We may look back to the 86th Annual Meeting in San Diego as a turning point in our association's effort to set a new course to strengthen both The American and psychoanalysis in the United States. Many spoke of the sea change in morale, attitude, and demographic composition of the participants at the 1997 spring meeting as representing an historic moment: The changes now in place will assure our scientific, organizational, and professional resurgence. Developments at the San Diego meeting — in external accreditation, eligibility, scientific program, and composition of registrants — seem to support such optimistic observations.
Recent meetings prior to San Diego were characterized by painful, divisive disagreements (all too characteristic of our association) which became focused on the pros and cons of seeking external accreditation. By last December's meetings, consensus had been achieved on the desirability of external accreditation, but a deep division still existed between colleagues who were primarily concerned with seeking accreditation privileges for members of The American (with or without the Independent Psychoanalytic Societies) and those who were committed to establishing accreditation solely with the Psychoanalytic Consortium. Happily, this controversy appears to be waning.
The Consortium's External Accreditation Committee continues its efforts to develop proposed standards for accreditation. These provisional standards, circulated in San Diego, were broadly reassuring to our colleagues in both camps. (The document that was produced by the Consortium Committee has been posted on the e-mail lists for the Council and the members. It is also available upon request from our Central Office.) The Consortium document states a clear preference for standards equivalent to or more demanding than those of The American Psychoanalytic Association and The International Psychoanalytical Association; these standards should nevertheless be flexible enough to accommodate the narrow range of differences that exist between the institutes affiliated with Consortium organizations and institutes outside the Consortium. The Consortium proposal establishes a floor of high standards for institutes that seek accreditation. All institutes (including those of The American) will have to raise their standards in order to be accredited by this proposed new body. It is anticipated that the eventual Accreditation Board will also serve in an educational and consultative role to help institutes prepare a successful application.
Perhaps the spirit of these negotiations is what is most noteworthy. Suspicion and contention are receding as the pace of committed collegial effort quickens. There is no longer a sense of disparate organizations eyeing each other warily, but rather of a unified team of psychoanalytic educators working to establish educational standards for psychoanalytic training that will accomplish for our field what the Flexner Report did for medical training in the United States at the turn of the century. Participants in the May 2 and June 20 meetings of the Consortium's External Accreditation Committee — including representatives of the Board, Council, Ad Hoc Committee on External Accreditation, and Executive Committee — left with a uniformly optimistic and buoyant feeling about the future of these negotiations.
As negotiations proceed, it becomes increasingly clear that the Consortium Committee's ongoing discussions are leading to a fundamental rethinking of training issues. For the first time, we are considering the impact of gender, race, sexual preference, and ethics on standards while retaining the best features of past standards. Our own Joint Ad Hoc Committee on External Accreditation is raising important questions and providing critical data to enhance the Consortium Committee's deliberations. Our ad hoc committee considers the Consortium option to be the leading proposal for external accreditation, but it is keeping all options open until the December 1997 meeting.
Consortium organizations have also seen these negotiations as richly substantive and confidence-building. The acrimony of recent months within the Consortium has disappeared. The Consortium Board is now considering including new organizations; at the June 20 meeting, it established a new committee to study the possibilities. In my opinion, a way will soon be established to facilitate the entry of additional appropriate psychoanalytic organizations into the Consortium. While the new groups may contribute to our deliberations, they will have to support the ideals and goals of the Consortium as well as the general thrust of its evolving standards. The details of these affiliations will have to be developed carefully and consensually.
A central principle of the Consortium that new groups will have to accept is that we are against psychoanalysis becoming an independent profession. We see it as a specialized training, based upon the analyst's prior training as a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, social worker, or other recognized mental health professional. Some exceptions will be allowed, as in the case of our academic (CORST) candidates, providing they are helped to attain basic training as mental health professionals.
The Consortium will continue to oppose attempts by individual organizations to seek accreditation privileges. It is the hope of many in the Consortium that the IPS will be included in a future expanded Consortium. The new committee will present its first report to the Consortium Board on October 17.
The external accreditation discussion now being conducted as a joint enterprise of BOPS and the Executive Council, through the offices of the Ad Hoc Joint External Accreditation Committee, chaired by Leon Hoffman and Cal Narcisi, has been characterized by thought-fulness, civility, and mutual respect for the different but overlapping interests of these two governing bodies. It augurs well for a future of organizational harmony and cooperation within our association.
Another harbinger of progressive trends is the Board's decision in San Diego to broaden the range of mental health degrees that are considered suitable for admission without requiring BOPS approval. This is based on the Board's recognition of demonstrated ability of local admissions committees to carefully select non-doctoral candidates. Perhaps more importantly, BOPS has detailed the clinical and didactic experiences that best prepare an applicant for psychoanalytic training and which must be part of an applicant's background either before or after onset of matriculation. This is equally necessary for applicants who come from doctoral programs, for one can no longer rely on traditional mental health training programs to prepare most trainees adequately for analytic training. (In my view, these requirements ought to be applied to our CORST applicants.)
