The following is a slightly simplified summary, as I understand it, of the governance structure of the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA). For some newer members this may be informative, for others review.
I believe the facts I’ll report here are now by and large accepted and no longer controversial.
Opinions I express ABOUT these arrangements may be controversial, though my hope is seriously not to stir controversy or foment “disharmony”, nor do I have any illusions my comments will at this point influence the current elections much.
My aim is diagnostic, in response to some recent postings. It is to point up some arrangements that I hope can be agreed upon as being a major, structurally based, source of organizational “disharmony”.
The disharmony we see is inevitable. To blame it on those who complain or on those who ‘prefer the status quo’ is certainly an oversimplification.
We have an ARRANGEMENT that makes conflict INEVITABLE, and I am afraid, unless one day everyone wakes up and comes to some surprising agreement, this conflict may remain as IRRESOLVABLE as it has been demoralizing. Dr. Singer is right these issues are hardly the ONLY cause of demoralization in the present economic and intellectual environment, though they did play a significant role in psychoanalysis’ relative failure to contend back when it most needed to.
Here is my understanding, slightly simplified in places, of APsaA’s governamental structure.
MEMBERSHIP:
The MEMBERS and CANDIDATE MEMBERS of APsaA are basically the shareholders in a professional organization that has been set up as a not for profit corporation.
The MEMBERS must be Graduates of APsaA or IPA institutes, or more recently, persons who meet equivalent criteria as determined by a Council Committee.
The CANDIDATE MEMBERS must be candidates in psychoanalytic training in APsaA approved institutes.
In times past, membership criteria was in the hands of the Board on Professional Standards (BOPS). Membership criteria is today in the hands of the Executive Council, within certain constraints articulated in our bylaws. At the same time, criteria for admission and graduation from APsaA Institutes, the main source of APsaA members, is set by BOPS.
As the BOPS no longer sets standards for APsaA proper, but only for those Institutes it approves, it might better be understood today as the Board of Education and Standards for APsaA approved Institutes.
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
The BOARD OF DIRECTORS (BOD) and overarching final authority (again, within the confines of our bylaws) of our Not for Profit Corporation is our EXECUTIVE COUNCIL, which is made up of:
(a) the current and past Officers (PRESIDENT, PRESIDENT-ELECT, SECRETARY AND TREASURER, PLUS THE PAST PRESIDENT, PAST SECY AND I believe, PAST TREASURER)
(b) 8 COUNCILORS AT LARGE, who are elected directly by the entire membership, in a national election
(c) 1 COUNCILOR* from each of APsaA’s 36 or so SOCIETIES, which are local groupings of members. These are the equivalent of Local Chapters as are seen in many organizations, except that over the years, most have become tied to their corresponding Institutes, and are free to accept or not accept as members other qualified APsaA members who live in their region.
(d) The CHAIR and SECRETARY of the Board of Professional Standards (BOPS), who serve as non-voting members on the COUNCIL (unless they happen also to be elected Council members by any of the methods above).
(e) The PRESIDENT and SECRETARY of the CANDIDATE COUNCIL serve on the COUNCIL as non-voting members.
Any Full Member may run to serve as an APsaA Officer, Councilor at Large or Councilor, whereas Candidate Members may vote in these elections**, but cannot according to our bylaws hold any of these offices.
The EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE of the EXECUTIVE COUNCIL
acts on behalf of the Exec Council in the period between the two semi-annual meetings. It is made up of:
(a) The Four Officers (PRESIDENT, PRESIDENT-ELECT, SECRETARY and TREASURER, all of whom may vote)
(b) The CHAIR and SECRETARY of the BOPS, who serve as non-voting members of the Executive Committee. However, our bylaws stipulate that in the event either or both of the BOPS Officers win a seat on the Council in either a national or Society election, they automatically are granted votes on the Executive Committee.
(c) Currently, but only by a voluntary agreement of the Executive Committee, two Councilors elected directly by the Council have also been invited to sit in as non-voting members on the Executive Committee.
So these 8 people, with 4 voting, (or up to 6, should the BOPS officers gain Council seats) carry out decisions of the Executive Council and act and make decisions in the Council’s staid, in the period between meetings.
The EXECUTIVE COUNCIL has various COUNCIL COMMITTEES of its own (on which only COUNCIL members may legally vote). Most are made up of Councilors elected by the Council, whereas, as I mentioned earlier, the EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE is elected directly by the Members.
***SOURCE OF CONFLICT ONE***
The fact that Members, and not the Council, elect the voting members of the Executive Committee that represents the Council has been a source of tension that arises at times between the Council and the Exec Committee, because the Exec Committee does not always feel accountable to or at least is not so constrained by its Council in the way it might were the Council electing and able to recall its ExCom Committee members. The presence of BOPS Officers on the relatively small Executive Committee of the Executive Council has also contributed to some Executive Committees positioning themselves (wrongly) as being equally accountable to the Council and to the BOPS, thus further splitting the ExCom from the Council in whose name it speaks.
