In 1997, APsaA president Dick Fox recognized that developments in science and developments in psychoanalysis appeared to have little to do with one another. The majority of members marched on their own paths of treating, teaching, and training, while the relatively few researchers went in other directions, sometimes seeming unmindful of the need to interest the membership in their work.
Fox was not the first to become aware of this gaping disarticulation. Three earlier task forces had recommended creating a science section on equal footing with Board and Council functions and prestige to give science a credible voice. Those suggestions involved a bylaws change and went the way of most such suggestions.
The Task Force on Psychoanalysis and Science was formed in December 1998, charged to report to Board and Council within 18 months. Its activities included interviews with a number of knowing and unwitting stakeholders in the psychoanalysis-as-science enterprise, studying the existing structures and structural relations of the Association and its science related bodies, and discussion of all of this. As a result, a number of more particular problems became clear.
Psychoanalytic journals carried very few papers that would be recognizable by practitioners in other fields as scientific papers. But why should our journals try to promulgate scientific approaches? There was almost no audience among psychoanalysts for such papers.
Members had little interest in scientific papers. One very strong reason was that most institute curricula carried no classes that dealt with or even mentioned psychoanalytic science (methodology of evidence, for example) or research. So long as students in our institutes typically spent four years without hearing science or research even mentioned, how could there ever be an audience for scientific work in psychoanalytic journals?
Bias against science and research had become a modus operandi not only of journals and institutes but also a broader bias among practitioner-members who saw science as little more than esoteric research with no applicability to clinical work.
Activities like surveys had come to be undertaken by various subgroups of the Association without any apparent idea that special skill and knowledge about such things were assets that already existed among our members, who might readily be consulted.
Failure to recognize that since no one else was any longer funding empirical research in psychoanalysis, funding would have to come from us or it would not come at all.
What little power there was for science tended to be concentrated in a few hands, promoting further isolation of scientific work by decreasing the breadth of members' participation, however excellent the particular scientific undertaking might be.
There was no voice for science at the executive levels of the Association or at executive levels of the educational bodies.
An informal survey revealed that we were the only major national association for health care practitioners and researchers that had no poster section.
The fundamental idea of the Omnibus Science Initiative (OSI) began to emerge: Perhaps there were better ways than bylaw change to enhance recognition of science and the promotion of scientific endeavor in and by our Association—small changes that would expand the voice of science in the Association, encourage our journals, program committee, and institutes to include science matters as a regular concern, make our programs and meetings more attractive to young researchers, and make our researchers work more attractive to general members. What follows are some samples of changes that were suggested by OSI and adopted by Board and Council as a package in May 2000, that is, a coherent group of changes that together would have an impact.
A science advisor to sit as a non-voting member of the Executive Committee, present throughout all meetings so that s/he could introduce appropriate science related considerations when the committee was not otherwise thinking about them. The same position and functions for BOPS.
Formation of Research Associates of the American Psychoanalytic Association with a relationship to the Association analogous to that of the Psychotherapist Associates, to attract another basic constituency whom we had been neglecting.
Establishment of a poster section to present research findings in a poster format in our display areas at national meetings.
Creation of a Committee on Education for Research to develop goals for psychoanalytic education that include various kinds of research competence, to be implemented by each of the institutes as appropriate to its curriculum and resources.
Creation of a Task Force on Funding for Research to coordinate the various bodies responsible for funding.
There were 11 proposals in all. Some results were very successful, a few were controversial, and a few never got off the ground. The most conspicuously successful has been the poster section, put together by Linda Goodman and Linda Mayes, with consultation from Stuart Hauser. There has been a steady increase in applications to exhibit posters, an increase in those exhibited to the maximum that the budget will permit, and an average attendance of over 200 members during the four hours that the poster room is open. To visit the poster section has become de rigueur when attending our national meetings. Also encouraging, as a result of OSI, there are reports of more communication among psychoanalytic researchers beyond the meetings. The Task Force appointed by our current president, Lynne Moritz, continues the increased emphasis on science in our Association.
Alan Compton, M.D., is clinical professor of psychiatry and biobehavioral science at UCLA.