Responding to Member Questions in the 2025 APsA President-Elect Election
Questions originally raised by Dionne Powell to the APsA Election Discussion Listserv on Dec 24, 2025
Across APsA, I conceptualize engagement and disengagement on a continuum. Some colleagues have fully withdrawn or resigned their membership. Others stayed, but pulled back from committees, training roles, or national organizational activities that once mattered deeply to them. On all sides of recent conflict, colleagues have carried real hurt. It isn’t useful—or fair—to weigh whose pain was greater or smaller. The real loss is the silence itself. When any member steps back, the whole community feels the gap.
I also want to honor the work of the Holmes Commission and the authors of the 2023 report: Dorothy E. Holmes, PhD (Chair), Dionne R. Powell, MD (Co-Chair), Anton Hart, PhD (Co-Chair), and Beverly J. Stoute, MD (Co-Chair). Their report gave us thoughtful recommendations for addressing harm caused by othering. It also asked us to notice strain earlier, consult more, and do better sooner, together. That work continues to offer us tools for both repair and prevention.
I see leadership as building a container where free expression can survive disagreement, critique can be healthy, and repair remains possible. Not because we all think the same, but because we agree to think together long enough to understand each other again.
I hold a clear vision about re-engagement and rupture-to-repair work. But I do not see it as a fixed end point. I see it as a starting place. If elected, my intention would be to refine this early, with the Board and APsA members, inviting healthy critique, real challenge, and meaningful input. In that way, the direction we set becomes course-corrected, shared, and co-owned—carried forward through governance, institutes, societies, and centers, not held by one person alone.
Re-engaging institute, society, and center-based colleagues who have pulled back
Our member institutes, societies, and centers are what link our local communities to APsA nationally. What connects us is our shared mission: education, training, supervision, scholarship, practice development, and the advancement of the field.
Based on current conditions, my leadership would emphasize:
- Small, opt-in working groups that include representatives from the national APsA organization—Board Directors, department heads, and committee chairs—and representatives from institutes, societies, and centers. Their purpose would be to study disengagement, silence, rupture, othering, and the conditions that support renewed participation, and to share insights outward so the work of some can strengthen all.
- APsA committee and department engagement sessions, designed as mentored, supported “on-ramps” into national organizational life. Members ought to be able to return because they want to, not because they’re expected to.
I see the Town Halls co-led by Dan Prezant and Bonnie Buchele as a meaningful example of this model already at work. Attendance averages around 30–35 participants. They are small, but the work is still meaningful when ideas are shared outward and studied together. In group analytic work, depth and continuity matter more than size. The work of some can benefit many without requiring everyone to do the same thing at the same time.
Repairing hurt and reducing repetition
The Holmes Commission report reminds us that harm reduction works best when we notice the early signs of othering and rupture, seek regular consultation from experts, and build shared habits of community engagement early, together. This is about shared accountability to the process, and to each other.
To support repair as a forward movement rather than repetition of past divides, I would emphasize these commitments:
- Co-created norms for respectful disagreement and transparent communication;
- A trained facilitation and dialogue resource pool for moments when conversation collapses or rupture occurs; and
- Ongoing scholarly and group-learning discussions, grounded in our core mission—psychoanalytic education and training, practice strengthening, and advancing our clinical and scholarly work.
In this way, strain becomes something we study, metabolize, learn from, and use. Not something we replay. We would stay in dialogue long enough to think again, repair relational breaks when they happen, and renew a shared sense of professional belonging.
Looking Ahead
If elected to President-Elect, I look forward to collaborating closely with Bonnie Buchele, the Board, and APsA members to refine the internal conditions for deeper engagement, shared thinking, and the well-being of our professional home. Bonnie and I share convergent interests in analytic, institutional group work as one important engine for strengthening dialogue and the health of APsA.
With gratitude for this community, I believe repair and renewed collegial life are possible when we care for the processes that hold us together.
