Changing membership policy requires careful reflection and the ability to imagine the future. If we do not take this care, small changes in membership bylaws may result in profound, but unintended, organizational change. The previously proposed bylaw that would make those in the category of Academic Associate, who do not have a vote, into Academic Members, who do vote, illustrates this point. Giving non-analysts a vote changes our organization from a professional organization to an interest group. The issue is not the merits of this change, but whether members will have considered the consequences of becoming an interest group instead of a professional organization when deciding this question.
Potentially unintended consequences also accompany the recent bylaw making all IPA members automatically eligible for membership in APsaA. This policy ratified a change in BOPS procedure based on 10 years' experience with members of the independent IPA societies. BOPS was comfortable with these applicants' level of knowledge and practice and with the congruence of the educational requirements of these institutes and those of APsaA institutes. However, the bylaw, in effect, created two accrediting bodies, each with the authority to set training requirements for membership. This, as Paul Mosher has pointed out, is a “multiple accreditation” membership structure and could be expanded. The bylaw was not intended to create this new structure and the membership did not vote for the bylaw with this choice made explicit.
Current tensions in APsaA render rational reflection on membership difficult. Opposing stances toward membership mirror general tensions. Those who would have the organization primarily represent psychoanalysis nationally favor an open membership policy not tied to our training requirements; those more closely associated with our educational mission are concerned about protecting member institutes with their stringent training and seek to maintain the link between membership and training requirements. Of course, the picture is always more complex. Many members also value the synergy created by a national membership organization of the most highly trained psychoanalysts that also has a hand in determining educational requirements and standards and are reluctant to interfere with that synergy. Others fear that the exclusivity of our Association has already had a deleterious effect on candidate recruitment and will have an even greater such effect in the future. They want to open up membership as much as possible.
I am fortunate to hold organizational appointments that afford me varied perspectives on membership issues. My responsibilities to BOPS give me an educational perspective, while my service on Council leads me to value the synergy that comes from the intertwining of the different functions of the organization. The Task Force on Extended Membership Criteria (TFEMC), ably chaired by Harriet Wolfe, educated me to the technicalities of membership issues. Most important of all, I am acutely aware that had many members not fought for change, I would not be writing this article because I would not be a member. I am aware of the rigidities and prejudices that were part of that exclusion and that still, to some extent, remain, but I also value the organization for what it has meant to high quality psychoanalytic practice and thinking and do not wish it to become unrecognizable.
So is there anything we can do to expand membership in the near future without unwittingly changing our fundamental structure? I think so. There are a significant number of serious analysts who have trained at institutes that require less than APsaA or IPA institutes require in the way of training, but who either during or after their formal training have met the requirements we ask our candidates to meet. We can and should work out an equivalency procedure for these individuals.
True, the numbers may not be staggering, though I suspect they are higher than many think, but this change could well have a greater influence than the number of people it initially affects. None of the reasons given for the reluctance of free-standing institutes, with their long histories, to join through the present Committee on the Accreditation of Free-Standing Institutes (CAFI) procedures has captured the complex mixture of collective identity, fierce independence, ignorance of what APsaA can offer, and generationally transmitted transference attitudes that I know from personal experience prevail in these cultures. If, however, we can gradually expand membership as I have indicated, in a fair and nonjudgmental way without giving up the essence of what we are as an organization, and truly integrate these members into all facets of our organization, these attitudes are quite likely to change.
It should be noted that this proposal preserves the link between membership and training requirements. Indeed, proposals that involve greater change should await a more comprehensive reorganization plan. As I have tried to show, it is otherwise too easy for change in membership policy to create a new organizational structure without members being aware that they are creating something they had not contemplated.
Changes in membership policy are both necessary and inevitable. The important and difficult task for all of us is to imagine the organization as we would have it, test that imaginative vision against a practical knowledge of political realities and of human nature, define a realistically envisioned possible organization, and then make sure that, where membership policy is concerned, in implementing that vision we minimize unintended consequences.
Gail S. Reed, Ph.D., is a training and supervisory analyst and faculty, the Berkshire Psychoanalytic Institute (NTF) and the Training Institute of the New York Freudian Society; chair of the BOPS Membership Advisory Committee, a member of the Council Membership Requirements and Review Committee, and co-chair of the Joint Task Force on Extended Membership Criteria.