Our cup runneth over as activities, challenges, and opportunities for the Association abound. Internal governance, structure, and function have been prominent in our discussions. Outreach has blossomed in public information and public relations. There is much more we can and must do. Strengthening clinical practice is essential for us as individuals and vital in sustaining the life of the organization. We must enhance our inreach activities, increase meaningful membership involvement, reduce energy-draining internal conflicts, and enrich members' benefits.
Injecting more intellectual excitement and creativity into our curricula—attracting the best and the brightest—is imperative. Our political slate and priorities are urgent; patients' rights and privacy are the cornerstones of these efforts. Research activities and scientific programs provide the foundation of practice, and our investment in psychoanalytic science must be enlarged. The array of activities and opportunities for APsaA have never been so full and so challenging. Our agenda continues to grow and reflects the richness of our mission and the creativity of our thinking.
Opening our membership doors to serious people will invigorate us, and I believe our intellectual survival depends on it.
From this kaleidoscopic image, I pick one aspect for focus: membership. I see it as essential for our growth, our vigor, and our survival. I have addressed this previously, but it is time for action and not just acknowledgement.
We as an association must open our membership doors wider and welcome with eagerness analysts whose training has not been identical to ours and whose views, though compatible, need not be traced images of our perspectives. APsaA doorposts were set and membership criteria established at a time when diversity and debate were experienced as threats and not as opportunities for enrichment and growth.
Membership eligibility was based on learning what our faculty could teach. Graduating from one of our institutes and subsequent certification were requirements for entrance. Only believers needed to apply, since questioners and skeptics by definition required more analytic preparation.
I hope that this kind of self-protective and self-aggrandizing thinking has disappeared. It is impoverishing and destructive. Rich discourse, thoughtful debate, and a diversity of views stimulate and sharpen our thinking and nourish our clinical practice. Opening our membership doors to serious people will invigorate us, and I believe our intellectual survival depends on it.
A second and very practical reason to widen our doors to membership relates to the demographic realities of our Association. I have discussed this previously in TAP (36/4), so I will be brief.
I am convinced a crisis in membership is looming on the horizon. In the past fifteen years, our total membership numbers have plateaued, whereas the numbers of our senior/life members have almost doubled. The average age of our members, including our candidates, is nearly sixty-two! Unlike many other professional groups, we are holding our own in terms of membership numbers, but we are rapidly “graying.” The number of those entering our ranks is not growing, and the inevitable (a shrinking membership) is indeed very probable. The time to act is now, not when a crisis has occurred, not when we are in free fall, unable to reverse a trend.
We have to ask what supports fears of inclusion and what fuels the underlying resistances. On the surface there are concerns that our educational and membership standards will be eroded, the character of the Association will change (for the worse), and we will establish different classes of membership in APsaA. These concerns sound far too familiar. They recall Freud's secret society and exclusivity, the struggle in the U.S. to discredit nonmedical analysts in 1938 (when membership was limited to physicians), the barriers to immigrant analysts in the late 1930s and early 1940s, and our legal struggle with psychologists in 1985. Despite ourselves, we have always benefited and been enriched by such inclusions. APsaA would be a shadow of our current organization if we had succeeded in barring dissidents, sealing out European analysts and psychologists, and eliminating “lay analysts.”
In addition to our internal resistances to change, the Association by-laws make it very difficult to be more inclusive and to broaden our membership. Our bylaws, established many years ago, are meant to protect the organization. Membership is made available only to those who graduated from one of our Institutes or an IPA approved Institute. Our membership committees are geared to screen out, not to invite in. It is imperative that we change the way we do business. This will involve amending our by-laws and/or developing meaningful equivalency criteria. We face new challenges, and we cannot continue to use old protective thinking and methods.
APsaA is currently re-examining our internal governance, and some may argue that we should wait and alter membership criteria as part of the broader organizational changes. But the organizational overhaul process will take several years, and our membership crunch cannot wait. Our future will soon be behind us.
Initiatives and change always carry some risk If the Association and psychoanalysis are to have a meaningful place in the future, we will have to step forward. Our greatest danger is of being paralyzed by caution. We can hide “in the box” and maintain some false sense of security and superiority, but surely this will lead to stagnation and obsolescence. Widening the doors to membership and promoting and enriching discourse and diversity are small steps out of the box.
Newell Fischer, M.D., is president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.