The discussion of the certification process that has taken so much time and energy on our electronic town hall, the Open Line e-mail list, confirms my own experience with the process.
The process began when I attended a meeting for prospective candidates for certification. Members of the Committee on Certification assured us that the process would be collegial; they wanted to use it to get to know us and our way of working as analysts. Candidates would not be asked to present a particular kind of analytic work. As one member put it, “Just show that you know the alphabet.”
This could mean that if you write lyric poetry, that is all right, but you have to use the alphabet correctly. As it turned out, however, it meant that to meet the standard is to eliminate anything that goes beyond the consensual and established. If anyone on the committee finds anything to disagree with, the applicant risks failure. No one on the committee was willing to state what was consensual and established.
The experience in this process is an examination in which the examiners are not willing to state their questions before the answers are handed in. They expect the aspirants to guess or to find out through other sources what they want. After the aspirant writes the cases, the examiners can choose any part or aspect and either help the aspirant to demonstrate what they want to hear or demonstrate that the aspirant does not know what he or she is supposed to know.
Any uncertainty, any hint of the scientific attitude of humility before the data, any attempt to create new meaning or seek underlying meaning that has not been part of the examiner's experience is defined as an aspirant's deficiency. This process demeans psychoanalysis and the organization that purports to have the advancement of psychoanalysis as its goal. It is not only that the certification process hurts the aspirant (that is bad enough); it is that this process demeans analysis. That is why I and so many others object to it.
Certification began as a way to exclude those who did not meet the high standards of the APsaA. Since the committee asserts that this is no longer the goal, various advocates for certification have claimed one or more of the following as current goals:
Assuring excellence in practice. But certification cannot do that, since it only shows what the aspirant writes, not what he or she does in the consulting room.
Promoting proficiency in writing. But the committee is not chosen for writing accomplishment as indicated by publication in peer-reviewed journals. Nor does it feature editors or former editors or members of the editorial boards of such journals.
Maintaining the reputation of our organization. But certification gives rise to allegations unfavorable to the APsaA by some who have been trained in its institutes, have graduated from them, and in some instances are already teaching in them. These allegations of unfair, arbitrary, and demeaning practices lower the reputation of the Association even as members repeat privately their belief that the system is not fixable. In addition, we risk besmirching our reputation with other organizations by using a test that does not meet the American Psychological Association standards for reliability or validity and basing training analyst status, a professional credential, on this test. The argument has been made, with some justification, that this is a restraint of trade, since none of our members can practice as a training analyst without this credential.
Maintaining high standards. But the process requires aspirants to limit their case writeups to the “alphabet” and not to attempt anything more sophisticated. Echoing the opinions of the establishment is not a high standard for anything but synchronized swimming.
Certification costs the APsaA and its members a great deal of time, some money, and a great deal of dissension. I believe that it has outlived its original purpose and has none now. It should be abolished.
Arlene Kramer Richards, Ed.D., is a training and supervising analyst of the New York Freudian Society, a Fellow of the Institute for Psychoanalytic Training and Research, and a certified member of the American Psychoanalytic Association. She has written several books on female psychology.