Last year was a devastating one for our financial markets. Illusions about the security of our various forms of wealth were shattered. Indeed, many of us have found our longstanding sense of trust in these institutions to be deeply eroded. Few of us and few of our organizations have been immune. Even the most solidly respected bastions of higher education with superb oversight, such as Harvard and Yale, have seen their endowments diminish. While I have long felt APsaA should have a program of development—it was an essential element of my campaign philosophy—last year's events cinched it for me.
I will describe an incident that impressed upon me the importance of development for our organization. I have served as a trustee of Wagner College, my alma mater, for many years now. While I was being recruited, the president came cross-country to speak personally with me. He outlined the college's improvements in enrollment. SATs were much higher than they had been a decade ago. Wagner had shifted from a commuter college to a residential campus with first a regional and now a national student base. There was an increase in the caliber and academic productivity of the faculty. However there was one crucial element, he told me, which stood in the way of the college taking the next and necessary step to attain near “elite” status. That was an endowment. The school was tuition dependent, which simply did not allow Wagner to accumulate the resources necessary for enhancing the school's ability to upgrade its programs and its physical plant. The analogs of this tuition dependent college and our dues dependent professional association are obvious. Wagner needed a process of development.
APsaA also needs this. We are all proud of our organization and even more so of our profession. Psychoanalysis has grown considerably in its more than a century of existence. From a highly controversial, new technique, at times at the margins of clinical work, and the province of a few unusual and highly imaginative innovators, it has now grown into an accepted part of mental health practice and a fixture in our academic and cultural mainstream. Nobody blinked an eye when psychoanalyst Glen Gabbard provided a popular weekly psychoanalytically oriented blog during the run of the last couple of seasons of The Sopranos. No one blinks an eye when psychoanalytic thinking is brought to bear in fields such as art, literature, drama, and philosophy. Psychoanalytic ideas have enriched our world in so many ways.
Unfortunately, the growth and development of psychoanalysis as a discipline and as a pillar of mainstream cultural life has not been matched by a comparable growth in the practice of psychoanalysis or in the growth of APsaA, our professional organization. In fact, our membership base is stagnant and our periodic surveys of the practice of psychoanalysis reveal a slow but persistent decline. It has become abundantly clear to me during my six years as your treasurer that our resources are not growing in a way that matches our most ambitious vision for the needs of the profession or of the discipline.
As I see it, while our current resources will most likely be able to provide quite adequately for the basic needs of APsaA as a professional organization, they cannot fuel the growth engine necessary to nurture and propel psychoanalysis the discipline towards anything near its full potential. As one way of combating this, I am proposing that we begin a program of development post haste. However, while I do consider it absolutely essential, I do not think we are in a precipitous position, at least not yet. I believe we can and must do this in a well considered and deliberate manner that allows us to proceed in a stepwise way and to succeed.
We will need to accomplish several tasks as we move ahead. First, we need what might best be called an “attitude campaign.” We have never really embraced this concept before and I suspect that many of our members are averse to the idea of asking other colleagues for money or of even giving money of their own, beyond dues, to a professional organization. We must begin a national organizational conversation that shifts our attitudes in the direction of championing the importance of giving to APsaA. This conversation must occur at both the local and national level. This raises another important point since a number of our local organizations are engaged in development efforts. We must establish cooperative or complementary endeavors with our component groups as well as with our APsaA Foundation so that we can benefit.
Second, we need to establish an annual fund in APsaA. This is a standard practice among most non-profits and all of us, no doubt, are highly attuned to that annual note we get from our various alma maters as well as to that dreaded yearly weeklong pitch from NPR. Of course, we will need to craft our effort in a way that encourages strong participation and minimizes negative feelings. We do not want anyone reaching to turn off our equivalent of the radio dial.
Third, we must make it clear that these efforts at development are not organized for the coffers of our operating accounts. Rather they will be used for innovative efforts that will attract new initiatives, new ideas, and generative individuals and organizations to our discipline. Contributors are much more likely to support new and creative projects rather than our daily operations.
Warren Procci, M.D., is president-elect of APsaA.
Fourth, we should start discussing how to begin a program of planned giving. Psychoanalysis has been good to many of us and many of us could well be interested in providing gifts to our field as we consider our legacy to the world we will leave behind us. Once again, this is more likely to occur if it is clear that our gifts are going towards some generative program, which can expand the field and the discipline. We may well need to think of ways of honoring the legacy of those who have bequeathed such gifts to us by providing various naming opportunities so that we can celebrate and perpetuate their generosity.
Fifth, if we can establish a solid program of internal development, we will be in a strong position to seek such gifts from external sources. In addition, we also will need to establish ties to various external organizations, agencies, and interested individuals that can enrich psychoanalysis in ways other than the monetary.
Just so you know, I am not without experience in these efforts. I have been an active participant in a number of fundraising efforts at Wagner College as part of my service on their board of directors for the past nine years.
While we clearly have a challenge ahead of us, I do think we can, and must, make a good start at achieving these goals. I hope to hear from many of you and I hope that a good number of you will also actively wish to join with me in working towards the accomplishments of these goals.