Two recently noted decisions by the Executive Committee relating to our relationships with governmental bodies and other organizations should be discussed by the members and the Executive Council. They seem to reflect a trend in governance away from the participatory and bylaw-directed primacy of the Board of Directors' responsibility for establishing and controlling policy.

The decision to completely bypass the Committee on Confidentiality and its able chair, Paul Mosher, and send Denise Nagle to represent us in Washington with testimony that included comments on Jaffe v. Redmond, not only mutes the voice of psychoanalysis in the public arena but vitiates the morale of this excellent committee. After working expeditiously and effectively with the Consortium to create an amicus brief, which redounded to our credit, the primary author and the committee were not even contacted when issues of privacy and confidentiality in psychoanalysis were promulgated. Cries that our members do not promote themselves in their communities as analysts cannot be made if our organization does not feel that analysts are proper spokepersons on the national level. The same absence of respect for the communicative process was revealed by the belated information that our officers, in December 1996, knew of the intention of IPS to file a letter of intent with CORPA to establish an accrediting board for psychoanalysis. The extensive debates in both BOPS and the Executive Council have been undermined by this failure to inform on what, in my view, should have been a significant component of the discussions and decisionmaking in both bodies.

I hope that an open dialog both of these issues and the responsibilties of the Executive Committe will be possible in San Diego. The strength of The American rests with member involvement and empowerment, not marginalization.

Judith S. Schachter