APsaA is your organization. The Task Force on Reorganization worked mightily to create a proposal for a new APsaA governance. Every APsaA member has received a copy of the report and it is available online. We hope that you will help ensure that APsaA works well and represents you well.
The task force tried to design a governance that is both effective and representative of APsaA's members. We hope members will read our report thoughtfully and come to their own conclusions based on its merits.
We are not trying to “re-invent the Association,” to determine its future course, or to empower a particular point of view. Our proposal attempts to create an arrangement in which, if the membership so chooses, changes of many kinds are possible. We want APsaA's energies to focus on its tasks, not its governance.
The task force report addresses some of APsaA's most controversial issues. If adopted, it would create a small, representative Board of Directors with great authority. It would dramatically alter the roles of the Council, BOPS, and the officers. (The successor of the Council would be named the Council of Societies and BOPS's successor, the Council of Institutes.)
The Board of Directors will include major representation elected directly by the members, several members elected by the Council of Societies, the officers of APsaA, a representative of the Council of Institutes and (optionally) three outside directors with special expertise needed by APsaA. It would include several directors, elected by the membership, whose jobs would be to oversee APsaA's major divisions. The Council of Societies, in addition to electing several members of the board, would coordinate societies' interests and receive reports from APsaA's committees. The Council of Institutes will oversee psychoanalytic education in APsaA institutes but play little direct role in APsaA's governance (i.e., it will contribute a single member to APsaA's Board of Directors). The Council of Institutes, as a subsidiary corporation, will have significant autonomy from APsaA, while at the same time it will include strong representation from APsaA in the form of APsaA representation on its board, eligibility of all APsaA members to serve on its board of directors and committees, and the capacity of APsaA's Board to discharge the board of the Council of Institutes.
There is no reorganization that would meet the wishes of all the strong voices in our organization. This diversity of opinion was represented on the task force. Even after struggling with the issues for a longtime, significant differences of opinion remained among task force members. Our report reflects the majority opinion of the best way to proceed in the best interest of APsaA and psychoanalysis. It also describes concerns about and disadvantages of our ultimate recommendations as well as considerations of alternative proposals. Its goal is to lay out our thinking so that members can come to an informed decision when it comes time to vote.
The task force was charged to design a governance for APsaA. Governance specifies how to do the organization's work, not what that work is. Governance should help get things done and reflect the members' wishes. It should not dictate what is to be done. APsaA is a changing organization with changing goals and projects. Governance should facilitate and certainly not impede these changes. At the same time, governance must address the particular tasks APsaA is likely to encounter.
Practically, this means that it should be clear who makes what decisions and decision making should be appropriate for the situation. There should be checks and balances to ensure that decisions are made fairly and well, but these should not make it unduly difficult to take action. For example, we recognized that APsaA will likely want to change its membership criteria from time to time, but we also recognized that such changes could change the entire character of the Association, so we designed a procedure in which the criteria could be changed by a majority vote of the Board of Directors and the membership because major changes need to be undertaken with caution.
Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, M.D., chairs the APsaA Task Force on Reorganization. He is a training and supervising analyst at the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis.
We are not trying to “re-invent the Association,” to determine its future course, or to empower a particular point of view. Our proposal attempts to create an arrangement in which, if the membership so chooses, changes of many kinds are possible. We want APsaA's energies to focus on its tasks, not its governance.
Our current bylaws include great detail about a variety of matters not ordinarily included in bylaws and apparently designed to set APsaA policies. We believe bylaws should be simple, clear statements about how to run the Association, not means to cement policies in place or to address every possible contingency that might face the Association. Our goal is to write bylaws that everyone can understand and use to accomplish APsaA's missions.
We very much hope that each member will read and think about our proposals. Before the proposals are transformed into bylaws language, we may refine them based on further feedback of members. After the January Meeting our proposals will be drafted by our attorneys into specific bylaws proposals for the members' vote.
We hope that discussion will focus on the merits of the proposals. We believe that APsaA will be best served if members calmly step back and consider the proposals. We hope they will ask not only whether the proposals satisfy their particular concerns, but rather whether they are “good enough” so that APsaA will work more fairly and effectively if they are adopted.