When I was initially nominated for president-elect of our institute and society in 1984, I felt it was something of an honor, but not a particularly substantial position. I thought it would be a nice way to be somewhat more involved. The myth, which I believed back then, was that the place was really run by a few “powerful” senior training analysts and that the board of trustees and officers were nominal positions given to those who were not TAs.
One of the more senior TAs told me how the Board of Trustees and Officers came into being. At one point, he said, the members of the institute realized they were graduating more people than could or should become TAs. One of the more “soft-hearted” TAs thought they needed to give these people something to do, and he suggested a Board of Trustees and Officers. It was, according to my friend (obviously not the soft-hearted one) “throwing the dogs a bone.”
What I discovered when I became president-elect was that no one was running the place and we were confronting an imminent fiscal disaster. Only our treasurer, Mel Brown, seemed to know this and was “shouting to the wind” about it. I'd just come from many years on the core staff of what was arguably the best analytically based training program in the country for residents, clinical psychologists, and psychiatric social workers, at Mt. Zion Hospital in San Francisco. That program, led by Bob Wallerstein and Ed Weinshel, was rich in talent but nevertheless went under because of financial problems. It seemed that this was about to happen to our institute and society.
What happened to the psychiatry department at Mt. Zion was out of our hands, but what happened to our institute and society was up to us. The Mt. Zion experience was one of the things that convinced me that for our psychoanalytic organizations to survive, we must remain independent of larger organizations that will not always give our relatively small group interests top priority. However, we then had to learn how to survive as a small non-profit. This was not anything about which I'd ever imagined I would have to learn.
Fear is a pretty good motivator, and it was that, rather than any particular notion of reform, that got things started. However, as someone said about psychoanalysis, no matter where you start with it, you have to encompass all of it. So it was with the fiscal challenges we faced; they eventually forced us to look at every aspect of our organization.
The first thing I did was to enlist the few members I could find who seemed to know anything about business and financial issues into the Ad Hoc Advisory Committee on Finance and Management. (It has since become an essential standing committee and enabled us to grow at three times the rate of inflation over the past decade, but that is another story.) That first ad hoc committee saved our institute and society.
I was also able to obtain a pro bono consultation with a principal at the local office of KPMG Peat Marwick, an international accounting/consulting firm. His area of expertise was non-profits, and he was the consultant for several University of California campuses. He more than confirmed the alarm sounded by our treasurer. Though the content of his discussion with us was important, more valuable was the appreciation we gained of the principles of finance that were involved. Finance, like our own field, while not an exact nor a definitive science, is a discipline. The consultant referred us to a non-profit outfit called The Management Center (see its Web site at ), with whom we entered into a year-long consultation.
We had to design and develop systems of financial control and process, from a disciplined budgetary process to investment policy. We also had to devise ways both to increase income where we could and cut costs considerably. Perhaps no more than half of the ideas we came up with were able to fly with the people in our organization. It was pretty rough going for a while. Our library lost its librarian, and its hours were drastically reduced. We seriously considered selling our building and renting space elsewhere to have some money to keep the organization afloat. All kinds of cuts had to be made, including the way we used our staff. It meant that administrative staff members could not be treated like personal secretaries. (This is still not understood by some of our senior TAs.)
A few friends and colleagues yelled at me. I tried to explain, and explain, and explain again with facts and figures and computer spreadsheet printouts and charts, and still not many wanted to hear about it or pay it much heed. Nor would I have wanted to if I weren't in the hot seat, I suppose. The representative of the Education Committee on our board usually represented the EC's opposition to almost everything we proposed. Did the EC not understand what we were up against? One EC member suggested the solution was easy: Just find someone with philanthropic wealth and have them contribute. At times, the attitude reminded me of what I'd heard about the old Jewish shtetl, where the rabbis were supposed to do nothing but study the Talmud all day and then make pronouncements while the peasants were supposed to work in the fields to provide them all they needed. Still, we made progress, slowly.
