Since Dr. Schachter refers to my personal solution, I should describe some of my professional work. I am the founder and full-time director of a psychoanalytic child development center. Among my activities there, I supervise the application of psychoanalytic principles in our preschool's therapeutic and normal nurseries; work with mother-child dyads; create and participate in a range of educational programs for parents, teachers, and mental health professionals; and direct our research efforts. I am immersed in the realities of the mental health world, including third-party carriers. I value my work as a crossover artist.
I titled my article “Crossing Over to Forces That Neither Respect nor Understand.” I frame the issue in terms of where and how we cross over. We should distinguish educational goals from practice goals. Institutes, societies, and individuals should disseminate our knowledge, build bridges, and find new applications of psychoanalysis. But where we cross over is crucial: the crossing over should not occur within the institute's walls. There we have an educational task and should indeed stay with our psychoanalytic texts. We should teach application of psychoanalysis, but without sacrificing the mastery of the competencies necessary to practice contemporary classical psychoanalysis. We should even question, from an educational perspective, the appropriateness of conducting supervised analysis with certain kinds of insurance intrusions that violate the integrity of the frame, attitude, and methods.
Clarity of educational focus will provide the best opportunity for candidates to forge a psychoanalytic identity. This psychoanalytic identity will be further supported with crossover activities that are grounded in paradigms that do not conflict with the intellectual and ethical basis of psychoanalysis. From the standpoint of education, this is the “how” of crossing over.
I absolutely agree with Dr. Schachter: our institutes and BOPS have the responsibility to engage the challenges before us on behalf of our candidates. The enormous trust that our organization has placed in BOPS does entail an ethical duty. In agreement that BOPS is faced with a moral imperative, I have launched a major new initiative, Project 2000, which will seek solutions for the types of question that you raise. My column in this issue of TAP provides an overview of this new commission. Its work will receive the highest priority during my tenure as chair. If the solutions exist, we are going to do what is possible to find them.