16. Further Struggles over Implementation, 1990-1991

In the continuing saga of the implementation of the New Groups policy by the IPA, the next event of note was a memorandum, dated August 7, 1990, sent by Charles Hanly to the IPA Executive Committee, titled “New Groups Developments.” There were three. The First concerned a letter received from Stanley Grand, President of IPTAR, declaring that his Society had met all of the IPA's requirements and was therefore asking for graduation to full Component Society status at the forthcoming 37th IPA Congress in Buenos Aires in 1991. That would be only two years after admission to Provisional Society status at the Rome Congress in 1989, a progression that customarily is not granted in less than four years. For the working of Hanly's committee, this posed a problem. NYFS, the other nonmedical New Group in New York in parallel progression, wouldn't be ready by the time of the Buenos Aires Congress. It was a larger and more complex organization than IPTAR, and the expectable issues in bringing its procedures and practices fully into line with IPA requirements would certainly take the four years leading to the 1993 Amsterdam Congress. Competitive pressures between the two groups were intense enough that the New Groups Committee dreaded putting one before the other. What to do in such a case? Hanly was recommending reining in the IPTAR enthusiasts, however unfair they might feel that to be, so that both groups could be presented together in Amsterdam.

With LAISPS, the Los Angeles group, still in the midst of its ongoing initial evaluation process, there was another issue. Charles Mangham of Seattle, the chair of the Site Visit Committee, had been approached at a scientific meeting by an individual seeking an interview about the process, representing himself as a reporter for the APA. Mangham had taken this as a representation from the Newsletter of the American Psychoanalytic Association; actually it was from the American Psychological Association.