Justin Krent appointed me to the chair of the Committee on Certification in 1990. Krent had been the first chair of the Committee on Certification and later was elected to chair of the Board on Professional Standards. His death in September 1990 ended a promise of collaboration.
Irwin Solomon, my predecessor, succeeded Krent as chair of the committee. When Solomon made his report at the end of his term as chair in May 1990, he asked if changes proposed to make the committee more user-friendly were based on accurate knowledge of the current practice or on a myth about that practice. In that report he spoke of the evolutionary nature of change, and emphasized that the committee wished to see reports of applicants' most recent analytic work rather than only their supervised cases. He anticipated that changes in response to pressure to make the certification process more user-friendly would result in lowering standards. User-friendly was the term used by Martin Stein in his committee report on their study of the attitudes of the membership concerning certification. I think Krent shared Solomon's concerns about lowering standards. I think he would have been pleased with the evolving nature of the changes and eventually reassured by realizing that easing the application procedure need not lower the standards against which the application is measured.
Succeeding Board chairs Marvin Margolis and Larry Chalfin have listened carefully, asked many questions, and facilitated the necessary debates in the Board meetings.
Maintaining standards is the essence of the Board's charge to the committee. The committee discharged its responsibility by conducting fair reviews based on the information contained in the applications. This was done without bias toward women or men, regardless of the professional degree, graduating institute, or theoretical view. However, many perceived prejudices and arrogance in the committee's functioning. Since May 1990, the committee has added the following principles as guides to its decisions and actions: to engage applicants in discussion soon after the application is reviewed; to work with applicants so the questions asked of them are understood; to avoid misuse of authority to tell colleagues how they must go about answering the committee's questions; and to distribute information widely, enabling understanding of the committee's procedures and the way they are implemented. The committees agreed to regard the application as a one-step process, completed when the recommendation for certification could be made.
I have heard the opinion that the changes were in response to political pressures exerted by the chair of the Board. This is not true. The changes the committee recommended were in response to the membership's criticism and our review of procedures. The changes were formulated in committee meetings, brought to the Board with the advice and support of the Coordinating Committee and the chair of the Board. Significant factors contributing to the pressure for changes were the report of the Task Force to Study Certification, and delinkage of membership and certification. In December 1990 in Miami, Marvin Margolis, who assumed the chair after Krent's death that September, appointed a blue-ribbon task force to study the causes of the despair generally felt about certification. Needing time to learn about my new job, I asked for delay in appointing the task force. Although this was not granted, I soon learned the wisdom of Margolis's action. The task force quickly developed a network that began to channel feedback from every part of the organization to the task force cochairs, Dan Buie and Morrie Peltz. They collated the vast amount of data and tactfully presented it to the Committee on Certification. The committee continued the evolution spoken of by Irwin Solomon and examined every aspect of procedure and function.
At the May 1991 meetings in New Orleans, the delinkage debate intruded into committee deliberations. A demand to recommend a greater number of applicants was brought to the committee by the BOPS chair. We feared such misplaced emphasis would compromise our efforts to make decisions solely on the information contained in the application. The committee observed that most applicants who persisted in their efforts to become certified were eventually successful. This meant to us that applicants who were initially unsuccessful may have conducted effective treatments but had not effectively described them. To encourage applicants to submit more recent work rather than the most problematic, the committee recommended to the Board changes in the application: We proposed changing the requirement for reports of all supervised cases to three treatment reports, whether supervised or not. The reports were to be selected from the applicant's best and most recent analytic work, and as before, to be no longer than twenty double-spaced pages. In addition, the committee described its new publication, Standards, Procedures, Guidelines, containing advice on writing treatment reports. We explained that if an applicant had not described a treatment process, it could not be inferred that the treatment was not psychoanalytic. This allowed the committee to focus on the task of writing about process. We agreed upon a broad definition to determine if the described process was psychoanalytic. If the treatment process had not been described, no assessment could be made. If the process was described and could be determined to concern itself with transference and resistance, and the other requirements had been met, a recommendation for certification would follow. The Board asked for more information.
The new draft of advice to writers was distributed, and the committee provided the membership detailed information about the thinking that led to the recommendations for changes in the application. At the December 1991 meeting in New York, the recommended changes in the application were debated and approved.
The next step was to bring the committee's practices into compliance with the recently adopted delinkage amendment. Certification, formerly the gateway to active membership, now was exclusively the privilege of members who wished full participation in educational and administrative activities of the Association and the institutes. We recommended that active membership in the Association be made a requirement for the application for certifi cation. Also, if review of the application for certification was based on the applicant's current work, and graduation from an institute implied that the standards for
Arthur L. Rosenbaum was chairman of the Committee on Certification of the Board on Professional Standards from May 1990 to May 1996.
training had been met and applicants were now active members, letters from supervisors and institutes about applicants' training experience that had been part of the application were no longer relevant. Similarly, the practice of the committee in supplying information about applications directly to the institutes was now seen as incompatible with the aim of regarding applicants as colleagues to whom we owed explanations of our actions. Proposals to eliminate information from supervisors and institutes in the applications and to discontinue feedback to the institutes in favor of directly providing it to applicants were introduced at the Board meeting in Washington in April 1992.
The historical basis of the charge to the predecessor membership committee and to the certification committee was the determination that standards for training had been met. The committee met its responsibility by assessing the graduate analysts' current functioning as revealed through written reports of the training cases. The idea was that if an applicant could demonstrate, through the written reports, a progression in learning technical skills and theory, then the training experience was assumed to have met the standards. Unfortunately, the reverse was also assumed. If an applicant had not demonstrated progression in the reports of the training cases, the committee was perceived to infer the training had not met the standards. This was one reason the delinkage question had become so divisive. Favoring delinkage was interpreted by many to mean a lowering of standards.
