What Distinguishes My Candidacy for President-Elect

Dear Colleagues (especially the undecided, dispirited, or confused),

My apologies for yet another post, but it seems that my letters and postings about inclusiveness, diversity, democracy, and reconciliation spurred first a flurry of negative responses and have now brought on postings that, in some ways, nearly copy my words and positions. But the differences among the candidates are great, and this is a very important election, so please vote, and vote thoughtfully.

HERE ARE WHERE THE IMPORTANT DIFFERENCES LIE:

I have said repeatedly, and have long supported, that we need an inclusive and democratic vision of our future. (Among other things this means absolute equal rights and opportunity for social workers, academics, psychologists etc.) Other candidates say ‘yes, but we’re all analysts….’, as though equality can just be assumed.

I have repeatedly raised the issue of diversity (in race, gender, sexual orientation, culture, and discipline, etc.) and our need to embrace diversity as a foundation for creativity and progress. Other candidates have seemed loathe to grapple with this fact in any depth.

I have spoken strongly for our need to attend to our history and to work to reconcile the exclusionary wounds and abuses that have marginalized those within and without our organization. My more traditional opponents think we do best to ignore that history, as if we could possibly move forward or bring people together without fully comprehending it.

I have written about the freedom that candidates need to have in choosing the analyst who’s best for them and how, through so-called local option, we can begin to make this happen. The more traditional candidates speak about ‘national standards’, not seeming to realize how our exclusionary and arbitrary national standards have diminished our prominence in the world.

I do favor national standards (just as have been ecumenically designed by the Consortium of major psychoanalytic organizations) and a certification system that is national and independent of our organization, as is the case in all other clinical and academic fields. Those who are more traditional want to obscure this issue, either by diminishing it, by delaying it, by ‘task forcing’ it, or by acting as if all hell (a 3-letter word) would let loose if such changes occurred.

As I’ve noted before, we are at a ‘tipping’ point in our organization, and the choice is to continue with business as usual or to take some creative and evolutionary steps to help our organization thrive as the robust, diverse, and creative umbrella for psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis that it has the potential to be.

Please do contact me if you have any questions or concerns (email wrprocci@sbcglobal.net, or phone 626-793-7957). And please don’t neglect to vote.

P.S. As an aside, it amuses me somewhat to be depicted as ‘radical’ or ‘divisive’. In case you don’t know, I have been the Treasurer of APsaA for the past six years. I’m a middle-aged white guy who walks around our meetings in three-piece suits, quietly listens to the perspective of others, works easily and collaboratively with my colleagues, and rarely utters a four-letter word (though they don’t escape the momentary fantasy).

So, in a sense, I’m an establishment figure who greatly values our organization, who gets things done in productive and cooperative ways, and whose ideas about governance, outreach, research, and practice overlap on many points with our more conservative candidates. But I also think that the differences I’ve outlined above are crucial to the future success and creativity of our organization, and qualify me as the best candidate to lead all of our members.

Warren R. Procci, Candidate for President-Elect, APsaA