I look forward to serving you as your president these next two years, and meeting and working with many of you during my term. I hope you enjoy this first issue of our revamped newsletter, The Candidate Connection. I want to thank Susan Flinders, editor, and Navah Kaplan, assistant editor, for all their hard work in bringing this project to fruition. I also want to thank all of you who contributed to this issue and to encourage everyone to consider writing for our newsletter in the future. The Candidate Connection will be published twice a year, in June and January.
Before I share with you some thoughts on what issues I plan to focus on during my presidency, I would like to tell you a bit about the Affiliate Council officers who will be serving with me in the Executive Committee. The president-elect is Hilli Dagony-Clark, who is a fourth-year candidate doing combined adult and child training at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Richard Grossberg is the treasurer, and a fourth-year candidate from the Cleveland Psychoanalytic Center. He is a pediatrician who came to training through COPAP, the Committee on Preparedness and Progress. Anne Malone, secretary, is a senior adult candidate and a third-year child candidate from the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia.
We have been hard at work since our January meeting in New York, updating our rosters and reaching out to many of you to get involved in APsaA. For example, we learned that out of the 103 new candidates that started training in fall 2008, 34 had not joined APsaA. The Affiliate Council Executive Committee followed up with these candidates, many of whom had forgotten to join APsaA with the early pressures and busyness of beginning analytic training. It seemed that candidates were often uncertain where to get applications, and how to follow up with the application process. So, together with the National Office, we were able to put the APsaA Affiliate membership application online. All new candidates can download the application at apsa.org. Please share this information with other candidates and your institutes.
As you know, the demands of analytic training, which can challenge the balance between personal and professional lives, and the recent economic pressures make this a particularly trying time for all of us who are beginning or developing our psychoanalytic practices. Throughout my training, both in psychology and psychoanalysis, I have been interested in how little attention is devoted to teaching the business aspects of running our practices. One gets the sense that discussions of promotional endeavors, marketing, and outreach are considered at the very least distasteful, if not unnecessary. This may have been the case decades ago, when psychoanalysis was in its heyday, and there was no shortage of patients interested in and eager to engage in psychoanalytic treatment. However, as you well know, we live in a fast-paced world that relies more and more on technology as a way of communicating, where many, if not most, patients expect speedy results, and where we now compete in a vast marketplace of mental health treatments. The recent economic downturn is an additional important example of how we need to contend with external realities.
Although these may sound like considerable challenges, they are certainly not insurmountable, and I believe that they offer us great opportunities to re-enliven and propel the field of psychoanalysis forward, as well as develop successful practices. During my term as president, I would like to try to help us focus on these precise issues—how to develop successful practices as psychoanalysts in our current world and our current economy, and how to promote ourselves and psychoanalysis both in our local communities and nationally.
There is a lot for us to do, but there are simple steps we can begin to take. One is for us to communicate better with each other and to use the resources we have to do so. This newsletter is one way we can keep each other updated not only about committee work and training issues at our institutes, but also about how we can further develop our practices and ourselves as analysts. Another resource we have at our disposal is our Affiliate listserv. Why is it so underutilized? Finally, as some of you may have read in the minutes of our January meeting, Laura Jensen, our previous Affiliate Council president, is working on a candidate blog, , that will be up and running soon.
Another sure way to move forward in developing our practices and the field of psychoanalysis is to get involved, locally both at your institutes and within the communities where you practice, as well as nationally. The value and benefits of doing so cannot be stressed enough. I can tell you that from my own experience, being involved nationally at APsaA and at my home institute (NYU), as well as participating in a variety of community endeavors, has enabled me to develop a network of colleagues and friends, which in turn has helped me build a more stable practice.
I want to end by briefly reviewing some of the ways in which you can get more involved nationally and to emphasize that the commitment to participate in any of these does not require endless hours of work. You will get out of it, as with many things, as much as you put into it. First of all, you can become an Affiliate Council delegate or alternate. Would it surprise you to know that there are several institutes not currently represented? The delegates are the most important part of the Affiliate Council, because they are the link between APsaA and its individual institutes. You can become a member of any of the existing Affiliate Council committees (Affiliate Participation, Candidate Organizations, LGBT Issues, IPSO Liaison, Racial and Ethnic Diversity, Scientific Paper Prize, TAP newsmagazine, and Scientific Programs and Training) or even develop and propose ideas for new committees. Finally, you can become a candidate member in many of APsaA's committees, where you can learn and join in the efforts the Association is putting forth to restore and develop the place of psychoanalysis in today's world.
The Affiliate Council meets during the APsaA meetings on Thursday morning, and this meeting is always open to all candidates. This summer, the Affiliate Council will meet during the IPSO/IPA Congress () on Wednesday, July 29 at 9:00 a.m. My plan is to devote a good portion of this meeting to a beginning discussion of the business of developing our psychoanalytic practices—what we do, how we do it, and how we can do it better. I hope to see many of you there. In the interim, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me by e-mail, , or phone, 212-674-6444.
Editor's Note: TAP has invited the Affiliate Council president to reprint the President's Letter from the Affiliate Council newsletter, The Candidate Connection, on an ongoing basis.