***
In addition, there are numerous COMMITTEES of the CORPORATION, whose members need not be COUNCIL members. These, with a few exceptions, are appointed and serve at the pleasure of the APsaA PRESIDENT.
The BOARD OF PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS (BOPS) is a Special Committee of the Corporation, whose members are selected or elected by each of the APsaA approved Institutes, in whatever manner the Institute elects to select them (eg, by the Director, or the Faculty or the Training Analyst Committee.)
As the attorney, Virginia Bjorklund affirmed a few years ago, Institutes are not technically a part of APsaA, in the way Societies are. Rather, they are actually autonomous entities (save that must be approved by APsaA in order to gain the rights accorded through approval by APsaA to belong to the International Psychoanalytical Association (IPA).)
The BOARD ON PROFESSIONAL STANDARDS (BOPS) is made up of:
(a) its CHAIR and SECRETARY, who are elected directly by the BOPS FELLOWS,
(b) the immediate PAST CHAIR, who serves as a BOPS FELLOW AT LARGE, and
(c) two FELLOWS* selected or elected by each of APsaA’s 30 or so Institutes.
(d) The OFFICERS of the APsaA’s EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE sit on BOPS as non-voting members.
Our bylaws stipulate that ONLY Training and Supervising Analysts are allowed to serve as BOPS FELLOWS. (An Institute such as my own, which I can easily imagine selecting a non-Training Analyst to represent it on BOPS, may not do so.)
The BOPS has (sub) Committees of its own, whose Chairs and members are selected by the CHAIR of BOPS.
Our bylaws further stipulate that ONLY members CERTIFIED by BOPS and Candidate Members are allowed to serve on BOPS Committees.
Uncertified Members are not allowed, though occasionally some are selected for service by the Committee Chair and ultimately by the BOPS Chair. When this occurs, they are or should more correctly be designated non-voting consultants to the committee.
The Chairs of BOPS’ numerous Standing Committees, along with the BOPS Officers, make up the BOPS COORDINATING COMMITTEE. Aside from the BOPS SECRETARY, these are all appointees (more often than not like-minded appointees) of the BOPS Chair, and were elected by no one.
***SOURCE OF CONFLICT TWO***
A second major source of conflict in APsaA arises from this. The BOPS Fellows and Committee Members see themselves as being accountable to the Institutes which selected them. What’s more, many Fellows take the position that BOPS’ decisions on educational matters, including standards, must never succumb to pressure from the membership and the vagaries of public or political opinion. (Ironically, it is clear from sitting through the BOPS meetings that their decisions are very much influenced by politics, but often in a defensive manner, in reaction against the pressure they receive, e.g., on the listserves.)
According to several recent bylaw votes a significant portion, perhaps a majority of APsaA MEMBERS DO feel that BOPS’ decisions ought be more responsive and accountable to the wishes of the Membership, on the grounds that BOPS is making decisions on behalf of the American Psychoanalytic Association, which constrain its potential, and limit its growth and survival. They would argue that they as Members, and not the Institutes, are the shareholders and dues payers of what is, in the end, a Professional Membership Organization. One which sponsors, as it were, a Board of autonomous Institutes. (I do not mean to be tendentious in putting any of this this way. Honest members disagree strongly about the accountability of BOPS to the Membership.)
The Executive Council, as the Board of Directors and overarching authority, has the power to approve, oversee and even rescind or nullify decisions of the Board on Professional Standards, within the constraints of our bylaws.
In its history, I don’t know whether the Executive Council has ever done so, but the wish that it would (as some see it), and the fact that it could (as others see it), has been a major source of organizational conflict. In the past, this led to efforts on the part of those favoring BOPS autonomy to restructure the governance in such a way that the membership COULD not oversee the BOPS (e.g. the Reorganization Task Force, the Renew Bylaws)
***SOURCE OF CONFLICT THREE***
Here I will mix what I see as facts with my personal interpretation of the effects of these facts.
We have seen major sociological changes in our culture from the time our Institutes and the APsaA’s governance structure was first formed.
APsaA’s very existence and raison d’etre as a regional association of the IPA, with special authority granted nowhere else in the IPA world, was founded on the wish by APsaA’s founders to maintain IPA affiliated psychoanalytic training as an exclusively medical opportunity within the USA.
The lawsuit forced APsaA to open its doors to applicants from other disciplines, but probably even had there been no lawsuit, a mix of enlightenment and the wish to survive would eventually have led to opening its doors.
Fifty plus years of domination by graduates of medical programs had a tremendous shaping effect on the economic and intellectual culture of the APsaA, not to mention on the development of psychoanalysis within and without APsaA those very years. (As someone who came from philosophy and then psychology into clinical internship in a predominantly psychiatric psychoanalytically oriented training hospital, I was alternately envious and disdainful of my psychiatric resident colleagues, for their remarkable self-confidence coupled with their far less questioning approach to our readings. I don’t know that many of them felt reciprocal envy but I did at times sense their disdain.)
