Under our current bylaws, the certification requirement for appointment as training analyst and supervising analyst cannot be waived for any reason. The “local option” amendment will allow institutes, if they wish, to appoint as TAs and SAs colleagues who meet all other requirements, local and national, but have not been certified.
The potential benefits are important.
For our institutes, added flexibility will permit acceptance of some well qualified candidates in treatment with uncertified colleagues. Throughout the country, there are respected colleagues who meet all other criteria for TA/SA appointment but have not been certified. Their analysands who want training often go to non-APsaA institutes rather than switch analysts. This has been an issue at institutes across the country. Even institutes with no difficulty recruiting classes could benefit from a bigger applicant pool.
For our national organization, it will help recruitment of individuals and facilitate affiliation of IPA institutes.
For our local institutes, it will increase available resources. (Here space limitation requires allusive brevity.) We encourage graduates of IPA institutes in the U.S. (institutes not part of APsaA) to join our Association. None of these IPA institutes has certification as a requirement for appointment as a TA or SA. So, even colleagues who have been TAs for decades, who themselves are members of APsaA, who have analyzed those we seek to recruit as members, cannot serve on BOPS. Nor can they enrich our institutes by becoming supervisors or analysts of our candidates unless they go through our certification process. Our local institutes cannot take advantage of what these colleagues, our fellow members, have to offer.
Within the wider analytic communities—local, national, and international—disagreements can be generative or destructive, or both. It is revealing to contrast our experience of theoretical disagreements with our disagreement about certification. Theoretical orientation is, wisely, not prescribed by our bylaws.
Jonathan House, M.D., is a training and supervising analyst at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research where he serves on the Curriculum and the Progression Committees and is co-chair of the Freud course.
The curriculum of each institute inevitably has a theoretical orientation, which tends to change over time as a result of generative differences. Differences about certification have been, on balance, more destructive than generative. The amendment does not eliminate certification but, by making it optional, will diminish the destructive effects of our differences. Locally, choice about certification will be analogous to choice about theoretical emphases in the curriculum. Ideally, local option will transform certification from a source of destructive divisiveness into a source of generative difference. A more modest but more certain hope is that it will diminish national bitterness and allow some institutes to open things up a little bit.
Local option does three things:
Prohibits BOPS from including certification as a prerequisite for TA/SA appointment in every institute, while permitting each institute to maintain that standard if it wishes.
Permits institutes to elect non-certified TA/SAs to serve as fellows of BOPS.
Permits the chair of BOPS to appoint non-certified members to BOPS committees.
That's it! Three modest, circumscribed changes.
To prevent possible misunderstanding, here is what the amendment, for better or worse, does not do:
Does not eliminate the TA system.
Does not change the certification process.
Does not eliminate BOPS's authority to set national standards for appointment as a TA.
Does not alter any other of the seven criteria used by BOPS to evaluate applicants proposed for TA/SA status.
Does not eliminate an individual institute's power to require certification as a prerequisite for TA/SA appointment.
Does not eliminate the requirement that every candidate be analyzed by a TA.
I hope you vote “yes” on local option.