AAPI Newsletter; Number One, Part One,
November 4, 2005
Dear Colleagues,
Greetings! As the newly elected president of
AAPI, I begin my tenure with both hope and dread (to coin a phrase). Hope
because—like so many others—I believe that AAPI is a great and crucial idea.
Dread, because—also like so many others—I have been very frustrated by how
difficult it has been to transform the promise of AAPI into substantial
realities.
I want to begin by forthrightly acknowledging
that there is widespread discontent with AAPI among its members. Many
individual and institute members feel neglected by AAPI. Some have even
stated that they will renew membership only once more, for this year, and not
renew again unless they see real results from our organization immediately.
Many members do not even understand the purpose of AAPI.
Obviously, these are problems that must be
addressed quickly. It is clear that if AAPI is to survive as an organization,
hard, focused work in a number of areas will be required. This letter is a
first attempt to outline specific actions that I believe need to be taken to
help revive and sustain AAPI.
• The most important issue emerging from the
October Board meeting in Los Angeles is that the purpose of AAPI has not been
clearly articulated and so not clearly communicated to its members and the
professional community.
I think the purpose of AAPI can be summarized
succinctly. The Association of Autonomous Psychoanalysts and Institutes is an
international accrediting organization of independent psychoanalytic
institutes and psychoanalysts devoted to the promotion of multi-disciplinary
and multi-theoretical psychoanalysis.
We believe that psychoanalysis is not the
property of any one academic discipline or any one school of psychoanalysis.
Unlike any other psychoanalytic organization, AAPI considers all mental health
professions as equals and advocates that all schools of psychoanalysis are
taught in a comparative methodology. I think these are ideas that all
individual members of AAPI would agree with, since most of us have devoted our
professional lives to them. I think it is safe to say that all of us wish
that our own psychoanalytic training reflected these ideals (or are glad that
they did), and that many of us are involved in the creation and maintenance of
institutes which do reflect these ideals.
The question frequently heard from individual
members of AAPI is: What does AAPI do for me? This question needs to be
reframed. Many of us belong to organizations like the Sierra Club. What does
the Sierra Club do for us individually? The answer is: Nothing.
But on a national level it does represent our individual ideals, and that is
why we continue to support it. In one way, AAPI is like the Sierra Club.
AAPI does on a national and international level what we members do within our
own institutes: promote equality between the disciplines and the various
schools of psychoanalysis. AAPI is a forum for our multi-disciplinary and
multi-theoretical viewpoint to be given a place alongside those of the more
powerful, long-established psychoanalytic organizations which do not represent
our interests.
But in another way, AAPI is unlike the Sierra
Club, for as psychoanalysts we are at a moment in our histories where
politics—both within psychoanalysis, and between psychoanalysis and the
law—impact many of us. This leads to my second point.
• A second conclusion of the L.A. meeting was
that we must organize immediately to address the problems developing around
the country as state legislatures are beginning to address licensing of
psychoanalysts. If some of this legislation stands, some of our individual
members may not qualify as psychoanalysts. It is possible that some of our
institutes may fold if this kind of legislation continues. Our institute and
individual members need to understand that AAPI is the only organization that
will represent their unique interests in this situation. AAPI can become the
vehicle through which these legislative activities can be addressed, and
challenged if necessary.
At the L.A. meeting, we developed a two-fold,
active response. First, through a political advocacy committee, we will
summarize these issues and communicate them to our members. Second, we will
strategize how best to respond to these issues while consulting with our
membership. It may be that we would join other professional action groups or
even join legal action against these state laws.
• A third conclusion of the L.A. meeting is
that a crucial part of AAPI’s mission is to help spread multi-disciplinary and
multi-theoretical psychoanalysis among the professional community.
To that end, we are establishing a committee
to help develop institutes so that they can qualify to join AAPI. For
example, a European institute has approached AAPI to become an affiliate, but
they lack adequate supervision to meet our criteria. We are developing ways
for AAPI to provide this institute with the necessary supervision so that they
can join us. Further, there are psychoanalytic study groups in American
cities that have approached AAPI for help developing themselves into
institutes, reflecting multi-disciplinary, multi-theoretical psychoanalysis.
Through actions such as these we will spread our vision of psychoanalysis.
• A fourth conclusion of the L.A. meeting was
that the identity of AAPI needs to be strengthened in the psychoanalytic
community, including within AAPI itself. We need to advertise our existence
and our purpose.
