After decades of the same structure and more or less the same identity, APsaA is catapulting toward an immense amount of change. Even when it is long-sought, change brings with it loss and varying levels of grief depending on one’s organizational identity. In January 2017, we face a double dose of loss: We come closer to losing our familiar organizational structure and we lose our “home” at the Waldorf. Both of these losses present the important opportunity we have to update and invigorate our organizational mission and claim our sense of place in a changing world. But without attention to where we have been and what we have lost, we will be poorly prepared to define and accomplish what we hope to become.
The changing face of the Waldorf Astoria serves as a metaphor for the challenges we confront as a tradition-bound profession in a rapidly changing culture, one interested in immediate modes of communication and quick fixes for complex problems. The old familiar Waldorf mirrors the Golden Age of psychoanalysis. Its myriad rooms have allowed a stunning number of gilded opportunities for conversation in small, medium and large groups. The enormous arrangement of flowers in the Park Avenue foyer and the centrally located clock have captured the dependable richness of intellectual and social exchange. The clock was still there last year, but the flowers were already gone.
This spring the new Waldorf owners surprised even the current Waldorf staff by suddenly moving their renovation plan up a year, forcing us to reimagine where we might hold our annual winter meetings. After a serious amount of research, our staff located suitable space and negotiated a favorable contract for future National Meetings. The solution required some compromise. We will meet in February rather than January and we will meet (the first year but not the second) in somewhat reduced space. APsaA’s new National Meeting location will be the New York Hilton on Sixth Avenue. In 2018 the scientific program dates are February 14-18; in 2019 they are February 6-10.
In January 2016, after 70 years with one organizational structure, APsaA members voted to endorse a new one. A supermajority of voting members gave the Executive Council, APsaA’s Board of Directors, full responsibility for the activities of the organization. This meant that the Board on Professional Standards (BOPS) was no longer autonomously responsible for educational matters. After decades of focused attention to developing and maintaining educational standards, BOPS itself will be sunsetted and a new Department of Psychoanalytic Education (DPE) will be established. Many herald these developments as immense progress. But unless we take care to honor what BOPS has contributed to our profession and our personal relationships within APsaA, we run the risk of adopting a sense of victory that excludes a balanced appreciation of the challenges inherent in mounting a vibrant, forward-looking program of psychoanalytic training and in achieving a focus on the profession rather than our internal debates.
As we know well from analytic work, the more complex a relationship is, the more complicated and necessary a process of mourning is. And many APsaA members have had complex and highly ambivalent relationships with both the structures we are losing, BOPS and the Waldorf. Many of my personal mentors and friends have devoted immense volunteer efforts to BOPS committees and study groups. I think that is true for many of us. We need to honor their constructive work and reduce the risk of losing dedicated colleagues.
The combined leadership of the Executive Committee and Executive Councilors and BOPS Fellows has achieved a vision of One APsaA and created a plan for organizational restructuring: the Six Point Plan. Steps include, in addition to the sunsetting of BOPS, a strengthening of Executive Council, the introduction of the Department of Psychoanalytic Education, institute choice (using IPA requirements as guidelines) regarding TA/SA appointment criteria and training standards, and the externalization of individual analyst certification and institute accreditation (used at the discretion of the individual institutes). These changes require ongoing collaboration across groups within the Association. The tasks are complex and the paths to change are not quick and easy.
Let’s come together in January, in our small, medium and large group settings one last time at the Waldorf, and repeatedly recognize what we have been, how we wish to advance, how we will honor our past and correct our course going forward.
As we mourn the loss of organizational configurations and relationships, let’s recognize a danger. It would be a form of pathologic mourning to repeat our history of focusing on—even creating—internal conflict rather than focusing on advancing psychoanalysis in modern times. We will never be conflict-free as an organization, nor would we wish to be. If we manage our differences with an open mind to hearing and understanding other points of view, we will have more success facing the future and make more constructive progress.