Recently I was asked about running in a future election for councilor-at-large. Here's my reply:
I'm too old. I'll be 66 this year; I can't make a four-year commitment to attend every APsaA meeting and to be active on committees of Council.
I don't have the “fire in the belly” to fight for the changes that APsaA needs. If it's still here, APsaA will be fighting its internecine war 10 years from now. Meanwhile, young people interested in psychoanalysis are taking non-APsaA paths to training; this is healthy for the field, if not for APsaA.
We need young people (in their thirties and forties) to get involved in APsaA governance. Our current geriatric APsaA is a far cry from the youthful, vibrant, radical field that psychoanalysis was 75 years ago. Whatever APsaA does will not affect my professional life like someone 20 or 30 years younger.
We need to discard our inflated self-regard. This is enacted in our meetings at the Waldorf, in statements about our “higher” standards, and in the mind-set that recently displayed itself regarding the training institutes APsaA members may list on the APsaA website.
We need to emphasize that psychoanalysis is a viable alternative to medication, a path that does not expand the “vegetable kingdom” that Robert Lindner decried in The Fifty-Minute Hour. We must break from the “psychiatric/pharmaceutical/insurance industry complex” even if that means we have to cut our fees.
We need to reconnect with the wideranging radical humanism that characterized psychoanalysis in its first half-century. Our curricula must change, along with our attitude toward what constitutes “real” psychoanalytic work.
Unfortunately, even if a majority of APsaA voters support such goals, a 33 percent minority still can block the bylaws amendments needed to foster organizational evolution. Life's change agent, death, will have to do its work—and it will. However, even if APsaA should succumb, psychoanalysis will survive.
Paul Brinich, Ph.D.
Chapel Hill, N.C.
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