Voting on the bylaw amendment is about to commence. The petition by more than 50 members will be receiving the full consideration and judgment of all APsaA members. We, the petitioners, hope the vote on it will reflect the membership's renewed sense of enfranchisement in our professional organization, on a par with the pride in our personal psychoanalytic identities.
The amendment proposal was generated in 2014 by the task force convened by APsaA president Bob Pyles and chaired by Erik Gann. The recent lawsuit over APsaA's bylaws had laid bare the anomalous nature of our bicameral organizational structure. The amendment was a response to it. By granting the Executive Council, APsaA's Board of Directors (BOD), full authority in all its organizational matters, it was correcting the structural anomaly—the source of chronic friction within the organization—as well as bringing it into a straightforward compliance with the New York State Not-for-Profit Law.
However, in the meantime a transition in APsaA presidency from Bob Pyles to Mark Smaller, with Harriet Wolfe as president-elect, was under way after the summer of 2014. Such transitions are opportunities for new initiatives, but they can also cause discontinuities. Though vetted by APsaA lawyers and ready to go, the bylaw amendment went on pause.
Inspired by Bob Pyles's impassioned address calling for the amendment even as he was stepping down as APsaA's president, I subsequently sent out a call on Members list for petition signers, in a test of grassroots interest. The idea was that if enough rank and file members answered the call, it could grow “new legs.”
And so they did. Members from diverse backgrounds and locations responded eagerly, exceeding the required number of 50 so as to allow the petition for the amendment to proceed to a general vote. This was December 2014.
The following spring the new Executive Committee (ExCom) notified the APsaA membership that a proposal for reforming our operational organization was in the works. Acutely cognizant of the need for constructive action, the Executive Committee created a proposal, Six Recommendations for Change. The transformations envisioned in the proposal had the potential to reshape our organizational policies and create new organizational structures. One could foresee these changes might lead to a correction in the bicameral organizational anomaly of authority as presently divided between the Council (APsaA's BOD) and BOPS, but if and when that were to be the case remained a matter of conjecture only. The six-point proposal did not make such change explicit. Indeed, aside from externalizing the certification procedure and deriving a department for psychoanalytic education from BOPS's non-regulatory activities, the status and governance rights of BOPS were not addressed at all in the ExCom proposal. It meant they were to remain as inscribed in the APsaA bylaws.
The ExCom proposal was enthusiastically endorsed in the joint meetings of the Council and BOPS. Yes, the details and the implementations were yet to be sorted out, but both were on board to contemplate new, out of the box, configurations.
However, while all that was for the good, the APsaA's bicameral division of governance authority itself remained untouched. Only the proposed bylaw amendment, like a magnetic needle, pointed squarely and explicitly at this enduring fault line. The San Francisco proceedings at BOPS and in Council the following day were about moving that needle.
Within BOPS, the leadership vigorously campaigned to produce an advisory to the APsaA membership against the amendment. (In a twist of irony, BOPS's right to issue an advisory on the amendment was just the kind of a bicameral governance prerogative the proposal under discussion was challenging, and yet was subject to it.) However, despite framing their determined opposition to the amendment as if it were to damage the work on the Six Recommendations for Change, the leaders encountered a decidedly skeptical constituency among the rank and file BOPS fellows. In the fluidity of the unfolding debate, the response by the fellows showed remarkable new flexibility and independence. While 22 fellows voted for a negative advisory, i.e., against the amendment, 18 fellows did not go along. The outcome was a remarkable vote of considerable support for the amendment in the BOPS chamber.
The following day's proceedings in the Council were marked by this continuing fluidity. BOPS fellows who were also councilors engaged in the shaping of the Council's advisory vote on the amendment. The motion in the Council made clear the streamlined BOD authority of the amended bylaws would be one of collaboration with the endorsed Recommendations for Change. The aim of the amendment was to support and dovetail with the Recommendations for Change. The support for the amendment solidified. The votes against it by some of the fellows in BOPS the day before became votes of support in Council. One became an abstention. In the end, the Council's advisory vote was overwhelmingly in favor of the amendment.
It takes a long time to turn a ship around, but with good winds and everyone at their oars, leaders and members alike, we are doing it. We are discovering the pleasures and benefits of democratic collegiality. The proposed amendment of the bylaws is a straightforward structural corrective, a necessary foundation for all reform at APsaA. We can make it happen.
Please vote for the bylaw amendment.
Luba Kessler, M.D., is councilor for Psychoanalytic Association of NY; on faculty of Institute for Psychoanalytic Education affiliated with NYU; in private practice in Long Island, NY. She organized the signature drive to bring the bylaw amendment to membership vote.