Dear APsaA Members,
We are both grateful to you for the trust you have given us in electing us to serve APsaA as president of the Association. Between the two of us, we have three and a half decades of experience working for and in this organization and a deeply felt passion for what psychoanalysis has to offer our world. We both want APsaA to retain its leadership position in advancing our field. That is why we both worked so hard to be able to lead our Association.
Today we write you a joint message because we feel the organization we are honored to lead is at a critical juncture and that our very survival is on the line.
We are asking all of you, the members of APsaA, to put your considerable intellectual might to the task of looking at the questions of compromise and/or co-existence or consensus.
We want to share with you our analysis of the crisis and our sense of the narrow range of possible solutions.
APsaA does many things extremely well, from public information to advocacy to outreach, member services, scientific programs, and support for research.
There is one sector of our functioning, having to do with educational standards, that has, however, led to decades of distress, conflict, strife, failed initiatives, and bylaws standoffs. A new effort to resolve these tensions is currently under way. It is called the Task Force on Educational Standards Revision. It is an initiative that has come from BOPS itself, and the task force is scheduled to deliver an important report in January. We are both strongly supportive of this effort and hopeful that a unitary set of standards will be reached, one that is acceptable both to those who want to see major changes in our standards and educational system AND to those who place higher value in the traditional standards.
It is our belief that the fundamental problems are these:
APsaA contains within it two groups with distinct and somewhat incompatible value sets regarding issues such as certification, the training analyst system, and what changes, if any, in these practices are desirable for the future of psychoanalysis. Each of these groups is absolutely devoted to nurturing and supporting its own value set.
Another dichotomous but separate area of disagreement within the organization is the value of strong national standards for institutes versus more local autonomy.
Any organization coping with such a situation like this is faced with a very difficult challenge—only three options seem to be possible: compromise, co-existence, or a new and widely held consensus.
We perceive that there is a thick overlay on this basic situation where old injuries, mistrust, power struggles, fear, and antipathy have led to an apparent hardening of attitudes which repeatedly interferes with a straightforward effort to find a resolution to the inherently difficult situation of dual value sets and limited options.
We believe that there is a shared value set throughout the organization which involves a commitment to high educational standards and practices and to the progress and growth of our profession.
How to carve out a way to compromise or co-exist, or in the best-case scenario arrive at a new consensus? How to remove the interfering layer of antipathy, power struggles, and blame that interferes with the extremely difficult problem we face, which is how to deal with the existence of two very different viewpoints on a set of “flashpoint” issues within one organization? Are we capable of compromise or, better yet, consensus that rises above compromise? Can we construct a system for co-existence that doesn't rip apart our institutes?
We don't know but we consider it essential to keep trying to do so. We are asking all of you, the members of APsaA, to put your considerable intellectual might to the task of looking at the questions of compromise and/or co-existence or consensus. We hope you will transmit your ideas to the task force, and do whatever you can to support a process of consensus building in the organization.
We do know this for sure—the organization is weary of the fight and needs, finally, a resolution in order to attend to the many other urgent needs of our members and our profession.
We will close by offering you our own vision of a new and better set of training standards for APsaA that we would hope could begin to build this elusive but essential consensus. In doing so, we are very mindful of the limitations of the president's authority in this matter. Our bylaws delegate the authority for setting standards to our Board on Professional Standards and we fully support that. But we want to share with you what we see as a way out of our impasse, and hope that all of you will share your own visions of solutions with the task forces that are working on this problem.
Prudence L. Gourguechon, M.D., is president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
Warren R. Procci, M.D., is president-elect.
Disengage certification from the training analyst appointment process.
Make certification an honor and a sign of substantial experience and skill in conducting analyses, and a sign of advanced immersion in our work, as it is in other professions. Certification should be time limited and renewable and should signal an ongoing involvement in a variety of activities such as continuing education, writing, teaching, outreach, and/or organizational work.
Shift training analyst (TA) appointment towards more objective criteria such as length of experience. The San Francisco model provides an excellent beginning for a possibly better set of TA requirements. TAs should be required to engage in career-long peer consultation groups.
Revise the immersion criteria to be more in tune with present day practice realities, rather than relying on waivers and exceptions.
Strengthen the standards for institute governance to include guidelines for fair practices in any decisions that affect promotion, demotion, and appointment.
Create new standards that recommend training and ongoing peer consultation for supervising analysts.
Create new standards that recommend pedagogy courses and consultation for institute faculty.
Strengthen and expand the far too minimal guidelines for curriculum currently included in our training standards to include guidelines for teaching of multiple theoretical models, community and applied psychoanalysis, modern theories of sexuality, combining psychoanalysis with pharmacotherapy, neuropsychoanalysis, and other key areas.
Strengthen the recommendations for a candidate's progression to graduation to eliminate the need for national assessment of individual graduates, since graduation per se should reliably be seen as a sign of full and adequate training.
More emphasis needs to be placed on optimal governance practices, and “teaching teachers to teach” both as supervisors and classroom teachers. You can see where we're going. Towards a set of standards that is less concerned with gatekeeping, or any kind of exclusionary practices, less hierarchical and more devoted to lifelong peer supervised learning.
This sketch of a set of standards which would be even more rigorous than our current ones, yet would alter the points that have so deeply divided us, serves, we hope, as an example of the type of standards for psychoanalytic training that could form the basis of a new consensus within the Association.
Prudy Gourguechon
Warren Procci