In May, the Board on Professional Standards elected Don Rosenblitt, current secretary of the Board, as its next chair. With his background as secretary, as a child analyst, as a community professional leader, as a respected colleague with close relationships with the leaders of our association, and with his gifts of synthesis and creativity in his approach to issues, he brings a talent for leadership that will benefit all our members and our profession. He is of the generation of analysts that looks to the future with optimism and realism. He has been a prime force in the evolution of the Board in its effort to find creative ways to support psychoanalytic education and to function as a body of educators whose role is to be of service to our institutes. Above all, his concern for the welfare of patients, born of personal experience and his work with young children struggling with the pain of disordered development, represents the highest values and concerns of our association.
Don's nomination was the first under a new system in which the members of the Nominating Committee were fully selected and elected by the Fellows. Formerly, the chair of the Board selected three of the five members of the nominating committee. Further, the votes are now counted in a sophisticated form of Australian ballot that ensured that the vote of each Fellow would count. This is a significant step in the democratization of the Board and ensures full representation in the process of choosing its leaders.
I would like to summarize for our members the issues and developments of the past two years that BOPS has confronted and sought solutions for, and to suggest some areas we will need to pursue in the future.
The Board has: 1) achieved widened participation in its processes and functioning; 2) become centrally involved in our members' concern about practice and has initiated and supported efforts for public education about psychoanalysis and outreach to various professional and student communities; 3) undertaken a review and revision of our educational requirements and procedures; 4) confronted troubling issues that affect the development of the profession at large and its function as the body of our association charged with the education of candidates.
Candidates have for the first time been involved in the functions of the Board. Candidate representatives have been invited to participate in the proceedings of the Fellows at our biannual meetings and the meetings of the Coordinating Committee. Student members have been appointed to almost all the standing committees of the Board. This year a candidate will participate for the first time as a full member of a Committee on Institutes site-visiting team. The education of students is the primary concern of BOPS. Thus this is a natural and highly valuable inclusion and participation, and is bound to bring a vital, new perspective to the functioning of BOPS committees.
As the issues of practice became more urgent, the need to consider the educational aspects of the practice issue became more urgent. Educational development requires adequate clinical immersion. Don and I have worked to focus the Board and the Association on a greater consciousness of the need to educate the public about what psychoanalysis can do and about the standards of our Association that protect patients and the public welfare. We have worked to facilitate strong Board support of our organization's efforts in the area of national legislation to protect patients in their quest for appropriate treatment, for the right to obtain private treatment through private contracting, and to the right to maintain confidentiality of treatment. Preserving a strong commitment to these basic psychoanalytic values is imperative in psychoanalytic education as candidates develop their identities as psychoanalytic clinicians. Public education about psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically based treatments and the preservation of these freedoms and values remain the highest priority for our future.
The Board and Council have functioned together to further necessary outreach efforts to maintain the intellectual and clinical potential of our association by attracting quality applicants to our institutes. We have jointly formed the Committee on Student Affiliation, which aims to connect with students in both the primary mental health professions and the academic community. The Board also initiated the Joint Task Force on Psychotherapy Education, which will collect, collate, and integrate the experiences and practices of institutes and societies.
Psychotherapy programs are an important potential avenue for applicants as well as for collegial outreach to the mental health.
During the past year, the Board, guided by the recent bylaw change, has established a process for evaluating and recommending for active membership applicants who are members of the North American IPA societies. Our new IPA members are a distinguished group of psychoanalysts.
At its last meeting the Board voted for a bylaw change that would automatically grant active membership to former affiliate members on graduation from their institutes.
Through its standing committees and task forces, the Board has continued its ongoing scrutiny of its core responsibility for psychoanalytic education. This scrutiny, in response to our developing knowledge and experience in education, is a central value of our organization that contributes to its standing in the public and in all professional communities. The Board has nearly completed a revision of our written standards. This revision will incorporate changes that have occurred during the ferment of the past ten years. It will reflect a shift toward an increased emphasis on elucidation of the educational principles that underlie our current requirements and expectations in the education of candidates. This shift reflects a significant change from the Board as gatekeeper to the Board as facilitator of institute functioning and candidate education. Greater understanding of the principles underlying our educational standards will provide a clear basis for a continuing evaluation of the effectiveness of these principles and of our means for implementing them.