Consequently, following delinkage, when the committee won approval to ask applicants to include in their applications descriptions of their most mature and best work. Many, confusing the application itself with the committee's review of the application, warned the committee it was on a slippery slope of lowering standards. Similarly, confusion between the requirements for graduation from an institute and the requirements for certification misled many to believe that by changing the application for certification, standards for training had been lowered. It had been believed widely that graduation and certification were based on identical criteria, although they never were identical. Consequently, many felt graduation from an institute should confer certification and a failure to certify implied institute dereliction. Once the changes were in place, applicant and institute no longer needed to collude to ignore feedback from a distant and apparently arbitrary Committee on Certification.
After these ideas had been explained to the Fellows, the proposals were debated and approved at the December 1992 meeting. Whatever was lost by restructuring the connection between the institutes and the committee and the link between membership and certification, the Association gained a useful working certification procedure.
By December 1992, Standards, Procedures and Guidelines had been again revised and widely distributed. The committee began to receive positive feedback and encouragement in its efforts. The first of the telephone discussions between applicants whose applications had been continued and the primary reviewer of the application, were tried with positive results. This innovation was a suggestion of Marvin Margolis and Dan Buie. They had conducted some telephone discussions about treatment reports in response to complaints by applicants who felt alienated from the Association after unsuccessful attempts to gain certification. The committee agreed to try such discussions and found them an excellent way to help applicants better understand the questions raised about the applications. They are now offered routinely to each applicant whose application has been continued. They help the applicant deal with the hurt resulting from implicit rejection following the initial review and to prepare for the interview and submission of additional written material that may follow.
By May 1993, the third revision of Standards, Procedures and Guidelines was published and the first of the discussion groups about writing treatment reports was planned for the December 1993 meeting. These discussions were to demonstrate and invite participation in the review of treatment reports. The committee chose this method of responding to requests from applicants for examples of acceptable report writing. The discussion groups, part of the scientific program of the Association, were open to anyone interested in attending, and were intended to convey how the committee conducted its review while avoiding the idea that there was one correct way to submit clinical reports. Workshops for prospective applicants continued.
Probably the most controversial proposal— coming so soon after the committee was warned that it was perceived to be lowering standards—was brought to the Board in San Francisco in May 1993. The committee reviewed its experience in response to a request for help from an area where an entire generation of graduates had not sought certification and were lost as prospective training analysts. The review permitted the committee to identify a group whose experience in the initial application review was significantly more successful in earning the recommendation for certification than any other group. The members of that group had graduated at least seven years before applying and reported their most current work. On the basis of these findings, the committee proposed that the requirements for applicants graduating seven or more years before application be reduced from three to two reports, providing the reports were of the recent treatments of a male and a female, one through termination. After a debate that continued into the next Board meeting in December 1993, this proposal was approved on a trial basis for five years. Now, halfway through the experiment, the expected number of applications has been slow to materialize.
One factor might have been anticipated. It takes at least a year for changes to appear in submitted applications. Four applicants have taken advantage of the opportunity under this rule, and upon initial review, all were recommended to the Board for certification.
A review of these events must include a darker side of the work. It is useful to consider how it is possible for prejudice to dominate our actions. Members of the committee were shocked when we found included in the reports of the task force to study certification statements of the belief that the committee was constituted so it could systematically discriminate against women, against theoretical positions, and against particular institutes and training analysts. We were astonished when we heard and read that respected colleagues believed that the chair of the Board, in collusion with New York analysts, selected members to the committee because they represented certain views and would use the certification process to suppress diversity under the guise of upholding standards. The accusations and remedies proposed did not acknowledge the integrity of colleagues appointed to the committee, that the committee has never been homogeneous, has seldom if ever agreed on any theoretical position and likely did represent the diversity of the larger group. The reactions to the committee and the proposals to bring reform seemed acts of prejudice similar to the prejudices thought to motivate the committee. The committee's position has been to acknowledge that
position has been to acknowledge that prejudice is always with us. If confirmation was needed, these accusations provided it. We recognize that prejudice is most influential when we are afraid. Fears are stimulated when just complaints, instead of being resolved, become part of a political agenda.
The committee turned its attention to revise the application form itself, eliminating questions that had no bearing on determining eligibility to make application. Because it is true that insensitivity will defeat the advantages of the most thoughtful procedures, another has been to consider the principles of providing feedback and to increase skills in conducting interviews, both by telephone and face-to-face.
Another task involves the teaching of report-writing techniques. Although changes in procedures have improved the user-friendly quality without changing the nature of the review itself, the applications have changed appreciably. They increasingly contain information needed to complete a review. We attribute this to the committee's efforts to bring to the notice of the membership the fact that psychoanalysts have not reached an agreement about the collection of the scientific data of our field. This effort is based on the following observations: the data of our field is the clinical interaction during analytic sessions; the record of these interactions is a description of the treatment process; for psychoanalytic knowledge to grow, research is essential; and to conduct research, data must be collected, studied, and reported. None of this can be done if we do not train candidates to write reports of the process of the treatments they conduct. To this end, we have proposed a model method and experimented with the teaching of the skill of writing in our institutes. We hope that the committee will continue to make what it has learned from the study of the treatment reports in the applications available to the institutes and provide guidance and direction to help candidates learn the valuable skill of writing about the process of the work they do.
I have completed my task as chair, and Myron Hurwitz, cochair of the committee for the past year, assumed the chair following the meeting in Los Angeles. He is well prepared and brings knowledge and experience to the task. I wish him, the committee, and the Board well.