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Although dated 2006 this article is still very informative
for up to date Div 39 info go here)
Below is an informative Division 39 Report about Section
IV.
By: Bill MacGillivray As most of you know, APS is part of the Division of Psychoanalysis (39) of the American Psychological Association (APA). As such, we are linked to both organizations in a number of important, and not so important ways. APS is organized as part of Section IV, the Section of Local Chapters, with 31 groups around the country that function more or less the way APS does. In order to belong to Section IV (and Division 39), our chapter pays yearly dues amounting to about $120 (or $4.00 per Division member). Another responsibility for local chapters is to send a representative of the local chapter to Section IV meetings twice a year. I currently serve as the representative. Local chapters actually predate the formation of the Division, and, as such, we have always had a more or less unique status within the Division. Up until recently, only members of APA were eligible to join the Division. While non-psychologists may now join as Allied Professionals without belonging to APA, they are not able to run for office, or vote in Division elections. At some point in the near future, there will be enough Allied Professionals to elect a representative to the Division Board, which will provide some sort of representation. In contrast, all current local chapters admit mental health professionals as full members with full voting rights. Some chapters extend full membership to graduate students; some admit anyone interested in psychoanalysis to full membership, whether mental health professional or not. Despite the evidence that local chapters have been able to succeed and thrive by admitting all professionals to membership, the Division as a whole appears to remain skeptical that somehow its identity as a psychologist group will be diluted if non-psychologists are admitted to full membership. One last point that sometimes confuses members: psychologists can only belong to the Division if they are members of APA, so we have the curious situation that social worker can join a psychologist organization, but a psychologist cannot, unless they are willing to join APA. This contrast between local chapter governance and the Division has made for interesting challenges and many local chapter folks who have gotten involved in Section IV have gone onto the Division Board. The last five presidents of the Division have previously served as local chapter representatives to Section IV: David Ramirez, Jaine Darwin, Jonathan Slavin, Maureen Murphy and Laurie Wagner. Section IV has spearheaded a number of initiatives, including sponsoring the Allied Professional membership category. Section IV also failed in its strenuous efforts to obtain voting rights for Allied Professionals. Since Section IV, along with all sections, has the right to present an invited panel during Division meetings (Spring Meeting and APA Convention), this has been another way for members “from the hinterlands” to get involved in the Division. I think it is a fair observation that despite the examples cited above, most people involved in local chapters have tended to see their local group as relatively unconnected to the Division. Over the last several years, there have been a number of initiatives directed toward local chapters, including a Speaker’s Bureau and a tape library that chapters can access. Despite attempts to make these services known, they have rarely been accessed. It is also fair to say that most local chapter people who are eligible to join Division 39 have not done so. The most recent figures suggest that only one-fourth of the members of local chapters belong to Division 39. APS statistics are in line with this estimate as well. The issues and concerns that face the Division (and Section IV) may often seem quite removed from our local group. In many respects this is neither good nor bad. In our own case, APS has done quite well in developing programs and maintaining its identity without looking to the larger groups to which we belong. There are a number of events and initiatives at the division level that I would like to review to illustrate how we are connected: · Spring Meetings: The annual meeting of the division is the most important and valuable way for members to take part in, and contribute to, psychoanalytic learning and teaching on a national level. This 3 1Ú2-day event typically attracts 600-1000 members with a wide range of presentations. This year the meeting will be held in Miami Beach at the Fontainebleau and many APS members contributed to this effort including John Auerbach, Jack Barlow, Bev Gibbons, Jim Gorney, and Kathryn White. Next year the meeting will be in New York City. · APA Convention: Although a much smaller part of its mission, the Division presents a program each year. This year the meeting will be in Honolulu; next year it will be in Washington, DC · Publications are probably the biggest ticket items for the Division and there are three publications issued on a 4-times a year basis: a journal, Psychoanalytic Psychology, a newsletter, Psychoanalytic-Psychologist, and Psychoanalytic Abstracts, which presents summaries of journals and books in the area of psychoanalytic thought · The Division seeks to forge connections with other groups within APA. One ongoing commitment has been to the Multicultural Summit and Conference held every other year. Next year it will be held January 27-28 in Hollywood. The conference was the brainchild of several leaders in various APA Divisions to establish a forum for discussion of multicultural issues, although the agenda has expanded in recent years to included sexual orientation and disability as areas of interest. The division’s involvement has come with some risk from “both sides” as advocacy groups have had to consider that psychoanalytic thinking might still be relevant to contemporary concerns, and psychoanalytic practitioners have been asked to consider how overly narrow views of “normality” have been propagated by certain versions of psychoanalytic theory and thought. For many years, the Division has participated with Divisions 29 and 42 on an Interdivisional Task Force to address managed care and other practitioner issues and to work through the Practice Directorate to push APA to take an active stand to protect psychotherapy and clinical practice. · The Division has also been working in the area of the wider psychoanalytic community through an organization called the Psychoanalytic Consortium. The most significant accomplishment of this group has been to reach a compromise on issue of psychoanalytic training that may eventually lead to establishment of postgraduate training standards in psychoanalytic education. The Division has also had close ties to the National Coalition of Mental Health Professionals and Consumers and has contributed money to its efforts to protect privacy, access and quality for patients. · On a more scholarly note, the division seeks to advance psychoanalytic education in a variety of ways including