A program for a traveling woman psychoanalytic scholar, sponsored by the COPE Workshop on Issues in the Psychoanalytic Training of Women, will be launched this year. Helen Meyers has been selected as the first scholar. The program will provide psychoanalytic institutes and societies across the country more contact with and exposure to outstanding female analysts.
Meyers will visit two sites in the 1998–99 academic year. On June 6, 1998, she will speak at the graduation ceremony of the Western New England Psychoanalytic Institute. In the fall, she will visit the Chicago Institute of Psychoanalysis, where she will give a paper to the society and meet with the candidates there.
Meyers is a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Psychoanalytic Center. She is renowned internationally as a leader in psychoanalytic education and as a psychoanalytic thinker and writer. Instrumental in establishing the House of Delegates of the International Psychoanalytical Association and herself one of the nine North American delegates, she was recently elected as the representative delegate to the Executive Council of the IPA. She serves on a committee established by the IPA to study psychoanalytic education around the world and serves as a site visitor to IPA institutes. She was secretary of the IPAs Program Committee at the IPA Congress in San Francisco in 1995.
Meyers has chaired the Liaison Committee of the North American International Psychoanalytic Association Groups (NAIPAG) for the last two years. This committee coordinates the activities of these groups and funnels information to the European Psychoanalytic Federation (EPF) and the Latin American Federation of Psychoanalysis (FEPAL). For 15 years she has led the Regional Council of Greater New York, which sponsors joint meetings between the New York and Philadelphia psychoanalytic societies and institutes. A leader in The American, Meyers serves or has served on the Board of Professional Standards, the Executive Council, the Committee on Certification, the Program Committee, and the Committee on New Training Facilities and as a councilor-at-large.
At Columbia she has served in virtually every major leadership position. As curriculum chair, she revolutionized the curriculum by integrating different frames of reference with a developmental perspective. This idea became a model for psychoanalytic curricula throughout the country.
Meyers has served on the editorial board of the International Journal of Psychotherapy and JAPA. She is widely known for her writing on gender, perversions, masochism, adolescence, aggression, psychic reality, and psychoanalytic education. Chosen as one of the plenary speakers at the 1997 International Congress in Barcelona, she gave a talk on sexuality in the clinical situation.
Long interested in issues relating to women, Meyers runs an international women's study group on pregnancy. Along with Barbara Deutsch, she was one of the founding chairs of the COPE Workshop on Issues in the Psychoanalytic Training of Women. Thus, it is fitting that she has been picked as COPE's first traveling woman scholar.
Each year a distinguished woman psychoanalyst will be chosen as a visiting scholar to travel to selected institutes and societies that have demonstrated a need for a woman as speaker and/or mentor. In some institutes, for example, there are no (or relatively few) female training analysts, and candidates and recent graduates of both sexes are not supervised, taught, or provided personal mentoring by women.
All expenses for the scholar's visit will be paid through the program's funding. The number of sites to be visited will depend on available funding. Funds for the initial year were obtained from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation and private sources. The committee is now exploring means of ongoing funding to endow the program for future years.
The COPE Workshop on Issues in the Psychoanalytic Training of Women was founded in 1980 at the spring meeting of The American in San Francisco. Since its inception, the workshop has produced a well-regarded annotated bibliography on female psychology and has supported research on pregnancy, gender-related attitudes, and gender-related referral patterns. Most recently, it has begun a women's mentorship program, of which the Traveling Women Scholar is one part. The workshop, now headed by Brenda Solomon and Muriel Laskin, includes representatives of each institute and any other individuals who are interested. The Mentorship Subcommittee is headed by Beth Seelig.
Institutes or societies are interested in being considered for a visit in 1999–2000 should contact Beth J. Seelig, M.D., c/o Emory University Psychoanalytic Institute, 1701 Uppergate Drive, NE, Rm. 414, Atlanta, GA 30322, or call 404-355-7175.
Nancy Kulish, Ph.D., is on the faculty of the Michigan Psychoanalytic Institute, on the editorial board of JAPA, and on the Mentorship Subcommittee of the COPE Workshop on Issues in the Psychoanalytic Training of Women.