committee. We wish to thank those societies and members who have worked to find less expensive housing for candidates at meetings and to support in other ways their presence and participation. Our outreach toward the future has also been greatly enhanced by a very successful Fellowship Program. In other steps taken to broaden our base, we have encouraged and made progress toward simplifying the waiver process; a procedure for admitting members from the IPA has been put into effect; the Certification Committee has furthered its outreach efforts; and the Membership Committee is looking for ways to facilitate the process of becoming an active member.
The Boards committees constantly review the wide variety of issues and opportunities that face psychoanalytic educators. At the May meeting in Los Angeles, the topic of the COI Workshop for Directors of Institutes and Chairs of Education Committees will be a most important one for our future: the exigencies faced by our current candidates and potential candidates. Analytic educators will be asked to consider several questions that candidates and potential candidates must deal with today: Of what use is psychoanalytic training? Is it practical? How does one meet financial pressures in these times? Should we teach more about advances in neurological research? about the use of medication? about psychotherapy?
These issues are beyond political or organizational solutions, as they reflect values and concerns inherent in todays world that impact heavily on young people making life decisions. These issues speak to the very survival of our profession and of psychoanalytic methodology. Without candidates, there is no future.
I have asked Donald Rosenblitt, secretary of the Board, to prepare a summary of the serious issues he and I have learned about from discussions in Board committees and with educators at our institutes. What follows is written by him.
Being an analyst is difficult these days. Attention is increasingly being paid to the difficulties of maintaining analytic practice and identity, and solutions are being sought to the difficulties of being an analyst.
Becoming an analyst is also difficult these days. The problems begin even before candidacy. Trainees have little exposure to dynamic psychologies and therefore lack familiarity or identification with psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic training seem mysterious and arcane.
The mental health professional considering psychoanalysis might be said to be making a counter-cultural choice, one that not only will involve time and financial sacrifice in the training years, but one that offers an uncertain practice and financial future. There are also special issues for today's candidates. They envision a career in which clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy will be but a part of their professional activities. Many will practice drug management or brief therapy. Others will work in settings that in the past have not been traditional for analysts. They will have the challenge of somehow forging an analytic identity that is integrated with a range of different relationships with patients and with the nonanalytic institutions and settings in which they will work. There are many other issues. For instance, our candidates have difficulty sustaining analytic immersion. There is also a need to attract and assist candidates from minority groups, and to assist women (and at times perhaps men) who are attempting to combine parenthood with candidacy. There is a need as well to familiarize candidates with current intellectual trends in the postmodern sensibility, so that they may avail themselves of the critical tools developed by various disciplines in the humanities. It is a strange feeling to be twenty years out of residency and have candidates talk to me about how different things were in “my era,” and of how different things are for analysts like myself who are “established.” Analytic life has indeed changed, quickly and radically.
It is time to make an intensive effort to find ways of helping candidates and potential candidates become analysts in today's world. We have much knowledge to build on, as we know the value of the tripartite model and of optimal immersion in training. Let's face it, though: how often in today's climate are candidates and institutes able to actualize such an optimal immersion in the tripartite training experience?
How can we be more relevant, both in appearance and substance, to a mental health professional who is not yet a candidate? How can we be more relevant to our candidates? Should we provide levels of mentoring and support that transcend traditional supervisory and advisory relationships? How can we interest and support minority candidates? How can we facilitate the acquisition of cases and the building of an analytic practice? How can we reform and revitalize curricula to help candidates build a coherent identity that integrates their many allegiances?
There are many possible remedies for the educational challenges that confront us. Many of our institutes have thought carefully about these issues, and some have already made creative responses we can all learn from. Precandidate training sequences may assist the insufficiently prepared candidate. Integration of faculty from the humanities into the curriculum might not only broaden the training experience of candidates, but might attract academics as candidates into our programs. Perhaps our standards for CORST eligibility should be altered so that they emphasize potential rather than accomplishment, just as our standards for our clinical candidates increasingly emphasize an assessment of potential. Courses that explore feminist and cross-cultural perspectives, as well as gay and other minority perspectives, might not only contextualize and broaden the rest of the training experience for our traditional candidates, but might attract candidates who in the past have felt unwelcome or misunderstood. The option of integrating psychoanalytic training with dissertation work leading to a Ph.D. would not only attract a broader range of valuable applicants, but would also give our graduates another important source of legitimacy and open the possibility of teaching within university humanities departments. Candidates' analytic practices might benefit from courses on practice
building and greater attention within the curriculum to the techniques of developing psychotherapy cases into psychoanalytic ones. Courses on ethics that address not only psychoanalytic ethics but the ethical issues for mental health professionals and psychoanalysts functioning in nontraditional settings would assist candidates in developing a contemporary psychoanalytic identity. Courses that address what is possible and what not possible with regard to the adaptation of psychoanalytic principles for short-term therapy would assist the candidate who is struggling to provide authentic service in today's mental health world.
These suggestions are not intended to be exhaustive of the ideas I have been thinking about and hearing about from others. I think that some ideas will prove to be better than others, and that some may fit local ecologies and organizational interests more than others. I envision a time when our institutes will be increasingly heterogeneous with regard to special interests, expertise, and educational possibilities.
Our challenge is to find ways to assist candidates in achieving what we know is vital — an education based on optimal immersion in a tripartite experience — as we also rework analytic education in its curricular, identificatory, and supportive dimensions. It is my hope that the magnitude of the task does not intimidate us into inaction, as the future of our profession rests on our success in helping qualified mental health professionals in the process of becoming analysts.
There it is, Don's very thoughtful analysis of probably the thorniest issues we as educators face. It raises provocative new possibilities as we look for solutions while maintaining our central values: new levels of mentoring; doctoral programs; changed standards for CORST eligibility to encourage greater participation by the academic community. We want the comments and suggestions of members as we strive toward continued revitalization. Don's statement and the views that will emerge from the COI workshop will carry forward the articulation of one of our most serious problems. As analysts we are aware that articulation is an ongoing process as we move toward insight, working through, and mastery.