This summer, APsaA gave birth to a new membership association called the Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Research Society (PPRS). Metaphorically speaking, the PPRS leapt from APsaA's brow.
Supporting psychoanalytic science and research was tagged as a high priority of our APsaA members in the strategic planning survey several years ago. My predecessor, Lynne Moritz, made it a core mission of her presidency. I planned to dutifully follow up, but I lacked intrinsic enthusiasm because my own interests tend to turn elsewhere, towards outreach, advocacy, and social issues. Then, an unexpected coup de foudre and I fell in love with the PPRS. Why this unanticipated excitement, attachment, thrill, palpitation? The concept of the PPRS is simply elegant—spare and efficient, bursting with potential.
“No one can know whether this vision and these benefits will be realized, but the PPRS is, in my estimation, the best hope for the future of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic thought.”
Where to begin? I'm irresistibly drawn back to Freud and his “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (written in 1895, not published until 1950). Freud begins with the following sentiment: “The intention is to furnish a psychology that shall be a natural science: that is, to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determinate states of specifiable material particles, thus making those processes perspicuous and free from contradictions.” Jones points out, lest latter day neuroscientists get too excited about the project, that Freud abandoned the neurological framework primarily because he could not “locate” the unconscious in the proposed neurological/psychological apparatus.
Now, moving a century forward, Alan Compton and a group of APsaA colleagues, in an effort known as the Omnibus Science Initiative (OSI), tackled the complex and urgent task of reconceptualizing APsaA's role vis-à-vis research and science. Compton's group, in 2000, offered 10 recommendations to Council and BOPS designed to consolidate, solidify, and expand APsaA's reach in research and science. I encourage you to read the entire report, which includes much wisdom and a good deal of research. (Go to ). To quote the report: “To sustain the profession and science of psychoanalysis, prompt and vigorous steps to [genuine] scientific exploration of its value as a treatment and as a fundamental science are indicated as urgent measures.”
About half of the recommendations of the Omnibus Science Initiative were implemented. Science advisors joined BOPS and the Executive Committee. BOPS added a research committee for training, and established a poster session, science prize, research fund, and Research Associates group.
The next chapter in the story: Lynne Moritz, in 2007, established a Task Force on Research and Science to see how APsaA might complete the mission of the OSI: to determine what structures are needed to support and promote psychoanalytic research and science in the decades ahead both within APsaA and within the profession. The task force's (TF) answer was at first startling—a separate (but closely allied to APsaA) membership society should be established. Lynne Moritz writes,
The TF took the risk to think through their charge of assessing what structures would create true value for psychoanalysis in the world, and they came up with this brilliant, innovative, and gutsy proposal. The genius of this proposal is its potential to increase our integration into the wider scientific community, open access to psychoanalysis to young researchers in diverse fields, and promote our own understanding of science within our discipline. Perhaps, with familiarity and respect developing on both sides, psychoanalysis will seem less alien to non-analyst researchers and psychoanalysts will feel less moved to preserve our profession through isolation.
The PPRS is largely the vision of the late Stuart Hauser, who with Linda Mayes chaired that task force. The TF immediately identified attracting young researchers doing psychoanalytically and psychodynamically relevant research as the best way to strengthen research in psychoanalysis. Yet there was a problem. Many of these young researchers would be ineligible for membership, and the category of Research Associate membership was unlikely to draw them to us.
Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D., is president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
These individuals would want to be stakeholders, voting members, of any organization that would foster psychoanalytically and psychodynamically relevant research. Thus, the idea of the PPRS was born within the TF. The concept was to create an organization to promote research relevant to psychoanalysis and psychodynamic thought that was both inside and outside of APsaA.
Stuart Hauser compared the ideal relationship between APsaA and the PPRS as that between two high-rise buildings standing next to one another with multiple bridges between them.
Among the potential benefits of the PPRS are:
Closer ties between psychoanalysis and the academic, research, and scholarly community.
Greater representation of research, scholarship, and critical thinking within psychoanalysis and psychodynamic thought.
Advancement of research, science, and scholarship relevant to psychoanalysis.
The evolution of psychoanalysis to a field grounded in evidence, data, and critical thinking rather than in tradition, theoretical schools, and authority.
A higher profile for psychoanalysis. Research and hard data make news. The press has an inexhaustible thirst for research and “new findings” about the human mind.
Eric Nuetzel has been one of those who have worked so hard to breathe life into the PPRS concept. He was invaluable in conceptualizing a workable concept for a corporate structure. (Legally, the PPRS is a non-profit corporation with APsaA as its sole member.) Nuetzel said, “No one can know whether this vision and these benefits will be realized, but the PPRS is, in my estimation, the best hope for the future of psychoanalysis and psychodynamic thought.”
Linda Mayes, president of the new PPRS, emphasizes that “young academics with an interest in psychodynamic scholarship and research would otherwise have few to no opportunities to present their work and network with like-minded investigators from multiple disciplines and levels of experience.”
Is it possible that the researchers involved in psychoanalytic science, supported by the new structure of the PPRS, will solve the problem of Freud's project?
Consider Andrew Gerber's prediction:
In the next 20 years, functional neuroimaging techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) will help identify the neural pathways for unconscious processes central to psychoanalytic theories of conflict, development, and therapeutic change. Even now, such methods have begun to reveal the neural correlates of unconscious affect, motivation, transference, and attachment and are being used to explore the way in which these may change over the course of a successful psychoanalytic treatment.
Membership in the Psychodynamic/Psychoanalytic Research Society is open to all APsaA members and all other psychodynamic and psychoanalytic researchers. APsaA members will be automatically invited to membership. For more information, visit the PPRS Web site at: . And spread the word.
We are in on the beginning of what may turn out to be an enormously important and successful endeavor: When an organization begins, you can't know what its larger impact will be. But how exciting to be present at its birth and have the honor of watching this new association grow.
Prudy Gourguechon