During the past four years, while I have been a candidate at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute, I have also served The American as a delegate to the Affiliate Council and for the last two years as president of the Affiliate Council. Although I have inevitably mixed feelings about completing the term as president in December, the opportunity to work with so many talented people has been an extraordinary experience that has shaped my analytic identity, and for which I will remain grateful.
We have all watched as candidates have taken on new and increasingly expanded roles, both on a local level at their institutes and nationally in The American. Nowadays it is not uncommon for an institute to have candidate representatives on various educational committees and on local outreach committees. The same holds true nationally. For example, there are now candidate representatives on The American's Committee on Institutes and Committee on New Training Facilities (CNTF), as well as a variety of other committees. As a result, there has been a growing appreciation for all that candidates can contribute before they graduate.
At the same time, there has been growing sentiment that psychoanalytic training is improved through efforts to minimize institutionalized indoctrination and infantilization. Treating adults like children is a detriment to the training experience. In the long run, we all benefit from educational and organizational policies that free candidates from the kind of regressive environment that fosters developmentally immature idealizations and/or devaluation of authority. As The American promotes a more open, egalitarian educational atmosphere, candidates are freer to flourish in their experiences with teachers, supervisors, and training analysts. As a result, candidates are less likely to imitate analytic idols and more likely to gather together their training experience with various analysts into a unique analytic identity, one that can be the basis for enjoying an inspired and creative career.
I want to answer publicly a question that I have been asked privately about being a candidate who is so involved at an organizational level, both locally and nationally. Several people have asked me to what extent my experiencing so much of the inner workings of The American and my own institute might take away from my enthusiasm and optimism about becoming a psychoanalyst.
This is a question that deserves to be openly debated. Is it harmful for candidates to be exposed to the underbelly of psychoanalytic organizations and the shortcomings of many analysts, including their own training analyst? From my own experience I would say the opposite is true. I have come to believe that it is harmful for candidates to be systematically shielded from the less ideal realities of teachers, supervisors, and training analysts and from the kind of organizational shenanigans that go on locally and nationally. Such “protection” deprives candidates of the opportunity to develop a resilient analytic identity that can embrace the shortcomings as well as the strengths of psychoanalysis.
This decade has been a challenging time for many candidates. The onslaught of managed care has led some candidates to hide their psychoanalytic associations in order to get on provider panels. Psychoanalysis has been pushed further out of many academic and medical school settings, alienating candidates from their alma maters and making them less sought after as educators. Control cases can be difficult to find, and the media frequently misrepresent and criticize psychoanalysis. These negative influences have made it more difficult for candidates to take pride in becoming a psychoanalyst — and it has become more challenging to earn a living. In spite of all that, there are more candidates in training and more candidate members of The American than ever before. These candidates represent a widening variety of professional specializations, with a diverse vision for their professional futures.
Over the past two years, I have listened to candidates talk about their hopes for the future of psychoanalysis and their own careers. In addition to wanting an analytic practice, they have a growing interest in developing new areas where the analyst's insights can be applied and recognized. Candidates want to find ways to be consultants and advisors to health care, education, child care, business, advertising, sports, government, and forensics. There is a feeling that expanding the scope of applied psychoanalysis will not only provide new professional challenges and additional sources of income, but will also provide public arenas in which psychoanalysis can find new ground to regain the respect it deserves.
Unfortunately (rightly or wrongly), some candidates perceive that they will only gain respect from their own analytic community by doing psychoanalysis four or five times a week. At the same time, there are analysts and candidates who have built more diverse analytic practices. Maybe the time has come to consider including more about the diverse applications of a psychoanalytic education in our training programs and our national meetings.
Might our institutes even consider training candidates in such expanded professional roles for analysts, or might we have workshops at our national meetings where analysts could share the expertise they have developed as consultants and advisors? The more we discuss among ourselves new applications of our analytic training to our professional work, the more they will become a recognized, accepted part of an analytic identity. Perhaps some day we will be asking each other, “What analytic work are you doing these days aside from seeing patients?”
In addition to hearing candidates talk about developing more diverse applications of psychoanalytic training, I have been a part of many discussions among candidates about the need to establish scientific proof of the benefits of psychoanalytic treatments. Clearly this is an agenda shared by the psychoanalytic community at large. My only point in bringing it up is to highlight the fact that many of our candidates have considerable expertise in scientific research. Their experience and diversity might be a great resource in searching for more effective means of doing psychoanalytic research, and it will be important to find ways to tap our candidate resources.
Lee Jaffe, Ph.D., president of the Affiliate Council, is a graduate adult psychoanalyst and a child analyst candidate at the San Diego Psychoanalytic Institute, where he has recently joined the faculty. He is also a newly appointed member of the Project 2000 task force.
Many talented candidates have contributed to the work done over the past two years that would not have been possible without the support of the leaders of The American. Our first order of business was to review and revise the by-laws so a number of improvements in the organizational structure of the Affiliate Council would become its formal structure. I am pleased to report that the by-laws of the Affiliate Council are now up to date in readiness for formal incorporation into the by-laws of The American. Karen Sabovich was central to this work on the by-laws. I appointed William Glover to establish a committee that would organize various candidate events in the scientific programs, and he has made the idea a functioning reality with a creative vision.
