It has been said that the American Psychoanalytic Association is a family—cohesive, quarrelsome, proud, and united by a powerful common history. I have had the pleasure of visiting many branches of our extended family. At every stop, I was welcomed and trusted—sometimes with sensitive material. I have spoken to our members, listened to colleagues, participated in society and institute councils, met boards of directors, participated in developing centers, helped in planning for state-level political action, and celebrated new psychoanalytic facilities. I have been in Chicago, Boston, Cleveland, Atlanta, and New York. Trips to Portland, Milwaukee, and St. Louis are already planned, and other travels are on the horizon.
These visits always remind me of the privilege of being a member of this family. They also renewed my conviction that we must open our doors to our psychoanalytic kin in North America, Latin America, and Europe. An extended family makes things richer and we need to see more of each other. With this in mind, plans are currently underway to make our North American, European, and Latin American colleagues as comfortable and welcome in our meetings as we have been in theirs. We also need to extend our family and will soon also be welcoming new members. The Membership Requirements and Review Committee, created as a result of last year's bylaw amendment after unanimous support from Council and BOPS, is up and running. It is working with the Joint Task Force on Expanded Membership Criteria to ease the way to membership for serious analysts.
As you are aware, our organization is in the midst of several groundbreaking planning and reorganizing initiatives. The overarching purpose of these initiatives is not only to expand and enhance the family but, since psychoanalysis, psychoanalysts, and the Association face challenges, to make the most effective use of our intellectual, human, and financial resources. Like any family with a rich and important history, we must ensure our legacy for our descendants—the psychoanalysts of the 21st century.
In my last column, I noted that one strategic initiative is called “governance,” an initiative charged to the Task Force on Reorganization. It is a strategic initiative because, while necessary changes have a little to do with New York law, they have a lot to do with organizational effectiveness and capacity. Our present governance made sense when we were smaller and internally preoccupied, with no competition or challenges—scarcely current circumstances. The Task Force on Reorganization has the mandate, parameters, responsibility, and a limited and tight time line to recommend facilitative changes across executive, educational, and board of directors' structures. In the conviction that governance is not well understood, I have encouraged the task force to put forward preliminary versions of its concepts for discussion purposes. I will also do my best to help encourage discussion.
In the interest of that dialogue, I believe we need facilitative changes in governance, for example, because the executive functions of the officers are structured for an age when officership was largely honorific rather than driven by political, legislative, and business demands. A new organizational structure is needed for critical educational functions because bicameralism does not work, and yet we need to nurture institutes and provide security to formulate educational policy and standards. Similarly, societies need nurturing, perhaps through combining the best of the Council of Society Presidents and the Executive Council. Our Executive Council has gotten us a long way but is not structured for modern challenges. Our current, difficult environment requires a smaller, streamlined board of directors, responsible directly to the membership and elected by it. We also need directors' seats for essential talents from finance, law, advertising, public relations, lobbying, and fund-raising because we require those talents. Finally, we need a board of directors that can raise money as well as oversee expenditures.
In the arena of strategic planning, we have a framework of endorsed priorities. As you are aware, the Priorities Survey distributed late last year was designed to bring to the surface members' collective perspective on our priorities for the future. A remarkable feature of the survey data was the degree to which respondents agreed about the highest-level priorities of the organization. Those priorities were reported in my last TAP column. Our work, however, has just begun. Priorities by themselves do not create a strategic plan. Having a sense of where we are just allows us to begin the process. As we begin, there are several principles to guide us.
The first principle is “constant communication.” Since strategic planning requires engaging, enabling, and empowering stakeholders, discussions about the survey results and the planning process must be broad, comprehensive, and ongoing. Partial results of the survey, including rank ordering of priorities in Part I have been on the Association's Web site since March. The reactions to the series of amplifying statements in Part II are now available on the Web site (). Please visit the site to see the exciting way our views are displayed, especially those from Part II. It is my hope that these results will spur further conversations about what is important to us.
As many of you have acknowledged, the survey process also made us aware that we have work to do on involvement. One important lesson is that many individuals we view as stakeholders do not view themselves the same way.
Jon Meyer, M.D., is president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
We need to try again and again to reach out through all available communication methods to members, affiliates, associates, active lay boards and friends, and staff so that everyone possible is involved. We welcome suggestions on methods of communication that will allow this process to become more comprehensive and inclusive.
A second principle might be called “hard choices.” A strategic plan means not only doing things better but also means doing some things either differently or not at all. Since intellectual, human, and financial resources are finite, decisions are required about when, where, and how they are invested. For example, consider our 93 committees. Some are essential to the missions of the Association and some seem more like interest groups, i.e., groups of colleagues brought together out of stimulating but not mission-essential common interests. I believe there are distinctions between mission-crucial committees and interest groups and that those distinctions should carry over into funding priorities, on the one hand, and, on the other, into increased flexibility in allowing such groups to evolve and devolve according to their members' interests and investments rather than with formal committee rules.
A strategic plan means not only doing things better but also means doing some things either differently or not at all.
A third principle might be called, as it were, “the principle of multiple funding options.” We need to broaden our thinking about the funding bases for programs beyond general revenues (i.e., our members' dues)—to dues-independent sources such as gifts, fund-raising, or endowments. To date, our efforts on this front have been rudimentary—a fact that can be attributed to both our slowness to understand the possibility of raising funds from other sources and the absence of a clear, articulated vision for potential donors. In one center visited in my travels, a member of the board whose career was in public relations was excited about the idea of advertising psychoanalysis on National Public Radio because, “It would show an educated audience that psychoanalysis is alive and well.” He offered to help in any way he could. We need more of that kind of commitment, optimism, and involvement.
To develop this kind of strategic option means establishing sound priorities, making decisions about what is appropriate for funding wholly or in part from general funds, and putting the machinery for fund-raising into place. For example, in line with our priority for advocacy, we need a war chest for political action; in line with our emphasis on advertising psychoanalysis and psychoanalysts, we need a fund for public information; in line with the emphasis on effectiveness and efficacy research, we need an endowed fund for research; in line with the priority on education, we need named lectures to bring leaders from basic science and complementary fields to our meetings; and in line with just plain common sense, we need to fund-raise for an income producing endowment.
None of this will be easy. There are vested ways of thinking and planning. We need to retool our thinking as much as our operations. In line with the hard work needed, by the time you read this column the Steering and the Coordinating Committees will have worked together in an extraordinary joint session on the outline of a strategic plan. I will report to you on that outline in Seattle. We will have an open forum on strategic planning for members in Seattle as we had in New York. Let's talk together. See you soon.