It has started up again. This time it was restarted by a proponent. This tedious and depressing discussion of you know what, featuring the usual repetition, oversimplification, nastiness, and talking past one another, threatens to continue unabated and unchanged on the Members List and the Open Line into the next world, perhaps defining the primary criterion of Psychoanalytic Hell. I am currently reassessing myself to insure that when I die, I go the other way, if by any chance, there IS somewhere to go.

The discussion that provided the opportunity to augment the reputation of you know what was the discussion, initiated by Jane Hall, about the present ineligibility of MSW’s for psychoanalytic education at the New York Psychoanalytic and Columbia Institutes.

Leon Hoffman scolded Jane for politicizing the issue, but Leon did not come out publicly and disclose his view on whether or not his institute should educate MSW’s. Nor, I think, did anyone else, except for Jonathan House, Henry Friedman, and perhaps Arnold Richards (I forget, but his position is well-known). If I have overlooked someone, I apologize. Now, some are now busy distracting us from this issue by again arguing that we protect psychoanalysis from the basically incompetent with you know what.

Today, the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia held a brunch for interested prospective applicants to our psychoanalytic, psychotherapy, and fellowship programs. In attendance were three people who would not be able to study at NYPI and Columbia, but they CAN study with us. One, a business executive in a second career, just completed his MSW at a prestigious local college. Another is a classics professor and lawyer, now interested in our field. The third is an author and teacher of writers. Already a past Fellow at our Center, he is pursuing a clinical education and license as an MSW, and will be back for further learning with us.

Each of them has been inspired by members of our faculty, and wants to immerse him/herself further in our world. In Philadelphia, they CAN go further and ultimately become one of our worthy colleagues. In NYC, they could not train at NYPI or Columbia, and would have to go to a competitor.

NYPI! Columbia! It’s your loss!

Ralph Fishkin

Jeff Seitelman

I think it has been and would continue to be a terrible loss to our field to arbitrarily exclude applicants for Psychoanalytic Training on the basis of their “parent” discipline and a potential return to the “bad old days”.

Of course, and rightly so, it would open the organization and all its constituent Institute/Centers up to the risk of another law suit as well, for the arbitrariness of such an admission standard.

Lastly, we are in an era, when any and all applicants showing requisite interest and talent in our field, need to be encouraged, taken in, and treated like the gems that they are. We have fewer and fewer interested applicants. I do not mean to suggest, therefore, a “take in everyone” approach; but rather, we cannot afford to keep out smart and talented practicioners of any origin.

Jeff Seitelman

Of equal, and on a certain level, perhaps even more serious concern, is the phenomenon of social workers excluding other social workers, which has come to light in the midst of a significant shift in the New York State Education Department’s (NYSED) policies around the practice of the profession. This affects what qualifies as acceptable supervised clinical experience for LCSW licensure in agencies, institutes, and private practice. The result is that many of our LMSW trainees will not be able to apply their supervisory hours towards the LCSW, as our training institutes are not “acceptable” facilities as far as earning hours towards the LCSW. This will not only affect our ability to recruit LMSWs and the concomitant loss to those Training Institutes that do accept MSWs, but it will also result in thousands of patients being abandoned and forced to terminate treatment with LMSWs.

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) – NYC supports NYSED’s stance and has advised against private practice for LMSWs as a path towards the LCSW. It is hard to imagine that many NASW members are not in private practice. Furthermore, most of them would have earned their degrees a long time before this recent shift took place, affording many of them the opportunity to graduate from a graduate social work program and “hang out a shingle.” Why would these same people impede other social workers who might decide to pursue a postgraduate course of training soon after obtaining an MSW?

This facet of exclusion in the form of those who create barriers for their own is a particularly worrisome strain of what Jane Hall describes in her excellent essay.

Ferne Traeger, LCSW

Just for the record I would like to remind everyone that we not just talking about psychologists and social workers, there are a number of members, like myself, who come from the humanities. Such a lineage has a long tradition in psychoanalysis. I believe, as mentioned in a previous article, which was posted on the blog entitled” “Reflections on a Profession,” that our profession must refind its enthusiasm again, the emotional and intellectual force that made it a movement – not simply another profession. Obviously to do that we constantly need new blood, new ideas. Lets argue over the intellectual, emotional and ethical qualities of candidates – what degrees they have, as Freud tried to remind us, are really secondary.