In order to accomplish this goal, I am
requesting that Board members of AAPI ask their institutes to include on
brochures and other institute mailings that the institute is a member of
AAPI. I request that Board members see to it that all mailings include a
statement, such as: “X Institute is a member of the Association of
Autonomous Psychoanalysts and Institutes, an international accrediting
organization of independent psychoanalytic institutes devoted to the promotion
of multi-disciplinary and multi-theoretical psychoanalysis.”
I also request that individual members list
that fact that they are AAPI members when listing credential on conference
brochures, etc. For example, “Dr. X is a member of the Association of
Autonomous Psychoanalysts and Institutes, . . . “
I also ask that members of AAPI request that
at institute meetings an announcement is made that the institute is a member
of the Association of Autonomous Psychoanalysts and Institutes.
I believe that all these actions will help
consolidate our group identity, as well as expand our membership.
• A fifth conclusion of the L.A. meeting was
that member institutes do not know very much about each other, and so a
cohesive group identity cannot be formed.
To address this problem, I have asked Board
representatives to send us information about their scientific meetings or
annual conferences, so that we can include the information in our new
quarterly newsletters and on our website. This will be free advertising for
our member institutes to the other individual members of AAPI. Then, for
example, those of us in New York City will know about the conferences
available to us, and it gives us a chance to support other member institutes.
We are planning quarterly newsletters. They
will be published in September (although this first newsletter is being
published the first week of November), December, March, and July. One section
of this newsletter will be a calendar of institute presentations, as well as
news about individual members’ presentations, publications, and study groups.
Please send us information about yourself, and have your Board representatives
send us information about your institute.
We will also feature one of our institutes in
each newsletter, describing its origins, the people who helped develop it, its
particular challenges in representing multi-disciplinary and multi-theoretical
psychoanalysis in its area of the country, etc. The first of these features
will be sent in three weeks, in the second half of this first newsletter.
• A sixth conclusion of the L.A. meeting was
that AAPI needs to be organized so that the good suggestions that are
generated from Board meetings and from individual members can be turned into
concrete results.
In order to implement this conclusion, we need
two things from individual members.
First, we need you to send your ideas to us.
How do you think the vision of AAPI can be better realized? Please send them
to me at
mdclifford@aapionline.org
or to our terrific new administrative director, Myra Karse at
info@aapionline.org.
Second, please volunteer to help us through
our committee work! We are all busy, but an organization such as ours can
stand or fall on the commitment of its members to participate. There is a lot
to be done, but if many of us help, our goals can be accomplished. I am
encouraging committee chairs to use “action-plans” that state the idea, who is
going to implement it, by what time, and who else will do the follow up to see
if the idea has been successfully implemented. Although somewhat pedestrian,
I think we need to concretely state our goals so that we can track how well
they are implemented.
• A seventh conclusion of the L.A. meeting was
that membership must be strengthened, both on an individual and an institute
level.
Over the past six months, we have worked hard
to revive our membership. Our efforts have succeeded. We have more than
twice the members we had six months ago. But we need to continue to work to
get our membership back to where it was soon after the organization was
founded.
I think that responsibility for developing
membership has three levels: the membership committee for AAPI, individual
Board members, and individual members themselves. First, from AAPI, we are
reaching out to all former and current members, asking them to keep their
memberships current. We will send this newsletter to all former members, which
we hope will inspire some renewals. Second, I am requesting that all Board
members take responsibility for contacting those members of their institutes
who have not renewed as AAPI members. On an individual level, members can help
increase membership by encouraging their colleagues to become AAPI members.
All of these actions together will increase our membership.
• An eighth conclusion of the L.A. meeting was
that the board must communicate with each other more frequently than twice
yearly.
To that end, at the L.A. board meeting, we
scheduled a conference call for all board members Friday, December 2, 2005, at
9 p.m. Eastern Stand Time. We will email board members with information about
this conference call, including the agenda.
There are other changes on the horizon. The
website will be redesigned to reflect a logo Alan Frank, L.C.S.W., one of our
individual members, who has also designed stationery for us. The individual
member roster on our website will also be made more useful to our members. We
will have four rosters listing members by name, locale, specialties and
insurance accepted, so that the rosters will be a flexible referral tool. We
hope to have this accomplished by February 1 of next year.
I hope that this letter, long though it is,
gives a sense of the direction I feel AAPI should go. I hope, too, that you
feel more hope than dread about AAPI. I do.
Sincerely,
Michael D. Clifford, M.Div., L.C.S.W.
President, AAPI
