Section IV Report - april 2003 meetings

Barry Dauphin, Ph.D., MSPP Section IV Representative

The most recent meetings of Section IV (Local Chapters) of Division 39 took place at the Division 39 Spring Meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on Friday April 4, 2003 (Senate Meeting) and Saturday April 5, 2003 (Open Meeting).  The minutes of the August 2002 Senate meeting were approved.  The 2002 financial report of Section IV was reviewed.   The 2003 budget proposal was reviewed and accepted unanimously.

On Friday the Section IV representative to the Division 39 Board reported on the January Division 39 board meeting. Several new appointments to the Division 39 Board were announced.  Considering our recent communications concerning the CE issue, I wanted to bring to people’s attention that Bill MacGillivray, Ph.D. will be replaced as CE Chair by Pat Strassberg, Ph.D.

Division 39 has created something similar to the Section IV graduate student sponsorship.  It is called the Helen Block Lewis award and will pay for one graduate student to attend the annual Spring Meeting and covers all expenses.

The Division 39 president, Jaine Darwin, Ph.D., has several initiatives.  She is very interested in outreach and wants psychoanalysts to get out of their offices for both a working function and a function of letting the public know better what analysts do.   An ad hoc committee was appointed to look at the function of research within the Division.  Section VI (Research) has been losing members and no longer qualifies as a voting Section within the Division.  In order to attract greater attendance, the Executive Committee of Division 39 voted to change the fee schedule for Division 39 meetings.  The fee for Canada, Western Europe, Australia and Japan will be $130.  For Third World countries it will be $90.

Division membership is up.  Ideas were discussed for increasing membership.  APA has changed the rules for dues exempt status (new age is 69—previously it was 65; must be member in good standing for 29 years—previous it was 25 years).  Division 39 retained its 5 council seats on APA board.  Many Division 39 members give all 10 of their votes to the Division.

The Division is expecting a budget deficit.  Greater expenses were incurred than were planned for. Especially noted were the multicultural conference, the website and the directory.  The website is a big project and is a one-time expense, and the cost of this was not known at the beginning of the year.  The APA CEO (Norman Anderson, Ph.D.) was invited to address the Division 39 Board.  The Board expressed its concern about marginalized visibility within APA.  Noted was a relative paucity of citing psychoanalytic research in the Monitor.  Issues regarding the extent to which psychoanalysis has changed were addressed.  Dr. Anderson asked to be supplied with materials to help him talk to community and business leaders about the value of psychoanalysis.

Especially interesting from the Council of Representatives were Bryant Welch’s observations that there was a divide between the researcher/academicians and the clinicians.  Those who practice are considered disrespectful of science.  Issues of possible future legislation regarding competency-based vs. evidenced based treatment; issues about what counts as science and as evidence.  

The “Intersection” meeting (a meeting among the nine sections of Division 39) was reported on by Bill MacGillivray.  Two sections have lost status as voting sections (VI & III).  Section III is the women and gender section.  There has been continued discussion of losing unjuried time for the APA meetings and sections having to share or rotate.  Dr. Saxe suggested that we actively communicate that Section IV isn’t like the other sections and deserves a special status.  Section IV is the only section which is not an interest group or topical section.  Rather it represented about one fourth of the entire division and is the only section which is a true cross representation of the entire division.  

The current Section IV president Marsha McCary, Ph.D., wants to make the Division more visible and relevant to local chapters.  She asked for a discussion of this from the local chapters.  Various ways of communicating what Division 39 is to members at the local chapter level were addressed.  We discussed the educational initiative, i.e., speakers’ bureau.  Concern was expressed that there has been very little activity on that front. Andrea Corn, Ph.D., will be too busy with planning the Florida Spring meeting to continue to organize this activity.

The Continuing Education program looks to continue.  We expect that the Division is likely to get 5-year approval at the next request.  The Public Information committee is conducting a media training session at the Conference.  They are attempting to help members to develop better media skills and to communicate more effectively using sound bites. 