To promote candidate membership in The American, we proposed and established a one-year complimentary membership for all new candidates. New candidates are now automatically invited into the organization. In addition, Jane Walvoord has been working on programs to bring in candidates who are in the midst of training but are not affiliate members. Along similar lines, first Stevie Smith and now Rachel Seidel have worked diligently to see that the approved plan to make all affiliate members automatically members of the International Psychoanalytic Studies Organization will be implemented in 1999.
Carolyn Weyand has been chairing the Mentorship Committee, which helps candidates find senior analyst mentors. With the help of Gerald Melchiode, she has expanded the program so candidates can be mentors to student affiliates who attend the scientific meetings and might have an interest in becoming candidates. She has also made the program more visible, as you will see in the preliminary program for the upcoming scientific meetings. Alexander Lerman analyzed more of the data from the original Affiliate Council candidate survey and published the information in TAP (32/1). He is currently working on a follow-up survey.
Beverly Keefer has agreed to organize and be the first chair of the Affiliate Council Committee on Gay and Lesbian Concerns. Gail Glenn has taken charge of our efforts to help candidates organize at local institutes where candidate organizations are either non-existent or less than fully functional. She has sent out a newsletter to the candidates at all institutes with information about various local candidate organizations and activities. Andrea Weiss has taken charge of the candidate column in TAP, soliciting columns by candidates about their professional activities.
With the help of Ellen Rowntree and CNTF, efforts have been under way to bring candidates at new training facilities (who tend to be isolated from candidates with experience) into the Affiliate Council. I am pleased to report that we have recently welcomed the Greater Kansas City and Milwaukee training facilities into the Affiliate Council. Furthermore, we have established a formal liaison between the Affiliate Council and CNTF through a candidate representative, currently Jane Walvoord. Nancy Brehm is the Affiliate Council liaison to Project 2000, a BOPS commission that will be examining current methods of psychoanalytic education [see page 12]. Maxine Gann has been working with Brian Canty of the APsaA central
“Candidates' experience and diversity might be a great resource in searching for more effective means of doing psychoanalytic research.”
office to put together a geographic referral list of candidates. It is hoped that such a list will allow candidates to help other candidates find control cases. Speaking of lists, you will now find an Affiliate Council roster at the end of the committee section of The American's new roster. Using this, our members can identify the delegates, committee chairs, and officers of the Affiliate Counsel, should a need arise.
One mission of the Affiliate Council is to promote activities that enhance psychoanalytic education. This work is well under way, as you will see when you look at the second page of the preliminary program for the upcoming scientific meetings, in a section labeled “Of Interest to Candidates.” One very recent accomplishment you will not see there, but that I am most proud of, is the establishment of an Affiliate Council $1,000 Scientific Paper Prize. Currently entries are being accepted from affiliate members. We hope to award the first prize at the upcoming December meetings in New York, where the winning author will present his or her paper. The Affiliate Council is indebted to Owen Renik for helping to make this new part of the scientific program possible.
The accomplishments I have outlined above would not have been possible without the help of many people in the organization. I cannot express enough appreciation for their support. Unfortunately, I cannot possibly thank everyone here. Nonetheless, I do want to mention some of the people who have made the work of the Affiliate Council possible over the past two years. I think it is difficult to separate my contribution from those of the other officers of the Affiliate Council: Jonathan Aronoff (treasurer), Nancy Brehm (presidentelect), Joni Liebermann (secretary, 1996–97), and Maxine Gann (secretary, 1997–98). On top of the work of being a candidate, maintaining professional practices, and having families, these officers have given much of their time to The American.
Our past president Marvin Margolis and our current president, Robert Pyles, have been a constant source of vision, advice, ideas, and support. The new president-elect of The American, Richard Fox, who was one of the original promoters of the Affiliate Council, has already begun to facilitate Affiliate Council concerns and agendas. In fact, all the members of the past and present Executive Committee of The American have made themselves available despite being very busy, including Larry Chalfin, past chair of BOPS, and Don Rosenblitt, the current BOPS chair. The help of the central office, especially Ellen Fertig, Tina Faison, Debra Eder, and Carolyn Gatto, has been indispensable. I have developed a great appreciation for how much work the central office staff does behind the scenes.
When I first assumed office, the Affiliate Council was still in its infancy. I hope that I have contributed to its being a more established and stable part of our organization. I could not have done this without the support of my wife and children, who remained remarkably cheerful despite all of my time the Affiliate Council and my psychoanalytic training took away from them. Nadine Levinson went out of her way to make me feel like I belonged during my first few meetings of The American. Last but not least, I want to thank James Morris, Robert Tyson, and Phyllis Tyson, who have been such a significant part my psychoanalytic training, and who inspired my initial interest in the American.
I hope to remain an active member of our organization. I know that I share this hope with many other candidates who have been active in the Affiliate Council, and who have found that their involvement enhanced becoming a psychoanalyst. When I finish my term in December, the Affiliate Council will be in the able hands of my successor, Nancy Brehm, along with the other talented candidates who will work with her. Together, they will continue what for me has been an exceptional experience of teamwork. In the end, I am convinced that what I have gotten out of this opportunity to serve The American far outweighs what I have given to it.