Once again the number of applicants to the Fellowship Program has grown, increasing by more than 60 percent from 82 completed applications last year to 132 this year. Of this year's applicants 112 were psychiatrists and 20 were psychologists. There were more than 600 requests for applications. Kerry Sulkowicz surveyed 117 people who requested applications from the Central Office but did not return them, which revealed that a third of them planned to reapply this year. The Fellowship Subcommittee made extensive use of the Internet and the World Wide Web to reach psychologists with announcements of the fellowship.
As a result of the rapid and widespread changes in the distribution of psychiatric health care, residents and psychology graduate psychology students do far less psychotherapy than ever before, and the teaching of psychotherapy principles and practice has been drastically reduced at most sites around the country. Two years ago one nonwinning applicant said, “The mentorship is the best thing in my entire residency training.” Since then a number of applicants have applied for the fellowship, not in hopes of winning, but simply to avail themselves of a mentor. One of this year's winners applied for just that reason. These nonwinning applicants, and of course our Fellows, have begun to constitute a cadre of people around the country who are interested in psychoanalysis. Many of the applicants come from states where there are few or no psychoanalysts, and many are from departments that lack psychodynamically oriented teachers. In some places they, and their colleagues whom they urged to apply, have begun to pressure their departments to make psychoanalytically oriented teachers and teaching more available to them.
George Feder/Phila., PA
The mentorship now lasts sixteen months, beginning one month after the cutoff date for applications and ending in June of the following year.
As in the past, the applicants were a superb group of young people, and it was with the greatest difficulty that the Fellowship Subcommittee selected the twenty winners. Sixteen of the psychiatrist applicants had doctorates in such diverse fields as psycholinguistics, engineering, and various biological sciences. Sixteen were boarded or had practiced in other fields of medicine, three had law degrees; six were members of the armed forces, one of whom was a West Point graduate. One of the applicants was the founder of a medical school and a professor of psychiatry in her native country, another was the first person to train Capuchin monkeys as aides for paraplegics, another was the senior medical officer in the Iranian Ministry of Health. There were financial analysts and an activist from the Solidarity movement, software developers and addiction workers. Four were children of analysts, and one was the grandson of an analysand of Freud's. Two described themselves as gay, and two as African-American.
Among the applicants were professional musicians, award-winning composers, writers, actors, painters, and champion athletes. Of the twenty 1996–97 Fellows, one has a JD, two are in the armed forces, and three have doctorates as well as medical degrees.
The Fellowship Subcommittee has begun work with societies around the country to help them set up programs to supplement the work of the mentors. The society presidents were asked to appoint liaison people whom the Fellowship Subcommittee can advise about courses to offer all applicants in their geographic areas, suggesting both course content and ways to contact applicants and encourage them to attend. The Fellowship Subcommittee is also helping societies with few or no applicants to attract more of them, an effort led by subcommittee members Helen Desmond, Margaret Hamilton, and David Joseph.
On the national level, all applicants' registration fees are remitted. The Affiliates' Council is making low-cost housing at the meetings available to applicants who did not win fellowships. The Fellowship Subcommittee now holds a reception for all applicants and their mentors at both national meetings.
In the past several years, new and former Fellows have met during the meetings to present their work on a variety of topics. Their presentations were so interesting and exceptional that a wider audience seemed appropriate. This December, for the first time, three of the discussion groups on the regular program will be run by Fellows and will feature their presentations: “Foster Parents-Psychological Parents: The Development Of Identity,” “Psychoanalytic Research and Social Policy,” and “Managed Care And Residency Training in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy: An Oxymoron?” Four other Fellows' groups are preparing submissions to the Program Committee for the spring meeting on such varied topics as ethnic diversity, neuroscience and psychoanalysis, ethics, and philosophy and psychoanalysis. These groups, and two of last years' groups, are submitting their presentations (one on Russian psychiatry, the other on violence) to the American Psychiatric Association for May 1997, and one group is preparing a submission to Division 39. One group of former Fellows presented at the American Psychiatric Association last spring. The publicity that the presence of our Fellows at these meetings has created for the American Psychoanalytic Association and the fellowship has been important both in attracting new applicants and refuting rumors of the impending demise of psychoanalysis.
The results of a survey of former Fellows (1994–95) will be available at the December meetings. The eighty-one Fellows and former Fellows have begun to form regional groups and hope to meet between the meetings of The American with those who are unable to attend the meetings.
Last year one of our Fellows presented at the meetings of the American Association of Psychiatric Residency Training Directors; this year two of our Fellows will be on a panel on psychoanalytic psychotherapy training. The Visiting Psychoanalytic Professorship, organized by The Psychoanalytic Foundation, will send a senior psychoanalyst to two departments of psychiatry suggested by the Fellowship Subcommittee.
The extraordinarily hard-working members of the fellowship subcommittee are: James Barron, Bertram Cohler, Helen Desmond, Paul Dewald, Charles P. Fisher, David I. Joseph, Margaret Hamilton, Frederic Levine, Warren R. Procci, Harvey Schwartz, Melvin Singer, Kerry Sulkowicz, Arnold Wilson, and George Wohlreich.