For all of us, the world turned topsyturvy last March. We had met in New York in February for APsaA's 2020 National Meeting, and conducted business as usual with only faint rumblings from Asia about a virus in faraway places. We attended organizational meetings, candidates met in the Candidate's Council, members attended the scientific program, and the Department of Psychoanalytic Education (DPE) went about its activities promoting quality psychoanalytic education. We now know we were operating in a state of ignorant bliss, secure in our assumptions that psychoanalytic life would continue in the manner it had been. At that time, all seemed well.
Just a few weeks later, most of us were living, practicing, learning, and teaching in lockdown. Everything we had taken for granted changed, seemingly overnight. Suddenly we were scrambling to see our patients and maintain our involvements in psychoanalytic education. APsaA's leadership acted quickly and decisively to create a team to help the membership deal with the crisis. Town Hall virtual meetings were instituted, along with other events, to support our members and community. Institutes were encouraged to move all aspects of their functioning to telephonic or video-conferencing modalities. Both APsaA and the IPA announced that remote learning, including training and control analyses, would count toward progression and graduation in all APsaA institutes. And the leadership of the DPE fielded individual and institutional questions about the effect of changed circumstances on formal psychoanalytic education.
As everyone began to gather their feet under them and realize that the situation could go on for some time or reappear in a second wave, DPE leadership considered ways of developing longer term aids for institutes, faculty, and candidates. No longer enough to provide short term solutions to maintain psychoanalytic education, we now needed to help institutes, faculty, and candidates prepare for the next academic year operating remotely.
Just as APsaA and the DPE were beginning to deal with COVID-19, George Floyd was murdered. The entire country erupted in this most recent example of institutionalized racism and rose up in protest. APsaA and its institutes now faced challenges both to take a stand on racism and to look inward at our lack of diversity, in our curricula and in those we educate. We all now were compelled to grapple with a second trauma.
The DPE moved up the date of its Workshop for Directors of Institutes, Education Committee Chairs, and Chairs of Child and Adolescent programs, allowing the leadership of APsaA institutes to share problems and consider solutions for more immediate educational issues. Held virtually, the May 16 workshop was well attended. Meeting online became tiring, so we limited the discussion to the two most pressing issues while tabling the rest for the next and further meetings. We planned follow-up workshops during the APsaA meetings, and possibly over the course of the summer.
Most striking was the sheer number of concerns, questions, and issues that institute leaders raised, mostly about candidates' anxiety around training. Some reported candidates' doubts about the quality or value of educating remotely. Harriet Wolfe, IPA president-elect, described a candidate's fear that the pandemic was the “death knell” of psychoanalysis. Harriet responded that, in fact, psychoanalysts were most well-equipped to deal with the anxieties and uncertainties brought by the pandemic. Her response reflected the need to balance, in these challenging times, the worries with a positive vision of growing and maintaining an analytic identity and mind. Many institutes offered their own town hall meeting for candidates and faculty as a way of dealing with these anxieties. One institute reported that candidates seemed more open with their concerns when faculty were not present. Others thought it was useful to combine both groups.
Often candidate anxieties involved more practical issues. For example, many continued to worry that remote training would not count despite reassurances from both APsaA and the IPA. Clearly anxiety was interfering with the ability to take in and trust information. Some candidates worried about beginning control cases virtually, a difficulty that seemed even more daunting with child control cases. Some institutes wondered if tuition should be
Alan Sugarman, Ph.D., is former head of the APsaA Department of Psychoanalytic Education.
reduced for virtual coursework. The group shared ideas, sources, and tools to help with these issues.
Another common concern revolved around graduations during social distancing. The fact that graduation acknowledges candidates' efforts and successes seemed to highlight the importance of providing some event. Some institutes planned to postpone graduation until they could gather in person, while another institute planned graduations via Zoom, where they could drink a toast virtually. Attendees were all impressed by institutes' creativity and thoughtfulness.
Other concerns, such as the pressure candidates might feel to see patients in person once their state opened when they did not feel safe working that way, were postponed for the June workshop. It was clear that we faced an ongoing need to create and sustain a psychoanalytic community during this difficult time; to that end, we discussed establishing consortiums of institutes in geographic proximity to share instructors, scientific meeting speakers, and other personnel.
The DPE held a second workshop on June 13 where we focused primarily on ways of recruiting diverse candidates and teaching about racial and ethnic diversity as part of the analytic curriculum. Because having a course on this subject is far from sufficient, we noted the role, meaning, and relevance that racial and ethnic differences have in all the traditional tracks of an analytic curriculum. The way that children organize their experience of others along the lines of sameness and difference, for example, contributes to how looking or behaving differently takes on meanings that are then internalized. We were reminded that the Diversities Section of the DPE, chaired by Anton Hart, had developed a bibliography that institutes could draw on for their courses.
