Important changes are occurring on many of the committees of the Board on Professional Standards. I would like to tell you about the changes occurring in three of our committees: Preparedness and Progress, New Training Facilities, and Research and Special Training.
One well-known example of the changes in BOPS is its conceptual shift with regard to the selection of candidates. The new approach to eligibility has occurred as a result of the dedication and vision of Phyllis Tyson and her Committee on Preparedness and Progress (COPAP), along with support and contributions from the previous BOPS chair, Larry Chalfin. Building on the thoughtful approaches of the Task Force on Selection, chaired by Ed Schiff, COPAP and BOPS have reconceived selection as a process that emphasizes the personal potential of an applicant and the nature and quality of prerequisite experience. There is less emphasis on a candidate's specific preparatory mental health degree.
These shifts in focus are equally applicable for selection of master's-level, Ph.D.-level, and M.D.-level applicants. Our new orientation elevates our standards by permitting more careful and sophisticated selections. The changes will lead us to better select individuals with potential for personal growth as well as the prerequisite experiences necessary to develop excellence as psychoanalytic practitioners. For those who worry that BOPS has gone too far, and that standards have been loosened, I urge them to remember that centralization does not standards make. Our institutes, which after all make up BOPS, will administer the spirit and letter of the new standards of eligibility with seriousness and integrity. By transcending the concreteness of degree categories, and with a more rigorous emphasis on actual preparation and potential, we have delineated higher and more genuine standards.
COPAP itself is evolving toward a new mandate. If the revised membership and eligibility bylaws are eventually approved, the committee will continue to evaluate the appropriateness of waivers for the occasional individuals whom an institute wishes to train but who do not meet eligibility criteria. In addition, the committee will significantly deepen its liaison with institutes. Institutes and COPAP together will study selections and progression and guide the Board in establishing appropriate prerequisite eligibility criteria for the psychoanalysts of tomorrow.
I wish to extend my deep gratitude to John MacGregor, who has ably filled in for the past several months as chair pro tern of COPAP. Phyllis Tyson, who perhaps understands the complexities of the selection and progression issues and the COPAP process more than anyone else in our organization, has graciously agreed to serve yet another year as chair of COPAP during this transition phase. Calvern Narcisi, a long-standing member of the committee, is the new co-chair. He will assume the chair of the committee in about a year's time. All questions about eligibility and selections should be directed to Tyson or Narcisi.
Another revolutionary step occurred at the BOPS meeting in May when the Board ratified an innovative model for the development of new institutes. Our hope is that this new model will allow institutes to achieve standards of excellence comparable to or higher than those achieved with our current system, at a more rapid pace than has often occurred in the past.
Traditionally, new training facilities (NTFs) have been sponsored by an existing sponsoring institute (SI). Under that model, the trainees at the NTF are actually candidates in the SI. Candidates initially attend classes and receive supervision at the SI. Generally the training analysis is conducted locally by one of the training analysts in the NTF All of the administration of the NTF begins within the SI. The NTF gradually establishes classes, supervision, and administrative structures. When these educational processes have been successfully established, and when the core of training analysts reaches the requisite level, the NTF progresses to provisional and ultimately to full status as an institute of the APsaA. Throughout this process, CNTF monitors and facilitates the process of development and ultimately recommends accreditation of the new institute.
Our traditional process has developed many of our fine institutes including the institute that I am affiliated with, UNC-Duke. Our local experience with our SI, Washington, was a felicitous one. We progressed at a smooth pace with a strong and collegial alliance guiding our development. In the 1950s and 1960s, our faculty and candidates traveled to Washington: It was a feasible adventure. In the early 1980s, when our child psychoanalytic program remained under the auspices of Washington, it was possible for me to fly to Washington biweekly to obtain my supervision in child analysis.
Nowadays, there are reasons to reconsider whether the traditional model best serves all our NTFs. The realities of private practice and academic life and changing patterns of family life have made extensive travel unrealistic or undesirable for many. In addition, there have been occasional situations in which the relationship between an NTF and the SI has been complicated. One issue emphasized by many experienced colleagues as a possible complicating factor is that the SI has an inevitable conflict of interest, for it gains candidates and income until the NTF becomes independent. For whatever reason, the NTFs' development has sometimes taken many decades and has occasionally been unsuccessful.
The new alternate system that has been developed by CNTF under the inspired leadership of Ellen Rowntree will enable our NTFs to teach classes, supervise, and administer from the outset, drawing on the experiences of several institutes, rather than modeling themselves on one. In the new system, the SI is replaced by a sponsoring team (ST) of three senior educators appointed by and responsible to the Board. The ST will work closely with the NTF, providing hands-on guidance and oversight as the NTF gains experience in its educational endeavors. CNTF will continue to have its own subcommittee, which will perform its traditional functions in relation to the NTF and the ST, at arm's length from the ST.