The Senate discussed the possibility of having a two-year term for presidency of Section IV.  The Division has just moved to this, with Jaine Darwin, Ph.D., being the first president to serve two years.  David Downing, Psy.D. (president elect), was approached about whether he’d be willing to serve two years if we went to that format.    After discussion the Senate voted on a motion to change the by-laws so that Section IV would have a two year presidency.  The motion passed unanimously.  The change needs to be written and voted on by the local chapters.  This is to happen in the upcoming election.

The position of secretary is open in the upcoming election.  Bill MacGillivray, Ph.D., is undecided about whether he will run again.  The ballots will be sent out by the past president.  Dr. Saxe and I are on the election committee.  There will be no president’s election this year.  Thus, next year we will not have a president-elect but will have a past president.  In years where we have a president elect we will not have a past president and vice versa.  This extends a president’s commitment to four years instead of three.  

We discussed two issues to potentially bring to the Division’s attention: HIPAA (and privacy) and Prescription Privileges.  The discussion was somewhat brief on these issues due to time constraints.  We have been informed via the Intersection meeting that the Division 39 Board does not want to touch the prescription privileges issue.  The APA is for it, so that’s the end of the story.  We explored whether having some kind of forum for discussion might be something that the Division would enable (such as a panel discussion at a conference, stuff in the newsletter, etc.).  The idea was not to lobby the board to take a position but to discuss it at the board and elsewhere so that we can be in a position as a large group to discuss and understand the possible ramifications and effects of this on psychoanalysis per se and practicing psychoanalytic work.  

There is a possible new local chapter to develop in Portland, Oregon.  There are currently two institutes in Portland, one affiliated with the American and the other independent.  They want to develop a local chapter.  

On Saturday, Andrea Corn, Ph.D. reported on the Division 39 Board meeting.    The new version of the website was launched on April 1, 2003.  It is www.Division39.org   The directory will be on the website.  Members of Division 39 will be able to edit their own information themselves. There will be members’ only sections of the website as well.  Section IV will be able to put information online as well when everything has been set up.  Those interested in joining Division 39 will be able to print out membership application though they will not be able to pay online.

There was discussion about a potentially very significant benefit of membership.  The Division was discussing the possibility that all members could be able to get access to the PEP CD-ROM (Psychoanalytic Electronic Publication).  This contains select psychoanalytic journals from the 1920s forward in electronic form.  This contains all the benefits of electronic storage, e.g., being able to search the data base.  In the future this data base will include the Standard Edition.  Despite high hopes, the makers of the PEP CD-ROM have since nixed the idea.

The ad hoc task force regarding psychoanalytic research is working to develop information to send to the APA Chief Executive Officer.  They are wanting to organize information about the evidentiary basis for psychoanalysis, etc., so that the Division and psychoanalysis get greater visibility within APA and elsewhere.  In August the Education and Training Committee will be sponsoring a workshop about teaching psychoanalytic psychology.  There was also discussion about Division 39 representatives to APA Council attempting to get APA to promote the 25th anniversary of Division 39.

There are efforts to get more graduate students to join Division 39.  So far, there have been no submissions for the Stephen Mitchell Award for grad student paper.  The membership chair of Division 39 (Joe Couch, Ph.D.) attended the Open Meeting.  He indicated that membership recruitment has been good but membership retention has not been.  He noted that there have been philosophical differences for some with APA.  That is, there are many people who would like to join Division 39 but do not want to join APA (a requirement for psychologists eligible to join APA). 

All local chapter representatives reported on activities of their local chapters.  A quarter to a third of local chapters seemed to have experienced a decline in attendance at conferences/meetings over the last several years.  For some, conferences which had been considered a money making activity have now become break- even events at best.  Another concern echoed throughout numerous chapters is that there are often few people available to actually do the work of the chapter.  Many have had difficulty in officer recruitment, etc.