Since June, the new leadership of Britt-Marie Schiller as head, and Wendy Jacobson as associate head, have instituted more regular virtual meetings of this group to remain available and help institutes share their experiences of educating with distance-mediated technology with each other.
Typically, the forum discussion revolves around controversial subjects in psychoanalytic education. In 2020, considering the Covid-19 crisis, the June 14 forum focused on complexities of teaching psychoanalytic courses by remote technology. Britt-Marie Schiller distributed related materials and invited all APsaA members to attend.
There was a consensus that teaching remotely poses particular challenges. It is difficult to use more Socratic or seminar-based learning, for example, to promote critical thinking. Furthermore, not being able to read body language, to know when to speak, to feel the emotional atmosphere in the group in virtual meetings adds to the pedagogical challenge.
Another effort to help institutes during the pandemic involved the creation of a task force to develop a model of best practices for analytic education that promoted a necessary mixture of in-person and remote training.
The task force's mission: Just as APsaA is responding to the needs of its members to manage these complexities, it is also committed to the DPE's role in helping APsaA's institutes adapt psychoanalytic education to the virtual realm during the pandemic. Neither our institutes nor our candidates, in their partnership of seeking excellence in psychoanalytic education, can afford to simply pause this lengthy pursuit indefinitely while in social isolation, let alone repeat the pause if Covid-19 rebounds in the future. Our institutes and APsaA exist, in part, to spawn the next and future generations of analysts. Consequently, the task force was asked to examine how best to maintain, adapt, and improve psychoanalytic education at present and in the future when elements of virtual education may need to be integrated with in-person training.
This task force plans to study and suggest strategies for:
Distance supervision
Distance analysis in training analyses and control cases
Teaching engagingly and effectively via technology
Recruitment, admissions, and progression procedures via technology
Curriculum issues
Complexities of transitioning back and forth between virtual and in-person as environmental circumstances change
Maintaining institute morale and connectedness when in-person meetings cannot occur
Financial strains of social isolation for candidates, faculty, and institutes
Ethical issues involved with technology
To date, the task force has met biweekly to develop a document to help institutes think about and deal with the complexities of providing excellent psychoanalytic education in an environment where they may have to move back and forth between the office and virtually. Its early discussions led to the realization that individuals, local institutes, and APsaA had reacted to the trauma of the pandemic with rapid action and prescription of policies
and guidelines. Task force members were struck by the relative absence of the usual analytic principle of self-reflection preceding action. Most had not even thought to pause, reflect on, and discuss advantages and disadvantage before acting. It seemed that one of the pandemic's traumatic effects was to cause reflection and discussion about education to collapse. APsaA and its institutes moved their educational functions into the virtual arena quickly and reflexively because it seemed so obviously necessary.
Meeting and discussing with each other helped the task force members to regain their bearings and to remember the value of talking and thinking about the impact of the pandemic on education. It helped them to clarify what was useful in educating candidates and what seemed to interfere. For example, it highlighted both the importance of such reflection and discussion before developing educational policies as well as how the traumatic anxieties and losses of the pandemic could lead to forgetting this basic axiom. They realized that the change to distance-mediated teaching, supervising, and analyzing had affected both the traditional analytic frame and the more implicit, but equally traditional educational frame. Thinking about these changes in frame and how they may impact so many educational activities is valuable. Articulating the new frame more explicitly is also important.
The task force also has noted that complicated issues are likely to arise as we move out of the pandemic. It was impossible to anticipate the pandemic, leaving no time to think about it beforehand. But APsaA and its institutes do have the luxury of anticipating its end and considering how it will affect educational programs. It would be valuable to think about what changes lie ahead. One issue that is likely to arise will be whether a candidate will be allowed to graduate if all his or her control cases were conducted virtually. The task force is not advocating a policy. Instead, it is emphasizing that it is useful to think about and discuss the principles that such an issue involves. It is important to be mindful of the value of being reflective about such educational issues. The document that it ultimately develops will delineate the various issues that institutes and APsaA might find it most useful to deliberate as we all continue our educational mission.
In summary, APsaA's institutes have been challenged to maintain the high quality of education during the Covid pandemic and racial reckoning. They have shown resilience and creativity in response. In addition, APsaA's Department of Psychoanalytic Education is an active partner in this task. This partnership highlights the importance of working together in adapting psychoanalytic education to the changing environmental and social context.