APsaA meetings, especially the National Meetings in January each year always leave me with a most pleasant afterglow. Some of it is the sophisticated ambiance of Manhattan, albeit my role as an officer has in recent years kept me away from the seductions of New York night life, some of it is the warm comfort of the very familiar surroundings and elegance of the Waldorf, but mostly it is the stimulation provided by the meetings themselves: the contact with colleagues, thoughtful and challenging presentations, and always all the knowledge of our solid enduring psychoanalytic community It's just simply wonderful to congregate with our fellow members and other fellow psychoanalysts and discuss the profession which we all hold so dear.
This year's meeting, our centenary, had some special treats: the presence of Jane McAdam Freud, the sculptor and great-granddaughter of our profession's founder, two intriguing plenary sessions on social advocacy and the influence of post-Enlightenment thinking on our field; a number of very stimulating panels including one about dissociation, and a most unusual symposium on domination and masochism. Yet despite all of these considerable savory delights, there were a few hints of sourness.
First, and quite unsettling to me, is our continuing membership decline as reported to our Executive Committee and Executive Council. We are down an additional 62 active members in the last six months. Even more disturbing is that we have had over 100 resignations in a year. I will not discuss here exactly why I think this is happening. (I will do so in subsequent communications.) For now we'll mark it as a significant finding which commands attention.
The second disturbing datum is that preliminary information from the test runs of our upcoming practice survey shows very modest incomes among many of our colleagues. While our membership decline is no doubt a multi-determined process, the income data may be related. After all, if one is not earning an appropriate professional income commensurate with one's educational background and with that of one's peers, might that not lead to at least some dissatisfaction with one's profession and its professional organization? While no one enters our field confusing the financial rewards of psychoanalysis with those of investment banking, our candidates must know that their Herculean efforts to complete their training should at the very least lead to the capacity for a satisfactory professional income similar to that of their peer group.
Despite all the challenges facing our field, and they are legion, I was optimistic as I looked around the Waldorf at our recent meeting. I think we have the resources, intellectual and personal, to get a handle on our problems and to catalyze a revitalization of our organization as it heads toward its second 100 years.
I certainly do not believe that continued decline is inevitable. Many other professional organizations are mired in retrenchment woes. However, I would like to balance this cloudy note with two hopefully salutary occurrences at our meeting. The first is the approval by our Executive Council, our board of directors, of my proposal for a strategic planning process for APsaA. I have pushed the plan precisely because I do see our organization in a decline and thus in logical need of the structure and focus of a strategic plan to help move us to face our problems and master them. I will be communicating with all of you on our listservs to tell you more about the plan and to keep you well informed. The basic ideas in a strategic plan are to:
consensually articulate our priorities as an organization consistent with our profession,
develop objective strategies to support these priorities,
then commit our resources to implementing these specific strategies to achieve these objectives,
and establish a process of evaluation, a sine qua non.
We all hope that this kind of careful, broadly designed approach will help us considerably as we stare our challenges in the face and seek to resolve them.
The second potentially powerful event is the marshaling of our organizational resources to launch a long-term, randomized outcome study of psychoanalysis as a treatment. The project took a big step forward at our recent meeting. This study is an ambitious project, led by Steven Roose as principal investigator, which will compare CBT, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, and psychoanalysis as treatments, in a randomized clinical trial. Yes, we will by all means be supporting a major study which will clearly conform to the rubric “evidence based.” There was considerable excitement as we discussed this
Warren R. Procci, M.D., is president of the American Psychoanalytic Association.
project and very much of a sense of being a part of the beginnings of a “moment in history” for our field. Indeed, one leading participant in the discussion came to me and said, “Warren, you have an opportunity to avoid doing to our field what the Catholic Church did to Galileo.” He knew I grew up Catholic and was well aware of this egregious instance of church misjudgment. Be assured, I will not excommunicate anyone. I do intend for us to provide all the support we can to get this study off the drawing boards and into the research lab, and ultimately available to help our practitioners and, of course, our patients.
Despite all the challenges facing our field, and they are legion, I was optimistic as I looked around the Waldorf at our recent meeting. I think we have the resources, intellectual and personal, to get a handle on our problems and to catalyze a revitalization of our organization as it heads toward its second 100 years. Hopefully, at our second centenary celebration, those looking back might be reminded over a toast in Peacock Alley that some significant events for the enhancement of our field began at this very meeting.