This May, Robert Cummings and I will complete our respective three-year terms as secretary and chair of the Board on Professional Standards. In this, my last column, I will offer some thoughts about where BOPS has been, where it is, and where it might be going.
Most of us are familiar with the history of BOPS and the major role it has played in developing and sustaining a national psychoanalytic educational system of the highest quality. BOPS's history has also been characterized by certain authoritarian and elitist trends, particularly as understood from the perspective of contemporary expectations. As BOPS has evolved from a primarily proscriptive body into one that is open, collegial, facilitative, and increasingly exploring and promoting new vistas in psychoanalytic education, there has been an inevitable gap between the current nature of BOPS and the general recognition of these new realities. Fortunately, there has been a marked narrowing in this gap during recent years. In my view, our members' increasing understanding of the contemporary Board on Professional Standards is a result of BOPS's continued progressive achievements and their effects on our institutes, candidates, and all members.
Perhaps a review of the past three years will convey a sense of the current ferment within BOPS. We have established a new standing committee, the Committee on the Impaired Faculty Analyst. CIFA, which grew out of a COPE study group, will help all institutes develop programs to identify and assist impaired faculty analysts. BOPS has established a second new standing committee, the Committee on Accreditation of Free-standing Institutes. CAFI will welcome and work with free-standing psychoanalytic programs toward full accreditation by the Board on Professional Standards. As an illustration of the acceleration of pace of change in BOPS, before CAFI and CIFA, a standing committee was last established in 1985, and before that, in 1977.
The Committee on Certification has accomplished the most substantial revision of the procedures for certification that has ever been attempted, fulfilling our continuing goal of developing the fairest and most collegial certification process possible. The new BOPS workshops on case writing and teaching about case writing are extremely successful and are providing important educational support to individuals as they prepare for certification.
An innovative procedure for developing new training facilities was implemented at the Minnesota New Training Facility. In this new model, BOPS provides direct facilitative sponsorship through a sponsoring committee, as well as the usual monitoring and assistance through our Committee on New Training Facilities. We have learned about the potential to use this model in other locales, to the benefit of our new training facilities in terms of the time necessary to become accredited, as well as the quality and maturity of the institute that is hatched.
Our Board committees have achieved a striking diversity in philosophy, degrees, and gender. Our committees are now composed of 30 percent women and 30 percent mental health professionals other than M.D.s or D.O.s. In both cases, the levels of representation in committees are significantly greater than the level of representation in APsaA membership.
A by-law amendment was developed and passed that allows provisional institutes full representation at BOPS of two voting Fellows and new training facilities representation of one voting Fellow. The by-laws codifying the changes in eligibility for admission to psychoanalytic education were approved, and the Committee on Preparedness and Progress has worked closely with institutes to accomplish a smooth transition to a new eligibility system that is more demanding for institutes.
Another extremely important development was the completion of the Revision of the Standards and Principles for Psychoanalytic Education, the first revision since 1984. We expect that this excellent statement of the essence and philosophy of psychoanalytic education will be widely used by educators, candidates, potential candidates, and other audiences.
These highlights of the past three years do not do justice to the full range of activities at BOPS, including the creative activity of committees such as the Committee on Research and Special Training, which has developed a host of innovative programs to integrate psychoanalytic thought with scholarship in a variety of disciplines, and the Committee on Institutes (COI), which has continued to develop new ways to collaborate with and support institutes in the site visit process.
Looking toward the future, the Ad Hoc Committee on Psychoanalytic Advanced Degrees been exploring the feasibility of developing a realistic path for our institutes to grant rigorous, research-based Ph.D. degrees, a prospect that has enormous implications for the quality of future psychoanalytic education. A major new venture, Project 2000, has been thoughtfully exploring the state of psychoanalytic education and is developing important programs that will help institutes in developing creative educational approaches. At the May meetings, Project 2000 will launch a new workshop, “Innovations in Psychoanalytic Teaching,” which will enable institutes to share successful cutting-edge approaches being developed throughout the nation.
In addition to the work within BOPS, there have been important changes in the relationship of BOPS and the American as a whole. Executive Council and BOPS relationships have improved substantially. It is my impression that throughout the American, there is an increasing appreciation that our educational programs require support from the entire organization. In this regard, there is a growing awareness of the importance of appropriate educational autonomy, which is reflected in the thinking and the provisional proposals of the current Ad Hoc Joint Committee on Education and Membership.
As we look to the future, we have much reason to be confident and optimistic. BOPS has become transformed into what it should and must be: an institution within which our institutes achieve a national consensus with regard to educational philosophy and policy, a think tank where new ideas are germinated, and an originator and facilitator of educational growth and programming within our institutes. Our institutes are strong, and there are important signs of resurgence of interest and morale in psychoanalytic education.
In my judgment, the major educational questions on a national level involve the uncertainty surrounding the future course and implications of external credentialing and certification. We do not know at this time if we will be able to achieve common ground with our Psychoanalytic Consortium partners and together establish an external credentialing body. If such an external credentialing body is established, I believe that it will then be essential to honor our commitment to maintain our internal COI accreditation. Maintaining our own accreditation is vital because our standards and philosophy will inevitably be quite different from the more generic standards of a jointly established external credentialing agency.
If we cannot establish a joint external accrediting body with the Psychoanalytic Consortium, other options will need to be evaluated. In such a situation, we would undoubtedly wrestle with the options of achieving greater separation of BOPS or COI from our Association for the purposes of appropriately accrediting our programs and perhaps other programs as well. Conundrums about achieving external credentialing (certification) of individuals will also confront us in the near future.
External accreditation and credentialing present opportunities and pitfalls. The future of the infrastructure of psychoanalysis — our educational programs — will rest upon our capacity to integrate our wishes to establish reasonable national standards with our mandate to maintain, implement, and represent the standards that we have come to believe are necessary for appropriate psychoanalytic education.
As I conclude six consecutive years as an officer of BOPS and a previous year of service as secretary-elect of BOPS, I feel especially fortunate to have been able to work with and learn from so many talented and dedicated colleagues. My two closest partners on this journey stand out. Serving as secretary of BOPS alongside chair Larry Chalfin and our current BOPS secretary, Robert Cummings, has afforded me the opportunity to collaborate with two singularly knowledgeable, dedicated, and ethical analytic educators whose commitment to the essence of analytic education has grounded and inspired me.
It has been a great privilege to have had the opportunity to serve psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic education in the capacity of chair of BOPS. I anticipate the pleasure of watching our new Board officers — Ralph Engle, chair, and Calvern Narcisi, secretary, two proven and exceptionally capable leaders — steer the course into the uncharted and challenging waters ahead.