Two vital and historic matters highlighted Council's agenda at the spring meeting in New Orleans: changes to the by-laws proposed by the Joint Task Force on Education and Membership, and approval of a document on psychoanalytic standards drafted by the Psychoanalytic Consortium.
You may recall that the recommendations of the task force were approved by Council in December 2000:
All members, including affiliate members, able to vote on all matters.
All members eligible to run for office.
Limited budget autonomy for the Board.
There was wide support in Council for all these recommendations. The only suspense was resolved one day before Council met in New Orleans, when the Board voted by a large majority to accept all the recommendations of the task force.
The next step was for the membership to vote on these by-laws changes. (The by-laws amendments passed by a wide margin in a mail ballot over the summer.)
Although there were no long, self-congratulatory speeches, most of those present knew that we had just taken a large step toward making the APsaA an effective participatory democracy.
The standards document to be used by the Consortium in developing an independent accreditation agency was brought up for final approval at the New Orleans meeting. This document was a compromise, worked out over the last six years with our partners in the Consortium. Starting with Allan Rosenblatts External Credentialing Committee, our representatives hung in for the lengthy negotiations that resulted in this document.
Leon Hoffman and Cal Narcisi, along with each of the past three APsaA presidents and Board chairs, deserve special thanks for their negotiating skill and patience. While the final document was a compromise, it was reasonably close to our own standards. It represents a “floor” of standards for training; we and other organizations are free to maintain higher standards.
The standards document was widely distributed to all councilors, Board fellows, societies, and institutes last spring. Along with the Board, Council approved this document in New Orleans, clearing the way to begin planning for a new institute accreditation process independent of any current analytic organization.
Three important things follow from this action. First, the Consortium will continue. If we had rejected the document, after all the other Consortium members had already approved it, we would effectively have seceded from the Consortium. Second, planning for the new accreditation agency can now move forward. Third, this document can now be used to educate any state legislature planning to license psychoanalysts. It will allow us to stand up to anyone who promotes unacceptably low standards for defining training for a psychoanalyst. Various state legislatures have been lobbied by groups pushing for licensing of psychoanalysts using clearly inadequate training criteria. Using the new Consortium agreement, we can tell legislators, “Here is what analysts agree is good training.”
At the request of Dick Fox, the Committee on Council, which I now chair, has been examining the Australian ballot (the method we now use) and other methods of counting votes. We have done this in conjunction with the Election Oversight Committee, made up of the current councilors-at-large.
Based on our study, I proposed at this meeting that a new method, the democratic plurality method, be used for elections in which more than one winner will be chosen. This will apply to many of Council's elections, where Council votes to nominate two or more peoplé to run for national office. It also will apply to national elections for councilor-at-large, of which we elect two every year.
With the new method, when electing candidates for two offices, each voter may vote for one or two candidates. Unlike the Australian ballot, these votes will not be numbered or ordered. The two candidates with the most votes will be elected. When Council votes on the six-member JAPA board, each voter may vote for up to six candidates. This is a fairer system, and it should result in fewer invalidated ballots. The proposal passed by a large margin.
There was some discussion concerning the current structure of the association. The difficulty of finding experienced people to run for office suggests that the leadership jobs may have become too burdensome for a volunteer organization. It was agreed that in the coming months we need to study various possibilities for change. Without changing the volunteer nature of our organization, it may be possible to redefine the leadership positions in a way that makes them feasible for those with substantial practice and teaching loads.
Glen Gabbard, chair of the Task Force on Independent Societies, presented a plan to give the members of analytic societies in the process of joining the APsaA — there soon may be some of these — a tentative (but non-voting) membership status, pending the full acceptance of their society. After a number of councilors questioned whether this well-intentioned plan might actually alienate the people we wish to bring closer, it was tabled for further study.
Bob Pyles, chair of the Committee on Government Relations and Insurance, announced a major victory for privacy. After we and the ACLU threatened to sue the federal government to force implementation of the Department of Health and Human Services' privacy rules developed under President Clinton (as required by the 1996 Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act), President Bush and the Secretary of HHS, Tommy Thompson, decided to implement those privacy rules [see TAP 35/1 and 35/2].
These rules incorporate the reasoning of the Jaffee-Redmond decision, giving special protection to a new class of data, “psychotherapy notes.” In order to receive this protection, we must now begin to keep “psychotherapy notes” in a place physically separate from the rest of the medical record. The rules, as you would imagine, are fairly complex. They hold the promise of much better protection for the confidentiality of our work.
As usual, I have selected only a few of the topics that came up in Council in New Orleans. Completing many years of work on voting rights for members—remember the “de-linkage wars”? — and external credentialing made this meeting seem like the end of an era. It is hard to predict what will come up next in Council. Privacy and government's role in protecting (or attacking) it is likely to continue to demand our attention. Perhaps internal reorganization will take center stage. Stay tuned.