 |
|
|
|
|
|
PRESIDENT'S
COLUMN July 2002 I plan to use this third of four columns that I get to write as president of the Division to update the membership on a number of areas where we have seen some exciting developments in our initiatives. So please take a look. It does contain important information for all our membership. Quiz What do the following people have in common? U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone, Steven Cooper, Jessica Benjamin, Jody Davies, Christopher Bollas, Malcolm Slavin, Sam Gerson, Phil Ringstrom, Salman Ahktar, Frank Summers, Muriel Dimen, Stephen Seligman, Marion Tolpin, Jim Fosshage, Ana-Maria Rizzuto, Donnel Stern, Allan Schore, Dianne Elise, Peter Shabad, Ruth Stein, Noelle Oxenhandler, and... [modestly] even me? Answer All of them, and many more, will be speaking at the next Division 39 Spring Meeting, April 2-6, 2003 in Minneapolis. In addition there will be a special performance of Six Degrees of Separation at the Guthrie Theater, followed by discussion with analysts and theater staff. So this is to call your attention to the more detailed announcement elsewhere in this Newsletter about our upcoming Spring Meeting. As you see, the program will be outstanding. More than Meets the Eye Despite the inherent biases some of us from the East and West Coasts may sometimes have, there is a lot to see and do in the middle of the country. Before I had the opportunity to teach in Minnesota, which I now have many times, I didn't think there was much out there (aside from my sister, who I imagined stuck in a place where everyone was blonde, terminally nice and said "okie dokie" or "you betcha" every 30 seconds). But that was before I took a lovely drive through scenic country towns along the banks of the Mississippi, went on a Riverboat from historic Stillwater, a town with classic Victorian architecture, and sampled the incredible array of Vietnamese food and Hmong arts and crafts available around the Twin cities. The Minneapolis-St. Paul area has a very large population of Vietnamese and Somali immigrants, both of whose cuisines are well represented, and the largest settlement of Hmong people in the US. The Hmong are an ethnic, mountain tribal group from Laos, who came here as a consequence of the Vietnam war. Their special crafts, needlework and food are available in various places around the Twin cities. Okay, I will quit here as I don't work for the chamber of commerce, but I wrote this to call attention to those who might not know just how interesting, multicultural, and scenically beautiful this area really is. And on top of that, the program rivals all of the best Division 39 Spring meetings we have had. So, if you are planing to submit a panel or paper, you won't be disappointed in the setting or the audience. Do plan to join us at the next Spring Meeting. Linda Giacomo and her co-chair, Tom Greenspon have done an incredible job already. Speaking of incredible jobs, I want to thank once again Elaine Martin and her wonderful committee for the recent New York Spring meeting. The program illustrated the range and depth of perspectives represented in Division 39. Our ability to come together under one psychoanalytic tent is remarkable. And we are most fortunate that Elaine Martin has agreed to co-chair the Division's Program Committee this year, and take over as chair when Jaine Darwin assumes the presidency in January. The APA Presidency One of our members, Laura Barbanel, is running for president of APA and the Board of the Division has unanimously voted to strongly support her candidacy. And Laura, who came in first in the nominations, has a real chance of winning, if we back her strongly. Her victory would be more than nice for psychoanalytic psychologists. It is vital. Practice, especially of the kind that we do, work that values the individual and does not try to develop recipes for treatment, is under siege. We need someone as APA president who really understands what we do and why. Laura is currently Professor and Program Head of the Graduate Program of School Psychology at Brooklyn College of CUNY. She is on the faculty of the Manhattan Institute for Psychoanalysis and an Adjunct Faculty Member of the Derner Institute of Adelphi University. She maintains a clinical practice in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. She has an extensive record of service to the Division and APA. Take a close look at her statement elsewhere in this newsletter. So when the APA ballot comes out, please vote and rank Laura number 1. This is vital in the arcane Hare system of voting APA uses. And there are two other practitioners running, James Bray and Kathleen McNamara. It would help the Division to rank them after Laura. This is Important: On to the Web By the time you get this newsletter, work will have already begun on our new website. The web services will, be provided by PsyBC. The web contract was awarded after a public solicitation of providers, careful review by our Internet Committee chaired by Larry Zelnick, and the decision on the contract was made by the Board on the basis of the quality of the proposal, in a blind review. As it happens, PsyBC is run by one of our members, Dan Hill, so we doubly benefit from a great provider as well as someone who knows our field from the inside. The web construction