Four members of the American Psychoanalytic Association received Distinguished Service Awards at the May meetings in Philadelphia. Three were honored for their contributions to the collection and circulation of information. Alice Brand Bartlett has made many distinguished contributions to the development of institute and study group libraries and to making psychoanalytic literature widely available. Sanford Gifford has for more than two decades organized oral history workshops at the scientific meetings, creating records of the psychoanalytic past. Nadine A. Levinson was recognized for her work as a board member of PEP (Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing), then as its president. The APsaA's second and current parliamentarian, George Roark, was honored for serving with finesse and style to keep BOPS, the Executive Council, and the meeting of members “fair, civil, and according to the rules.”
The second Psychoanalytic Community Service Clinic of the Year Award was given to the clinical services at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.
Bartlett began her career as a psychiatric librarian. The first member of her family to attend college, she had hoped to become a clinical psychologist. But for practical reasons, she earned a Master of Library Science degree and went to work at the Menninger Clinic. She worked energetically and imaginatively for twenty-six years as the Menninger librarian. The clinic provided her opportunities for training as a therapist and an analyst; she completed analytic training as a CORST candidate.
Menninger's was a comprehensive psychiatric library. But “a library isn't a bunch of books,” says Bartlett. “It's a staff of people” who know how to help. Bartlett has made many contributions to the APsaA. The founding (and only) chair of the Library Committee, she was able to help very small libraries with very few resources. She is most proud of her contributions to Jourlit on the APsaA Web site. An article search database, it was supplemented by a document delivery service provided by the Menninger library. Psychoanalytic literature has by this means been made available to the wider community.
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Bartlett is a member of the PEP board; she brings to that project an extensive knowledge of how university and special libraries function.
Gifford was recognized for his contribution to the creation and preservation of “records of events and personalities in local, national, and international psychoanalysis [that] will serve as primary sources for future historians of psychoanalysis,” to quote his citation. He has been the keystone of the oral history workshops at the scientific meetings for more than two decades. Workshop topics have included the history of women in psychoanalysis, the history of psychoanalysis in New York, and the arrival of psychoanalysis on the West Coast.
Gifford traces the formation of the oral history workshops to the efforts of Arcangelo R. D'Amore and Sandor Lorand. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Lorand organized lunches at national meetings for “old-timers.” Lorand urged his colleagues to “get a tape recorder and go back to their institutes and record their histories,” Gifford recalls. But “it wasn't that easy. You have to get a dialogue going and … have someone who is interested in what the old-timer has to say.” So in December 1973 D'Amore began the tradition and institution of semi-annual workshops, which he chaired until the late 1970s. Gifford succeeded him as chair of the Committee on History and Archives.
Gifford's work in psychoanalytic history began in 1973 with a contribution to a three-day symposium of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, the proceedings of which were published as Psychoanalysis, Psychotherapy, and the New England Medical Scene, 1894–1944. He has written biographical sketches of Felix and Helene Deutsch and Grete Bibring, among others.
The oral history archives are being donated to the Institute for the History of Psychiatry at Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where they will eventually be open to the public.
Levinson was selected as a PEP board member because of her business expertise and computer knowledge. Her skill, she says, is in “taking a project that might seem grandiose and making it a successful business venture.”
Levinson came from a family that is very business-oriented, but she wanted to become a doctor. From adolescence she had been interested in becoming a psychoanalyst. But she took a detour, first becoming a dentist, where she saw a lot of “highly anxious patients.” As a faculty member of the University of California–Irving medical school and co-director of the facial pain clinic, she participated in the residency training program of the department of psychiatry. Thus she “was a dentist who trained as a psychiatrist.” She became a CORST candidate in the early 1980s.
Michael S. Slevin is a Ph.D. candidate in British literature at George Washington University and a second-year academic associate at the Baltimore-Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is a member of the TAP editorial board.
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Discovering that the “acorn didn't fall far from the tree,” Levinson brings entrepreneurial skills and perspective to the APsaA. PEP's next step, now available, is Web access delivery through annual subscriptions purchased by major universities worldwide. Levinson intends to open psychoanalytic literature to undergraduate students who are interested in “Freud, sex, rage” and who use computers for their research. It is a way, she said, “to keep psychoanalysis for the future.”
Roark prepared for his job as parliamentarian by working to update the Baltimore-Washington Institute and Society's by-laws. There were “very sharp differences of opinion about how people get nominated,” recalls Roark, and he hoped to give more of a voice to non-training analyst members. He also worked to give a role to former presidents, as people with experience.
In recognition of his efforts he was asked to serve as parliamentarian of the Baltimore-Washington Society. He took to it; “It naturally fitted my disposition as [one] interested in detail, language, and correct usage of language.”
As Roark told TAP last fall, the “Zeitgeist embracing the utility of a parliamentarian is that of a participatory democracy in which three principles reign: one person, one vote; debate on all issues open to all members who wish to speak; and a majority of voters decide the issue.”
He has served four APsaA presidents as parliamentarian (and served as BOPS parliamentarian all that time). Newell Fisher has asked him to serve again, and he has agreed. He succeeded Oscar Legault, the only other parliamentarian of APsaA. Asked how APsaA had managed without a parliamentarian until the late 1980s, Roark said, “probably by the seat of their pants.” He said that it was an era of government by highly regarded leaders who made their way by their charisma and skill as clinicians. Today, he said, members are “more sophisticated, more ready to go to the mat about being overruled by a dominant or charismatic chair.”
Roark will retire at the end of Fisher's term of office. He has been asked to seek a replacement, someone who will acquire or has the knowledge of parliamentary procedure. The parliamentarian, he said, has to be fairly apolitical publicly.
In 1994, Chicago's Institute for Psychoanalysis decided to “throw out a wider net” for cases for candidates, medical director Barry Childress said in an interview. In its submission to the APsaA for the award, the institute wrote, “The candidate clinic, by design and inertia, had not been service oriented and had a mixed reception by the community.” Today, approximately 16,000 clinical hours are recorded annually by a reorganized Barr-Harris Children's Grief Center and Candidate's Clinic and a new Adult Psychotherapy Clinic.
In that turnaround, a medical director, an administrative director, and clinical social workers were hired. The low-fee adult psychotherapy clinic was opened in 1997 and is currently staffed by eight therapists. These therapists were fully trained graduates of child and adult therapy programs who, says Childress, wanted to contribute and wanted the camaraderie. As part of the clinics' synergy, the staffers participated in a weekly clinical seminar, offered by a graduate of the institute's psychoanalytic training program, Ruth Yanagi. This approach made it possible to treat within the psychoanalytic community patients who were interested in psychoanalysis but unable to afford it or could not commit the time. Referrals for the clinic come entirely by word of mouth. There is currently a waiting list for low-fee analysis.
The Barr-Harris program to assist grieving children has expanded, with grant support, into four hospitals. “A particular focus of the Center,” the institute's award submission states,“ has been collaboration with the urban school systems where loss of a parent through violent death or abandonment has been a prevalent problem.”
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