Then we held our first-ever leadership retreat. We met over a weekend at a scenic spot overlooking the ocean. The board of trustees, all committee chairpeople, and the EC were invited. Most came. Away from our usual setting and the political situation there, things were rather different. We got everything out on the table, it seemed, including the plight of general members and analytic practice and the tensions between the TAs and non-TAs. Pushed by the fiscal problems, we had to address our priorities. The retreat facilitator told me when it was over that she saw how we all liked one another. Of course she was right, but it just hadn't occurred to me before. Actually, it was some TAs who took the lead in addressing the plight of our membership, reminding all of us that they too were members, and pushed me to do something about it. Open discussion can indeed bring us together.
One of the things we did was modeled after what had occurred in the counties to our south. They had begun having dinner meetings every six weeks or so. It started because of their disgruntlement with the way things were done in San Francisco and their feeling they had been relegated to some backwater status. They met initially to consider splitting off and forming their own institute and society. The end result was that the group got to know one another and soon became far more active in the home society. The leader of the “rebellious” group later became one of our TAs.
Melvyn B. Schupack, M.D., is a former president of the SFPI&S and a current member of both the Advisory Committee on Finance and Management and the Investment Committee. E-mail him at for more information.
I set out to try to form such evening dinner groups in each of the counties and areas of our far-flung organization. I went to the initial meetings in some of the counties. I asked people to talk about what their careers and practices were actually like and what they thought the society did or might do for them. The careers were quite varied, although most were doing at least some clinical analysis. The importance of their analytic training for whatever they were doing was unanimous. Many felt that the restricted focus of those they felt were in control of the society and institute excluded them. Some had bitter stories of how they had been treated when they tried to suggest enlarging that focus to at least include the work they were doing. Morale was not good, and their affiliation with our central organization was tenuous.
Those dinner meetings lasted for several years. The social purpose was perhaps primary as people got to know one another. The discussions turned to analytic subjects, if somewhat broader than those discussed at the home base. More people began to show up at our scientific meetings.
Like The American itself, we were and are a two-headed monster since we are both an institute and a society. Emboldened by the retreat, I organized the first off-site dinner meeting between the Board of Trustees and the EC, to try to address some of the issues.
The question of having TAs at all came up, of course. A couple of TAs argued for the merits of the system, and I agreed with them. But I added that the way they conducted themselves made a difference. The tradition seems to have been to shroud the EC in the same aura of segregated secretiveness and ambiguity as we had used in our consulting rooms. I suggested that in the consulting room this approach had its usefulness, but in an organizational setting it was destructive. To my mind, it helped account for the various powerful and influential myths that are such an important part of our culture. As analysts, I think we know that myths contain psychological truths. I suggested that all of us in leadership positions, and especially the tenured EC, needed to pay attention to the ways in which we contributed to the more regressive experience of the organization for its members.
In the following years there have been what seem to me to be dramatic changes from within the EC itself. The president is now a member of the EC, keeping open the important communication between board and EC. The EC began to be far more open about what it was doing, and the minutes of its meetings now appear in some detail in our newsletter. The procedures for becoming a TA are published in our policies and procedures manual, and each graduating class is presented with the procedures used for becoming a TA and for getting on the faculty. Now we have non-TAs on the EC, and the EC has delegated some of its power and responsibility to an elected Faculty Council. Our group of TAs has expanded considerably and encompasses a much fuller range of that theoretical pluralism with which we are either graced or plagued, depending on your point of view.
The problems are not entirely solved, and our EC still tends to act like an island unto itself, forgetting it is part of a larger organization. However, we have made a good beginning and have begun to dispel the myth of a closed secret society that taps future TAs.
We have also grown considerably since then. We have more candidates than ever, have more members than ever, and have become far more actively open to the community outside and the community inside. The culture of the SFPI&S has changed dramatically, and I think it is a very different experience for our candidates now. If I have learned anything about leadership from my experience, I think it is that the secret of leadership is actually to be a good follower.
I also learned it is a very difficult job. I'm not sure anyone can do it for very long. I've noticed after years of hard work at acquiring a certain understanding and experience (not yet expertise perhaps) in certain areas, I start to get impatient with members who have not put in that work and don't have that understanding but who question things “naively.” I think we need something like term limits; I don't think academic tenure should provide political tenure as well. Term limits may not be the most efficient approach, from one point of view, but as Churchill said, it is far better than the alternatives.