Eligibility for psychoanalytic training at
our Institutes has broadened in the past ten years. This expansion of eligibility has now been subject to ten years of experience with candidates from a range of backgrounds who have entered our institutes directly or through waivers. Institutes and the Board Committee on Preparation and Progression (formerly Committee on Non-Medical Training) now judge that they have sufficient experience in evaluating these backgrounds and in judging the success of our educational efforts with a broad range of medical and nonmedical candidates, to support the change of removing the waiver requirement for most mental health backgrounds. Informed by the experience of the Committee on Preparation and Progression, and supported by the work of the Task Force on Eligibility, many believe that we can move to a concept of eligibility based on background clinical and academic preparation, potential talent, and the inherent personal characteristics that can lead to the development of excellence as a practitioner of psychoanalysis. Such a step places great responsibility on our skill at evaluation, since it would somewhat deemphasize reliance on the achievement of the traditional credentials. Not all are confident that we have reached the point where a next step is warranted, and the Board will actively debate this issue in December.
The future of our child analytic programs and child analysis remains a serious concern. A Task Force on Child Analysis will bring its report with its observations, concerns, and recommendations for full discussion in December.
The Board has also undertaken a survey of training analyst selection procedures and requirements throughout our institutes. Central features of that survey were the universal reliance on some form of clinical evaluation procedure and the primary significance of the character of the applicant in institute considerations. In general the Board has adopted an accommodative and facilitating policy in regard to appointees with special clinical and academic backgrounds or where there are important geographic considerations.
Discussions of the past two years have clarified that the question of seeking an external credential for our graduates apart from our internal process of certification had shifted to a primary emphasis on seeking external accreditation of our institutes. This would be in addition to and separate from the accreditation now accorded by BOPS. Thus the external accreditation question has become one that has a core relationship to our training institutes and to our educational procedures and standards. The responsibility for elucidating the various options, including the option of whether it is an advisable development, from the point of view of their impact on our educational processes, our institutes, and on the overall functioning of the Board. The BOPS Committee on External Accreditation has been formed to obtain and bring such information to the Board. This will be an important ongoing question.
This has been a period of great activity for the Board as it has confronted, examined, and reevaluated both its core educational concerns and the ongoing organizational and external concerns and pressures from the perspective of its particular responsibility of achieving and preserving a high level of psychoanalytic education for candidates. In a period of significant change in the practice environment of psychoanalysis, the Board has engaged the effects of these concerns and pressures on our educational practice in a dynamic and thoughtful way, preserving the quality of our educational efforts with flexibility and realism as it has attempted to facilitate our institutes', our candidates', and our graduates' efforts to develop and maintain their psychoanalytic identities and expertise.
Changing attitudes toward treatment, economic pressures felt by patients and by analysts, third-party involvement, attacks on analysis—fair or unfair—all tend to translate eventually into proposals or pressures to modify standards. Standards, however, are primarily determined by the inherent requirements of the psychoanalytic procedure itself and by the current state of the art and science of practice. It is human nature to grumble about standards, but in our pursuit of excellence we must tolerate our grumbling with the understanding of the essential value of maintaining the inherent requirements of the procedure. The Fellows of the Board, selected from our most experienced educators, possessing the highest level of understanding of psychoanalytic procedure and its requirements, and with deep knowledge of the experiences necessary for its effective mastery, form a group essential to the preservation and the rational evolution of psychoanalysis and for the good name of the profession. It has been a challenge and an honor to support the Board in these turbulent times in its fulfillment of its core responsibilities to the Association, its institutes, our candidates, and, most fundamentally, our patients.