Project 2000 is a new initiative that the Board on Professional Standards is undertaking to broadly re-evaluate our psychoanalytic education by clarifying the major issues confronting psychoanalytic educators today.
BOPS undertook two previous evaluations of psychoanalytic education. In 1960, Bertram Lewin and Helen Ross published their findings of a 1958 survey of our institutes. A second study of psychoanalytic education culminated in a national conference in 1974. The findings of that conference were published under the editorship of Stan Goodman. Both the Lewin and Ross and the Goodman projects were undertaken partly in response to social change and partly in response to information gathered by the various BOPS committees about issues in psychoanalytic education. Both studies were remarkably prescient about future trends, resulted in new directions and new functions for board committees, and had an important influence on national educational trends.
Conditions for psychoanalytic education have changed considerably since 1974. Our candidates come from a wider range of backgrounds and have varying levels of preparation. Diminished practice opportunities have made it more difficult to apply the tripartite system. Because candidates and young graduates often need to work in settings that are not grounded in psychoanalytic frames, new professionals entering our field have difficulty building and consolidating a psychoanalytic identity and a career within our institutes and national organization. There are also issues of curriculum to consider: Advances in neurobiology and psychopharmacology, as well as our burgeoning theories of clinical psychoanalysis, complicate the task of developing a coordinated and scholarly curriculum. Finally, as some institutes have expanded their outreach efforts and developed into psychoanalytic centers, new models of governance may be required.
I have appointed a committee of distinguished and progressive national educators to organize a broad inquiry into these and related issues. Larry Chalfin, immediate past chair of BOPS, will lead this group; candidates and recent graduates will also be represented. The project will succeed to the extent that it is grounded in a partnership between the Project 2000 committee, Fellows and committees of the Board and, most importantly, institute faculties, candidates, and recent graduates from all of our full and developing institutes.
Our decades of commitment to psychoanalytic education have helped our programs attain an admirable level of excellence. With the re-evaluation that Project 2000 will provide, we will have new tools to elevate our tradition of educational achievement. Please communicate your ideas to Larry Chalfin or to me, or to any of the other members of the Project 2000 organizing committee: Steven Ablon, Adrienne Applegarth, Fred Busch, David Carlson, Larry Friedman, Bud Heijn, and Helen Meyers (consultant).