is part of a broad based strategy to use the internet to increase services to members, decrease expenditures on our publications and mailings, increase our sense of community, and facilitate the efficiency of our working groups. Among the features you will find on the new website will be an online membership directory that will always be up to date (you will be able to change your own data entry at any time) and will save us the $20,000+ that we spend on printing and mailing the directory. And this database may serve as the basis for a referral service we may institute in a future iteration of the site as it evolves. Other features will be more immediate access to our newsletter and its archives, abstracts of our journal, a members only section that will allow us provide you with important, "in-house" information, subsites for each of the Sections, a content management system that will allow us to maintain the site by ourselves thereby saving on maintenance costs, and up to date information about our conferences and other activities. I want to emphasize that the site has the potential to pay for itself and quickly allow us to divert funds that now go to the post office and printers to services that directly benefit all of us. We can only accomplish this goal if we have your email address. Rest assured that we will never sell them and will only send you important announcements. If you have not already done so please send your email address to Ruth Helein at div39@namgmt.com And do keep in mind that the printed directory you will receive in the coming moths will be the last one to be mailed. For the future, our directory will be always up to date and available on the web to all members. National Multicultural Conference The National Multicultural Conference and Summit 2003 will take place at the Renaissance Hollywood Hotel in California on January 23-24, 2003. Division 39 is one of the co-sponsors of the conference, entitled "The Psychology of Race/Ethnicity, Gender, Sexual Orientation, and Disability:Celebrating Our Children, Families, and Seniors." As our profession and our patients grow more diverse, we must evaluate how to adapt our theory and practice to meet the challenges of this pluralism. The conference, organized by Divisions 35, 44, 17, and 45 of APA drew over 900 registrants in 2001. We want all Divisions and attendees to be aware of our serious commitment to diversity. In addition to our sponsoring role, we will show our support by holding our winter 2003 Board meeting in at there on January 24, 2003, following the conference. We want to encourage our membership to attend and to be a voice in this dialogue. The last conference sold out quickly, so we urge members to sign up as soon as the registration is announced. We will send the information out on our listserve as soon as it becomes available. Bylaws change: Recently the membership voted by the required 2/3 majority to pass two bylaws. Both are important for the Division. The first enables psychologists who are licensed by their state, but who are unable to join APA to become full members in Division 39. How can this be? Certain states, such as California, fully license graduate programs to grant degrees, but for one reason or another, those institutions are not accredited by the regional higher education accrediting organization. Some choose not to apply for a variety of reasons. But their graduates are nevertheless doctoral level, licensed psychologists. APA does not permit any graduate of an institution not regionally accredited to join, ever. There is no remedy. So this by law change, which is permitted by APA, allows these licensed psychologists to become full members of the Division, although they may not hold APA sanctioned office (e.g. they cannot be on the APA Council). The second bylaw establishes a two year term for the president, commencing with Jaine Darwin's term. Advocated for a long time by past-president, Maureen Murphy and others, this will be a welcome change for the Division (well, maybe not for Jaine, but she has agreed). The presidency does take a lot of work, a lot of time, even I finally admit that! This change will enable future presidents to do more than learn on the job and then exit before they can see things through. Committees One of the commitments I made on assuming the presidency was to strengthen our committees by clarifying their charge, insure that they were real working committees that did more than exist in name only, and appoint graduate students serve on as many of them as I could. We have been at least partly successful. We do now have graduate students serving on almost all committees, and most of them are hard at work on their tasks. In the next newsletter I will update the membership on what some of our committees have accomplished. For the moment, if you are going to APA in Chicago, look for the program on the teaching of psychoanalysis on the undergraduate level sponsored by our Education Committee and for a special program organized by our graduate students on what we have to "unlearn" when we enter the field. It is very gratifying that we can count on our graduate students for some of the most interesting and provocative programming. Best wishes for a good summer! Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D. Jonathan H. Slavin, Ph.D.,
|
