Ohio, that humble state most New Yorkers vaguely position out there somewhere with the other vowel states, not only produced six American presidents but also gave our American both its new president and its new chair of BOPS.
At the annual meeting in May in Chicago, Richard Fox (now of Los Angeles) became the sixty-first president of our Association (the first president was James J. Putnam of Boston, elected in 1911), and Ralph Engle (now of Boston) became the twentieth person to chair the Board on Professional Standards, which was established in 1947. This is the first time in six years that the American has a new president and a new chair of BOPS simultaneously.
Newell Fischer of Philadelphia succeeded Fox as president-elect, continuing on the Executive Committee, where he has served as treasurer since 1995. Allan Compton of Los Angeles took over the office of treasurer from Fischer, thereby joining the Executive Committee.
Presidents of the American are elected two and a half years before their terms begin. Fox was elected in 1997 and has been serving as president-elect since May of 1998. He and immediate past president Bob Pyles made themselves a team, with Pyles the “outside man” and Fox the “inside man.”
Fox's organizational skills are relatively uncommon in our psychoanalytic culture. His accomplishments have already led to profound changes in the way our organization is structured and how it functions. Most significant is his new system for organizing the burgeoning crowd of seventy-plus Council committees into six divisions that can be meaningfully managed and whose work can be adequately tracked and appreciated. He is also planning to create an umbrella structure for our growing set of associates. This associates' umbrella will encompass the already existing psychotherapy and student associate groups, as well as the research and education associates groups Fox anticipates establishing.
His priorities include supporting clinical practice; public and media outreach; prioritizing and streamlining the organization's efforts; emphasizing and elevating the work of societies; giving all members, including candidates, the full vote in the organization's affairs; promoting research and child analysis; and using psychoanalysis and the American as a source of moral authority that can represent the importance of the unique individual in our culture.
Photo by Mervin Stewart
Fox is a member of the Los Angeles Psychoanalytic Institute and Society (LAPSI), where he served as Director of Education, BOPS Fellow, and LAPSI Councilor to APsaA. He is one of the founders of the Coalition for Patient Rights.
Born, raised, and educated in Cincinnati, Ohio, Fox did his psychiatry training in the mid-1960s, in Maury Levine's department at the University of Cincinnati, an exciting place where everyone in the department was an analyst. Levine pioneered community psychoanalysis: Residents worked in courts and jails as well as with individual patients. “Maury knew that community support was important, that government and university funding weren't enough”, says Fox. Asked where he got his organizational skills and interests, Fox again credited Levine, as well as his work at Boston State hospital during the heyday of the community psychiatry movement and his experience running an adolescent unit at U.C. Irvine.
Fox has written scientific papers on various topics including the narcissistic trauma suffered by Vietnam veterans, establishing therapeutic relationships with skid row drunks, and countertransference love.
He is married to child psychiatrist Ruth Fox. In what little leisure time we have left him, he enjoys capturing some moments of peace on the beautiful beach near his home in California, and follows the news, particularly politics, with interest.
Ralph Engle, the new chair of the Board on Professional Standards, has already moved the organization in a more democratic direction by naming Calvem Narcisi as his choice for BOPS secretary before the election occurred. (Traditionally, the BOPS secretary has been appointed by the BOPS chair after the chair is elected.) By announcing his choice beforehand, Engle allowed BOPS Fellows the opportunity to know the entire leadership slate they were voting for. The continuation of this practice is one of the recommendations of the new governance plan. Engle and Narcisi anticipate working as a team throughout their term as BOPS leaders.
Photo by Mervin Stewart
Engle sees the Board and Council as having complementary missions: the Board's being training, education. and the maintenance of standards, and the Council's being membership functions. “There is a real difference in the mandates,” he commented. “If you don't bring them together there's a fight between these functions. A lot of energy has gone into fighting between Board and Council.” Engle noted that the May meeting was the first time the president of the Association came to a meeting of the Committee on Institutes. He hopes to see a reduction in divisions between Board and Council, so that people no longer see themselves as “Board people” or “Council people.”
Engle and Narcisi want to make the operations of the Board more transparent. “We would really like to let people know what we're doing and why we're doing it so that educational missions are joined in by everybody,” said Engle. They are pleased that the minutes of the Board will now be posted to the membership.
The two new BOPS leaders come with different skills and interests. Narcisi is a child analyst with extensive experience on the Committee on Preparedness and Progress and with the knotty problems of external credentialing and the Consortium. As a member of the Committee on Institutes, Engle has worked with the Minnesota New Training Facility and is enthusiastic about the new model for direct sponsorship of new training facilities. He recently chaired the APsaA's Joint Committee on Ethics and has shepherded in the new ethics revisions, as well as a campaign to promote ethics teaching in local institutes.
Engle was born in Freemont, Ohio, as was President Rutherford B. Hayes. Freemont is a small town close to Lake Erie, just seven miles from Clyde, Ohio, the real “Winesburg, Ohio” of Sherwood Anderson's famous book of character sketches. Small-town Ohio life had “too many pickups and not enough books” for Engle, who is glad to be living in the Boston area which has plenty of books and few pickup trucks. Besides working for the American and local psychoanalytic efforts, he enjoys exotic gardening (orchids and bonsai) and tennis, which he played in college and taught while in medical school.
Narcisi is director of the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis, past president of the society there, and past director of child analysis. He has been a Fellow of the Board for five years. Narcisi has been co-chair of the Joint Committee on External Credentialing since 1997, and one of the Association's representatives to the Consortium. In Colorado, he enjoys skiing, golf, and tennis.