The Reimagining vision we articulated for APsaA a year ago is underway. We are living through unprecedented times—the pandemic, political and social upheaval—and these have served as catalysts for changes in our association that have been many years in the making.
The purpose of APsaA as a nonprofit organization is to serve the public good by fostering psychoanalytic education, research, and professional development, with clinical work at its core but informing an increasing number of psychoanalytic applications and outreach to external constituencies. This expanded vision solidly includes, but extends beyond, a focus on furthering professional ambitions.
Our new Standards for Psychoanalytic Education builds on our tradition of excellence, recognizes innovation, and expresses the aspirations of psychoanalytic education today. Our pluralistic model embodies a philosophy and establishes principles of education with guidelines for implementation by local psychoanalytic groups. Accountability is provided by collegial institutional exchanges instead of hierarchical oversight.
The Standards recognizes a variety of educational models and practices, and provides structures for working together to study, compare, and update standards as we evolve. This allows us to turn our attention from past controversies toward the forward-looking initiatives of Reimagining:
Culture and society. We recognize culture and society are constitutive of psychic life and reclaim the liberatory promise of psychoanalysis by fully addressing racial, class, patriarchal, and gender normative biases in psychoanalytic theory, practice, and institutions. The work of the Holmes Commission can help guide our efforts toward racial equality.
Advocacy for psychoanalytic thought and all of its applications. We are working to establish clinical necessity guidelines and lead the broader psychoanalytic community in advocacy for parity and access to psychoanalytic treatments. These efforts will bring badly needed recognition of psychoanalytic thinking and treatments to the public, legislators, and payors.
Membership expansion. We propose that APsaA become a home for psychoanalysis, not just psychoanalysts. APsaA can lead psychoanalysis in the U.S. as an inclusive association for the entire analytic community—more broadly defined—rather than as a small, elite professional guild that is challenged to sustain the scope of activities and national prominence we all value.
Improving access to care and expanding membership to include psychoanalytic psychotherapists, researchers, and scholars establish the ground floor for creating diversity and igniting intellectual vitality in psychoanalysis, which in turn will enrich our evolving field. Application of psychoanalytic thinking in all mental health fields will strengthen APsaA and make further training feasible and attractive to a larger and more diverse group of practitioners.
Clinical psychoanalysis will be stronger and more relevant as part of a larger and more robust organization rather than as an isolated, declining specialization. Those qualified as psychoanalysts will have primary responsibility for psychoanalytic education.
We invite you to join us in bringing the promise of Reimagining APsaA to fruition.
Best wishes,
Bill Glover, President
Kerry Sulkowicz, President-Elect
CORRECTION
In TAP Vol. 55, No. 2 Spring/Summer 2021, a photo caption on page 4 misidentified Margaret Morgan Lawrence's husband and son: Her husband’s name is Charles R. Lawrence, II (not Robert Lawrence, Jr.), and her son's name is Charles R. Lawrence, III (not Robert Lawrence). We regret the error.