Today, APsaA is adjusting to a major shift in its culture, where over the past probably ten to twenty years, the majority of APsaA candidates have come from outside the field of medicine. They have also come in different economic circumstances (for example, commencing training on average 7-8 years older than the MDs in their cohort), have come with different intellectual styles and expectations and have come with a less authoritarian prior experience in education.
***SOURCE OF CONFLICT FOUR***
Traditionally, and still in many places, APsaA Institutes have not been run by their faculty so much as by their Training Analysts, themselves selected by prior Training Analysts, a group once seen as the senior and most capable persons to take charge of all matters concerning education and training.
I cannot believe, if someone were to attempt to set up an organization in 2011 (or really, ANY time after 1970), that intended to grant a special status to an elite subgroup of its members ordained in this way, that this would or could have been seen as acceptable.
Times have changed. BOPS carries the remnant of this past attitude to training, and has never challenged the rule encoded in our bylaws that ONLY TAs (people selected by other TAs ostensibly for the purpose of analyzing and supervising candidates) may serve as Fellows.
Something which is already the majority or comes close to being the majority of the membership balks at this arrangement. Many no longer revere or wish to retain the favor of the Training Analysts as perhaps they once might have, nor do they particularly respect the kinds of hoops and hurdles that the elder TAs all had to undergo or the methods on which these are based. Those who underwent much greater hurdles than exist today find it difficult to understand how members might balk at what they see as minimal hurdles by comparison.
So the Certification and system as the prerequisite to entering this special status became the touchstone of issues that really run much deeper than just the TA selection process.
***SOURCE OF CONFLICT FIVE***
The BOPS Committees meet for as much as six days prior to the arrival of the members at our semi annual meetings. Many can be seen checking out at the Waldorf lobby as the members and even the Executive Councilors check in.
MUCH that has bearing on APsaA is decided in those days.
So, there is no question that the members of BOPS and its many sub committees are hardworking, dedicated and serious about APsaA and the education its institutes offer. Nor would anyone who sat in on their meetings, as I have, believe they make decisions about the TA system, or other educational matters, out of bald financial self interest
.
The problem with BOPS, I believe, is who is NOT to be found on its committees.
The problem is the invisibility of the large and equally talented MAJORITY of our members who are scarcely to be seen in the BOPS echo chamber in the five or six days of meetings, prior to the Scientific Session (when the rest of the members show up).
Many members, whether by temperament, principle, politics, lack of organizational ambition, a history of past exclusion or simply because they have other priorities, want no part of the time consuming Certification/TA ladder. This has led to a cultural divide that cannot be reduced to one of Experience/Lack of Experience, Educator/Graduate, specially established Competence/ unproven Competence.
In ANY population, some people will always be drawn to maintaining rules, order, “if we don’t stop thus and so, what will happen?” Others with every bit as much to contribute will have little patience for that. And yet others may not care about these differences or organizational politics, so long as they get their cheaper liability insurance and the Scientific Sessions and Journals are of high quality.
The “ONLY TA or CERTIFIED” BOPS Structure along with its long self-enclosed meetingsmeetings, I believe, ossify these cultural differences.
***SOURCE OF CONFLICT SIX***
Fundamental (i.e., bylaw) change, in any direction, requires a super-majority of 66.7%. Societies seldom arrange themselves so neatly that attitudes fall out >67/33 on much of anything. Besides, I imagine, if 10% from either side were to disappear today, those in the middle would unconsciously reshuffle, such that the balance remained more 55/45 or 60/40. Rarely 67/33. The idea that everything was fine, if only their weren’t these dissenters is naive in the extreme.
The disharmony in APsaA is and has been and will likely continue to be inevitable. To some it will appear to be the fault of the “complainers” and “highjackers” of the elists. Others of us believe that the lists offered a forum for widely held dissatisfaction that, prior to the lists, was effectively marginalized and rendered powerless to do anything.
***Barring some epiphany, I cannot foresee any resolution to the perennial conflict, with APsaA structured as it is. In saying this, I am NOT suggesting another Task Force… even one which was evenly constituted (which would be a first!)
I know how this sounds coming from one with my views, but frankly, I believe this epiphany can only come from BOPS. Even when people like me withdraw from APsaA politics, others will come forward.
Seriously, how can anyone expect these paternalistic arrangements to work in 2011!
They may have seemed to work back in the day BOPS ruled membership criteria and only those Certified by BOPS could even vote. But this requirement changed (in part out of economic necessity, as unCertified members grew in number and felt increasingly disaffected.) This has led to another huge shift to which APsaA has been adjusting the past nearly two decades. (***SOURCE OF CONFLICT SEVEN***)
In my opinion, the damage that WAS wrought to psychoanalysis in America (and because of its strong influence, the world), back in those days of apparent harmony, is responsible, more than anything, for the relative decline of psychoanalysis in the intellectual and mental health arena today. This damage can only be measured when one imagines where psychoanalysis might be today, had APsaA not attempted for its first 50+ years, to exclude generations of psychologists, researchers, like minded psychoanalysts… the list goes on.
That is water under the bridge, I suppose.
I wish I were more hopeful.
Tom Bartlett