Regardless of degree, these new eligibility requirements ensure that we will maintain the necessary level of preparation for candidates for psychoanalytic training. Through repeated surveys conducted by the Board, the institutes have demonstrated their competence to assume full responsibility for evaluating masters-level applicants for admission. For example, more than 60 MSW candidates are now in training. They have all been doing average to superior work. In San Diego, therefore, the Board voted to allow local institutes both to process these new applicants and to make final admission decisions. The Committee on Preparedness and Progress will be available to institutes for consultation. Since the proposed broadening of eligibility now encompasses a variety of masters-level categories (especially the MSW), we are now ready to complete the Gaskill process, begun some six years ago, when we allowed local option in admitting Ph.D. candidates but continued to require a national waiver for masters-level applicants until local institutes were prepared to assume that responsibility.
We are indebted to Phyllis Tyson, Chair of Progress and Preparedness, Board Chair Donald Rosenblitt; and past Board Chair Larry Chalfin for their dedication and leadership in bringing this development in such a thoughtful and careful manner to a final conclusion within BOPS. The final step will be a vote by active certified members for a by-law amendment to broaden eligibility. The vote will take place in the fall. With the passage of this proposal, we can look forward to increasingly large classes of able candidates drawn from all of the mental health professions.
We can be very proud of the continued excellence of our programs at national meetings as reflected at the San Diego meeting. Our scientific programs, under the able leadership of Owen Renik, feature leading scholars from all psychoanalytic organizations and all theoretical points of view. Our discourse is open, vigorous, and challenging. We have an ever-increasing number of discussion groups, which are open to all registrants.
In addition, we are conducting special programs for various groups. In San Diego we launched an open public forum, a panel on assisted dying. We had advertised widely in the San Diego area; the large hall was full. The broadening of our program brought academics to hear “Amae Reconsidered” — an interdisciplinary program of special appeal to academics interested in Japanese culture. [Amae can be loosely described as a mutual interdependence of individual and state that underlies the traditional Japanese social structure. We'll have more on amae in the next issue of TAP. — the editors.] Finally, under Morris Peltz, the successful program for spouses (in San Diego the presentation was “Bringing the Dead to Life: Reading James Joyce”; see page 28) has evolved into an applied analysis forum of interest to all. A particularly poignant moment occurred in San Diego when honorary membership was conferred upon Benjamin Spock for his contributions to child-rearing. This broadening of our programs reflects our greater openness and growing appeal to the mental health, academic, and general communities.
We succeeded in attracting a more diverse, younger, and larger group of participants to the 1997 San Diego meeting, thanks to our attractive program and the outreach and publicity efforts of Sharon Zalusky's Outreach Committee for Scientific and Educational Programs (together with the Public Information Committee and the American Psychoanalytic Foundation). More than at previous meetings, colleagues, candidates, psychotherapists, students, academics, and interested members of the West Coast and local communities were noticeably present. The total registration in San Diego was 60 percent greater than that for the 1996 annual meeting in Los Angeles. We will continue this wider programming at the fall meeting in New York and the annual meeting in Toronto. Broad programming is no threat to our scientific program. A rising tide of participants bodes well for augmented attendance at all programs.
All of our problems have not been solved, but our new organizational strategy was much in evidence in San Diego. Our appeal to young people and to the general public is beginning to bear fruit. Candidate recruitment has significantly increased The American is clearly entering a new period of sustained growth. In San Diego the Council established a new category of student associates. Psychotherapy, academic, and foundation associates will follow in the near future. These thousands of potential associates will constitute a community of support at the local and national levels and a new basis for increasing our influence in the American population. A large number of new Council committees, and reinvigorated existing committees, are now in place to help our societies lead the way to increasing our visibility, helpfulness, and impact on our own local communities. By the spring of 1998, our membership and associate base should increase by at least one-third. This accelerated rate of growth will continue as we win the best minds and the most idealistic young people in our local communities to our psychoanalytic enterprise.
San Diego was our first clear indication of the new American which will bring the message of psychoanalysis to the general public. It will usher in a new period of scientific productivity, increase in trainees, and revival of the private practice of psychoanalysis. The San Diego meeting represents a turning point in our organization's annals.
I hope that you can share my pride in and appreciation for the efforts of the many analysts, candidates, allied psychotherapists, and Foundation Board members who have labored so diligently and creatively to make these events come to pass. I hope to see you at the New York meetings, if not sooner at the Barcelona IPA Congress. Please write, call, or e-mail your reactions to our evolving program to Bob Pyles or me. We especially need additional colleagues and candidates to participate in our many new committees. On behalf of the Executive Committee, I wish you all a pleasant, relaxing, and refreshing summer.