assisting in formation of local institutes. Although APA does not allow a formal relationship between the division (as a voluntary membership organization) and psychoanalytic institutes, a number of institutes have emerged, partly though Division leadership (Education and Training Committee) and partly through local chapter initiatives. Examples include Southeast Florida Institute for Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy and the Toronto Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis. Of course, the division played a prominent role years ago in sponsoring the GAPPP lawsuit that eventually forced the American Psychoanalytic Association to allow psychologists to become candidates for psychoanalytic training in their institutes. The division has recently agreed to form a partnership with PsyBC, an online psychoanalytic educational enterprise to develop courses, workshops and discussion groups to expand the reach of other education efforts. In other words, it may be possible for a group that has presented during the Spring Meeting to turn their effort into a teaching module that will reach many more people. Rather than publish a book, an author or authors might instead present their work as a seminar and develop a more interactive way of communicating ideas to a wider group of interested individuals. · Recently, the Division funded the electronic digitalization of the first years of its journal, and convinced the its current publisher (APA) to allow the entire journal to eventually become available as part of the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing (P-E-P) project that is developing as a premier psychoanalytic library available in electronic format. This is a project that will revolutionize psychoanalytic scholarship and provide fully searchable texts of major journals as well as writings of key theorists, including a complete text of the Standard Edition. Other initiatives have included developing a pool of book reviewers for the APA journal, Contemporary Psychology, to correct the fact that psychoanalytic books have rarely been reviewed in APA publications. Finally, the Division’s newsletter will also be placed onto an APA site that will further spread information about psychoanalytic ideas and concerns. Readers may be interested to know that all these efforts have been spearheaded by Nancy McWilliams, who recently presented at our Fall Conference. · The Division has also attempted to facilitate communication both within and without the organization with the establishment of a website that contains information about all the component parts of the division with updated information on its activities. The division also maintains a listerv to rapidly communicate relevant ‘breaking news.” · There are two major subgroups within the division: Committees/Liaisons and Sections (although arguably the local chapters are a special case, even though they are grouped organizationally as a section). Several committees are very active and have been alluded to earlier. The Multicultural Concerns Committee under Dolores Morris, and the Committee on Sexual Identities, under Dennis Debiak, have been instrumental in moving the division toward closer cooperation and collaboration with other APA Divisions, and in general have highlighted the division’s and psychoanalysis’s commitment to a broader vision of itself. The Outreach Committee, under Marylou Lionells, has been very active in identifying and publicizing the efforts of division (and other) members and groups who have gotten involved in community projects, such as “A Home Within,” which provides ongoing psychotherapy to children in foster care, as well as individual efforts of volunteers in the Division who have worked in the area of trauma and PTSD following in the wake of 9/11. The Division’s Council Representatives work within APA Council to advance our concerns. The Division wields quite a lot of influence with 5 council representatives, far more than other divisions of APA, thanks to the apportionment votes of division members who typically cast all their ballots for the division. Of course, APS has extensively utilized the Continuing Education Program, currently chaired by Patricia Strasberg; and this program serves about 20 local chapters, several Sections and the Division Spring Meeting CE Program · That brings us to the Sections, which also have their outreach and educational efforts. Many of us remember when Section I (Psychologist Psychoanalytic Practitioners) held their board meeting in Knoxville several years ago, and they continue to visit local chapters on a yearly basis. Section II (Children and Adolescents) has been active in seeking to bring “A Home Within” to a number of communities and has established a listerv for interested clinicians. Section V (Psychologist Psychoanalyst Clinicians) and Section VIII (Couple and Family Therapy and Psychoanalysis) also have listervs for interested clinicians and Section V has a website which offers a Home Study Program. Section VI (Psychoanalytic Research Society) is developing an educational document that will summarize research that supports and validates depth therapy that can be used as “talking points” in addressing media interest as well as the general public. Ironically, this document may be most needed to address the unthinking skepticism of many of our peers who have taken to dismissing psychoanalytic treatment as unnecessary and unhelpful without troubling to review the relevant leterature. Section IX (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility) reaches out (and in) in multiple ways to address social issues, including impact of war and trauma, class and poverty, as well as erosion of a public space for thought and reflection (including psychoanalytic thought). I hope that you have “hung in there” and read this article. I had an explicit purpose to convince you that the activities and initiatives of the division are important and worthwhile, and relevant to local chapter concerns. I do not think that this will result in every APS member heading off for the Spring Meeting, or joining a section of the division, or investing in one of its projects. I do hope to convince everyone that our connection to this larger organization is important and even vital to the preservation and protection of our craft. I do not think that the division is the sole organization that can do this, and there are many other groups that do as much or more. I have even surprised myself with this glowing encomium to the division, unused as I am to praising the division in many circumstances. I do hope that some of our members will take an interest in one or more of the issues noted above and become more active. If you are a division member, read the journal; join a section; attend a meeting. If you are not a member, please consider becoming part of this wider community. Contact Ruth Helein by phone (602-212-0511), fax (602-212-9692) or email (Div39@namgmt.com) for membership application, or go online to www.division 39.org and follow the links. Cost is $75 a year. William A. MacGillivray, Ph.D. 7 Forest Court, Knoxville, TN 37919 Tel & Fax: 865-584-8400