In the closest race ever, Jon Meyer of Milwaukee defeated Paul Mosher of Western New York for the office of secretary of The American. Donald Meyers of the Association for Psychoanalytic Medicine (New York) and Warren Procci of Southern California were elected councilors-at-large by Australian ballot, defeating Peggy Hutson of Miami and Jorge Schneider of Chicago.
The Executive Council elected Ralph Roughton of Atlanta and Richard Fox of Los Angeles to serve in the IPA House of Delegates. Roughton will take office in Buenos Aires in January, while Fox's term will begin in Barcelona in July. In other action, the Executive Council acted to regulate and monitor the future conduct of elections within The American.
Secretary Jon Meyer's efforts over the last years have been to foster and support the growth of psychoanalytic practice in Wisconsin. Trained at the Washington Institute, he moved to Milwaukee in 1983 “to develop an analytic presence in an area of one million people where none had existed before.” One measure of the success of Meyer and his colleagues is that Milwaukee now boasts both a society and a new training facility, including ten candidates in training. Meyer himself is an advanced candidate in child analytic training at the Chicago Institute. A second measure of success is that Meyer is Medical Director of an insurance company which continues to cover psychoanalysis as a member benefit.
He states, “We need to do everything we can to develop and sustain psychoanalytic practice—that includes educating our critics as well as working with our friends.” Within The American, Meyer
has served on the Executive Council for five years, where he was appointed to its first Select Committee, which inquired into the problems with the lobbying efforts, and now chairs its second Select Committee, which will report on the structure and functions of the Executive Council. In this regard he has been heavily involved in evaluating the suitability of the Executive Council to serve as the Board of Directors of the Association and the implications of this role. He also serves on the Committee on University and Medical Education, the Committee on Issues of Homosexuality, the Committee on Public Information, and the Ad Hoc Joint Committee on Governance. He served on the Program Committee for nine years and on the editorial board of JAPA. For the IPA, Meyer is a member of the Committee on Constitution and By-Laws.
Councilor-at-Large Don Meyers is well known to members of The American, having served as secretary of the Association as well as serving on the Executive Council for nearly twenty-five years. Over this period, Meyers has played a leadership role in many of the great movements of the organization. He was an early advocate and leader of the effort, which, through many steps, has finally established automatic active membership for all affiliate members upon graduation. He was a leader in the forming of the “Wednesday Group” (which discusses the issues to be addressed at the Thursday meeting of the Executive Council), and he has been an effective organizer of new programs; for instance, he moved a new training facility to maturity and he organized a child analytic training program, both in record time. Meyers is now devoting his efforts to the cause of external credentialing with the Consortium; in addition, he has been asked to help promote the formation of new training facilities across the country where none currently exist.
“On looking back over my years on the Executive Council, my major concern continues to be the difficulty on the part of some of our members in learning lessons from past experiences. A comment that has been repeated many times is that we have to become more pro-active rather than re-active. We only have to look at the lengthy debates—the fits and starts—the costly delays regarding such issues as nonmedical training, membership for all institute graduates (”delinkage“), and more recently, external credentialing, to realize that we still too often arrogantly ignore the current realities of psychoanalytic education and practice, often allowing premature or unfounded fears of divisiveness to interfere with debate and seriously delay progress.”
Warren Procci, councilor-at-large, describes himself as a “full-time practitioner of psychoanalysis,” though he admits to a great love for his quarter-time faculty appointment to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center, where he supervises psychotherapy for psychiatric residents. Until 1988 he was the full-time Director of Residency Training. At the Southern California Institute, he is the current chair of the Education Committee. He is also a member of the Federation of International Psychoanalytic Association Societies, a small collaborative group with membership drawn from the two societies of The American and the two IPA societies in Los Angeles; FIPAS works to further common interests and common goals. Procci also teaches at the independent Newport Psychoanalytic Institute.
Procci has been identified with the “Southern California position,” a political stance which gives top priority to the need to preserve private contracting for mental health care, though he is also in favor of efforts to secure reimbursement for psychoanalysis. He feels that a balanced position is best. He is in favor of external credentialing, though he does not feel “wedded to the Consortium.” Procci has just assumed the chair of the Committee on Government Relations and Insurance and serves on the Committee on Confidentiality as well as the Subcommittee on Fellowships.
“Psychoanalysis continues to have an exciting, productive future. We need to reach out to our collegial analytic organizations while also reaching in to attract the energies of our less involved members.”