The Journey to Our Future

Dear Colleagues:

This is my final letter of the campaign (perhaps one or two too many for some of you, but please plow ahead at least a sentence or two).

I recently had occasion to attend an event at Ellis Island. As I walked through the Great Hall there, I thought of my grandparents and the millions of other uneducated and unsophisticated immigrants who traveled here in steerage at the start of the 20th century. What a transformation America wrought in them and their descendants, many of whom are now well established as managers, professionals, and leaders.

I found myself thinking about risks, journeys, and the power of time. Here we are a hundred years later, many of us children and grandchildren of those bold travelers. And now our venerable organization is moving into its second century too. But do we current travelers have any ideas where our psychoanalytic descendents will be three generations from now? Have we the courage our forebears had, to strike out towards a new world that can support a rich future? Can we even imagine that new world?

We all want an APsaA that is not just managing to keep afloat, but actively growing, with a membership that represents the full creativity, diversity, and ambition of the mental health and academic worlds: an APsaA that embraces, incubates, and generates ideas that enhance the vitality of psychoanalytic theory and practice; psychoanalytic institutes that are educational resources not only for analysts and (by extension) their patients, but also for the mental health community, the academy, and anyone else who is interested in self-knowledge and emotional development; thoughtful institutes whose forms of teaching build on and expand from our traditional models, exposing candidates and students of psychology everywhere to vigorous ideas and rigorous thinking; lively institutes that foster exciting and meaningful research in collaboration with other important disciplines. In short, we want future institutes that are truly centers of psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic research, with arms stretched into the communities who desperately need our ideas and practices. Great universities do this, and so do progressive governments. But, of course, by definition, there are risks.

Forgive me if this sounds self-serving, but what I think distinguishes my candidacy for president is that I do not know what forms the future will take, whereas the conservative agenda in our organization concentrates on self-preservation and self-reproduction. I do not think that will work. Nurturing a future that has value and meaning requires that we create right now the conditions under which our organization can grow and thrive. This means a wider expansion of our democratic ideals, a fuller embrace of diversity (of race, culture, theory, profession), and a greater openness of communication and exchange, all of which together provide the kind of evolutionary catalyst that keeps organizations and ideas from marginalization, fossilization and, ultimately, extinction.

I am no pollyanna here, but we are at a juncture in our history where we need some fresh air, some renewed boldness, and some hope and humility. Like any human being I don’t always rise to the expectation of my own ideals and, of course, I’ve made mistakes. But with your help and my leadership, we can all rise together and fulfill this achievable ideal of a thriving and enlightened future for our organization.