Myrna Weiss and Cal Narcisi were elected co-chair and co-secretary of the Board on Professional Standards at the June meetings in Washington, D.C. They will take office in June 2007. They defeated Norman (Drew) Clemens, who ran for chair on a slate with Lee Ascherman, who ran for secretary. The vote was 30 to 23. This is the first time two candidates ran proposing to share the offices of chair and secretary.
Weiss is a training and supervising analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of New England, East. She graduated from the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute. She was elected a fellow to BOPS by her institute, PINE, in 1985, and has served many terms. She has served as a member and chair of numerous BOPS committees, study groups, and workshop.
We will do our best to strongly support our institutes and the best possible psychoanalytic education of our students and candidates.
In 1998, she was appointed to the Committee on Institutes, and in 2001 was asked to serve as chair. She will complete her six-year term in 2007. She has served in a variety of capacities at PINE, and has taught at the institute for many decades. She also served as a delegate to the Executive Council, from 1991-1995.
Narcisi is a training and supervising analyst in adult, child, and adolescent analysis at the Denver Institute for Psychoanalysis. He is a past director of his institute and a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Within APsaA, he has served as co-chair of external credentialing, secretary of the Board on Professional Standards, acting chair of BOPS, a member of the Task Force on Education and Membership, co-chair of the Ad Hoc Committee to Study Certification, a member of the Task Force on Reorganization, and is currently chair of the Certification Advisory Research and Development Committee.
In response to a request from the editor of TAP for a statement of their hopes and plans for BOPS under their leadership, they submitted the following excerpt from the statement they sent to BOPS prior to the election:
These are very challenging times for our organization and especially for BOPS. We are saddened by the fact that our Association is such a significantly divided organization. We see a far too frequent loss of respect and professionalism in our dealings with each other. There are three different reorganization plans before us. All contain different compromises, as well as different strengths and weaknesses. They all represent attempts to hold together our membership interests and our educational, standard setting, accrediting, and certifying functions. We support this laudable goal, which may or may not be possible to achieve.
Given the present circumstances, we believe that for BOPS to function with integrity, it must have relative autonomy from membership pressures. BOPS needs to redefine and support national standards that are determined by our current best understanding about how to optimally educate candidates. Standards that are driven by the aims of a membership organization differ significantly from standards that are educationally driven. We endorse the fact that educational standard setting functions must be determined by a body whose primary responsibility is limited to an educational mission. We will do our best to strongly support our institutes and the best possible psychoanalytic education of our students and candidates.