We have launched this model informed by two sets of experiences. The first is our own experience with the Oregon NTF under the auspices of the San Francisco Institute and the Kansas City NTF under the auspices of the Topeka Institute. From the outset in each case, supervision, classes, and administration have taken place near the NTF, with ongoing guidance and participation by an oversight committee within the SI. However, the trainees are still officially candidates in the SI, the training analysts belong to the SI, and the ultimate administrative responsibility is with the SI.
It was during the tenure of the previous chair of CNTF, David Carlson, that this visionary step toward greater local involvement and responsibility was taken. Because of our successful experience with Oregon and Kansas City, we were poised to take the further step of developing an ST model.
Further lessons we are relying upon are those learned by the IPA, which has long experience with a different version of a sponsoring team model. I extend my sincere appreciation to Otto Kernberg, president of the IPA, and particularly to David Sachs, chair of New Groups for the IPA. They have generously shared their experience with Ellen Rowntree, Bob Cummings, myself, and others who have been involved in conceptualizing this new venture. Marvin Margolis and Bob Pyles have also been consistent supporters of this approach and have contributed invaluably to our thinking.
Minnesota will be the first NTF at which we will be implementing the ST approach. Minnesota has had a complicated and lengthy development under the able stewardship of the Chicago Institute. For various reasons intrinsic to the local situation, Minnesota, Chicago, and CNTF have all agreed that the ST approach is the right one for Minnesota. The ST for Minnesota is Ralph Engle, who has long experience with Minnesota through CNTF; Marvin Margolis, from Michigan; and Kenny Newman, from Chicago. Continued support from Michigan and Chicago will be integral to Minnesota's continued development, and Margolis and Newman will help to provide a bridge to those resources.
We anticipate that our approach in Minnesota will validate the benefit of the sponsoring team concept for the appropriately selected
new training facility. Other new facilities will undoubtedly benefit more from the traditional sponsoring institute model. With this flexibility, we will be able to assist our new training facilities to develop in a way that recognizes the strengths and needs of each situation. I also anticipate that our sponsoring teams will gain experience that will help us formulate new ideas about how we can flexibly and responsibly facilitate the development of NTFs.
(This subsection on CORST is excerpted from a future TAP column written by Peter Loewenberg, chair of CORST and distinguished CORST graduate, in consultation with Vera Camden, active candidate member of CORST)
CORST has undertaken new endeavors: screening non-medical applicants (psychologists, social workers, counselors, and academics) for The American, supporting a fervent commitment to academic recruitment, cultural outreach; advocacy of psychoanalysis and a support for analytic training in the university. This policy was initiated by Deanna Holtzman, who retired as CORST chair in May 1998.
Programs initiated since January 1997 include a CORST essay prize, which was highly successful in its first year. It gathered 28 submissions, an astounding response for a new prize. Last year, with funding from the American Psychoanalytic Foundation, CORST conferred its first training grant of $5,000 to help an academic further his psychoanalytic training. This year the Foundation has given CORST $20,000 to aid the psychoanalytic training of two research scholars for three years. The symbolic and moral meaning of this support from The American is at least as important as the material support, which (as we all know) only defrays a small fragment of the cost of an analytic training. We encourage an institute waiver of tuition, or free or low-fee supervision, for academic candidates.
CORST consults for local institute initiatives, which are the only way to build an academic research program. No national body can do the necessary intensive individual personal recruitment. CORST is a central clearing house for local programs, problems in preparing academics for clinical training, issues of state licensure, and the preparation of waiver applications. To promote psychoanalytic research and teaching among students and faculty in our universities, CORST consults and cooperates with, among others, the American Psychoanalytic Foundation, the Robert J. Stoller Foundation, the Hayman Endowment, the Psychoanalytic Studies Program at Emory University, the Oregon Psychoanalytic Foundation, the Center for the Study of Mind and Human Interaction, the Group for the Use of Psychology in History, Psychohistory Review, the University of California Interdisciplinary Psychoanalytic Consortium, Clio's Psyche, and the New York Psychohistory Forum.
The support and development of the CORST mission is crucial to the future of American psychoanalysis because it is the academic psychoanalyst who is strategically poised to interpret our field to a culture which in various ways has disavowed psychoanalytic discoveries. At a time when the clinically oriented disciplines have diminished the complexity and the creativity of the human subject through fierce biologism and reductive nosologies, the academic psychoanalyst's training in history, the humanities, the social sciences, and other interpretive disciplines prepares him or her to contextualize the clinical experience of patients in terms larger than those traditionally available through rigid applications of diagnostic and other clinical categories.
We also know that a merely academic and cultural understanding of psychoanalysis — without the clinical basis upon which its most groundbreaking discoveries originate and from which its mutative potential emerges — runs the risk of becoming an empty abstraction and another interpretive game. CORST's objective is to assist academic scholars in the crucial components of clinical training and practice while enriching the language and interpretive powers of psychoanalysis itself by building bridges to other disciplines.