Jerry
Gerald J. Gargiulo, Ph.D.

Education teaches us to conform to the expectations of our teachers and
necessarily involves heirarchies, elitism, specialization and differentiation.
From early childhood to post-doctoral education to continuing education
teachers tend to create others in the image of themselves. Students identify
with and introject teaching whether in the form of rote manuals to the model
of wise elders.

This process is influenced by the ever-changing expecations of cultures, sub-cultures, social classes,
the evolving disciplines of academia, medicine, and the workplace generally.

The problem in all education is how to maintain a dialectic between the known
and the yet to be known. Education is by nature conservative and wary of new ideas
and the curiousity so necessary to growth and progress that threaten the status quo
and the feeling of the safety of the known.

There is an irony in psychoanalysis having been especially conservative
when its teachings and theories privilege an understanding
of the developmental underpinnings of this learning process that include defensive identification,
tendencies for teachers to require conformity and the inevitable oedipal transference struggles and counter-
transferential exclusion of those who don’t “get it.” Awareness of such unconscious contributions to
the learning process might mitigate but never eliminate human nature’s creation of barriers to new
insights and to the “other.”

Fred Sander

Leon Hoffman’s recent note amounts to a lecture delivered to Jane Hall regarding her note strongly objecting to those APsaA Institutes that discriminate against those with MSW degrees when it comes to accepting this degree as a credential that qualifies an individual to be considered for analytic training. My emphasis here is on QUALIFYING AN INDIVIDUAL FOR CONSIDERATION FOR TRAINING. In the old days, whether considered good or bad old days, I well remember when the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute rejected on the initial application as many as 50% of all applicants with MDs. Of course no other degree was acceptable to BPSI and other categories were rejected or really need not apply. Homosexuals who acknowledged their sexuality knew they need not apply and while this wasn’t an overt category anyone who was divorced or a single individual with an active and open sexual life also was unlikely to pass through the portals of BPSI, standards were, after all, supreme and of course not to be questioned.

From my first contact with psychoanalysis in Boston I was struck by the rigidity and self defeating aspect of the selection process. It seemed designed to keep out so many talented individuals and screen in those who seemed to conform to standards of mental health that were frankly hard to justify. Well, we have changed a lot but even in those days the presence of Anna Freud and Erik Erickson seemed to indicate that lay analysts could perform the task of analysis. For the 15 years that I worked with a staff of social work psychotherapists as the director of Boston’s largest academic outpatient clinic I observed and supervised many excellent social work therapists who were imbued with years of actual therapy experience; I knew what is widely known, namely, that the PhD in social work didn’t involve more clinical immersion than the MSW + experience in clinical psychotherapy.

Leon’s assertion that Jane Hall is appealing to emotion rather than reason is not only insulting but it is wrong. His own idea that the exclusion by some institutes such as the NYPI, Columbia and the WAW involves educational standards rather than prejudice obviously is designed to protect the notinnocent at all. These institutes are discriminating against social workers when they exclude them categorically. There is no way around this
since we do train non medical candidates in growing numbers. There is nothing to indicate that a PHD means more clinical experience. Social workers should be accepted by all our Institutes but on the basis of the sense of clinical talent and intuitive responsiveness to patients. To do otherwise means treating social workers as a special class of untouchables. This is discrimination and nothing resembling academic standards. Jane Hall deserves recognition for telling it “like it is”. Instead, Leon has delivered a patronizing lecture that is the very opposite of the response that her note should have elicited.

Henry J. Friedman

Frank Summers, Ph.D.,ABPP
333 East Ontario, Suite 4509B
Chicago, IL 60611
http://www.franksummersphd.com

I have taught (not to self-aggrandize) courses in the MSW program at CSU Long Beach when Jim Kelly (current Pres of NASW) was in charge (chair). I have always felt that my colleagues in social work were often on the front lines and vital in handling the huge needs of our public. I would back up anything to continue giving them their rightful and vital place in our organization with full respect and priviledges.

Jeff Seitelman