Do you know what COPE is?“
Many APsaA members, buttonholed in the hall and asked this question, answer no.
Larry Inderbitzin, chair of the Board's Committee on Psychoanalytic Education (COPE), reacts to this information with frustration and a bit of bewilderment. “I have to find it amusing, or I'm almost tearful,” says Inderbitzin. “Going back to Mort Reisers first term [as chair] fifteen years ago, I have heard this.”
The mystery remains a mystery. Despite an open newsletter (read it on the APsaA Web page by clicking on “Committees and Task Forces” and then on “Committee on Psychoanalytic Education”) and the many ideas and products COPE members and study groups have brought back from their discussions to the membership at large and to local institutes, not many members know much about this important and creative committee's work.
TAP interviewed Inderbitzin in New York last December. He said that COPE's overall function is to study educational issues. It is quite insulated from organizational politics, functioning as a think tank for educational issues in psychoanalysis. The committee reviews the progress of ongoing study groups and workshops, of which there are fourteen at present. It also considers proposals for new groups. Including committee members and study group members, more than 100 psychoanalytic educators are involved in COPE's work.
The process of forming a new study group begins when any interested member, most often from outside COPE, makes a new study group proposal to the committee. COPE discusses the proposal and approves or rejects it. The chair of each study group is expected to be an experienced, knowledgeable psychoanalytic educator, but not necessarily a training analyst. If the study group is approved, the new chair works with COPE to form the group. Once a study group is formed and under way, new members are not usually admitted, but if there is strong interest in a particular topic (as was recently the case with supervision), other groups and workshops are spun off to accommodate the additional people. The study groups function without a budget.
Inderbitzin described COPE's work as exciting, innovative, creative, and unpredictable. Study groups are given no time limit, although they are encouraged to wrap up their work within an appropriate time frame rather than continuing ad infinitum. No specific product is required of a study group; perhaps because of this freedom, many spontaneous products have come out of the groups' deliberations. Inderbitzin says the most important products of the groups are the ideas and the new directions in thinking that the members take back to their local institutes. To facilitate wide germination of these new ways of thinking, no study group includes two members from the same institute.
Photo by Mervin Stewart
Here are some of the “products” emerging from the COPE study groups in recent years:
The Study Group on Boundary Violations, co-chaired by Glen Gabbard and Morris Peltz, recently published an article in JAPA and has another one in progress.
The Study Group on Women originated the Traveling Woman Psychoanalytic Scholar Program (now renamed the National Woman Psychoanalytic Scholar Program).
The APsaA's current efforts to establish effective, ethical, and humane approaches to the impaired faculty analyst started in Jerry Winer's COPE study group on the topic.
The Psychoanalytic Quarterly published a special issue on psychoanalytic process, including papers emerging from the work of Sander Abend's study group on that subject.
A bibliography on female sexuality and women's psychology was compiled by the Study Group on Women under the chairmanship of Helen Meyers and Barbara Deutsch.
The Study Group on Supervision of the Pregnant Analyst, chaired by Marianne Goldberger, has submitted a paper to the Psychoanalytic Quarterly.
Inderbitzen described one example when an intellectual connection was the most important product of a group. The Study Group on Pedagogy, chaired by Todd Davison, became interested in the work of an educational theorist named Parker Palmer, who is affiliated with the Fetzer Institute. The basic principle of Palmer's work is that regardless of the subject matter, a successful teacher essentially teaches himself — the way he views the subject and the world. The members of COPE became so interested in these ideas after Davison's presentation that they decided to read Palmer's book, The Courage to Teach, as a committee and discuss it at the next COPE meeting.
So why does the work of COPE remain a mystery? Possibly because it is, intentionally, unstructured, with no scheduled reports, no issues to vote on. It engages the participants in a process far more fluid and organic than almost any other aspect of our organizational work; we're not used to registering, recording, and communicating about such differently formed efforts.
Inderbitzin invites all APsaA members to read the committee's newsletter on the Association's Web site and to call or e-mail him () or any other member of COPE if they want more information. TAP will publish occasional bulletins from COPE about the unpredictable products and ideas coming out of our think tank.