This statement reflects my leadership vision for APsA at a moment when differences in emphasis can sometimes be misunderstood.
Leadership involves decisions about where to place attention within a complex organization. When I speak about strengthening the clinical and educational core of psychoanalytic work, I am not suggesting limits on where it may be practiced or applied. I am speaking about leadership emphasis: about how priorities are set, sustained, and stewarded at this moment in APsA's life, and about sustaining the internal conditions that allow a diverse and evolving field to remain coherent, rigorous, and generative.
My conviction is that a strong professional organization begins with internal stewardship. This orientation is not a narrowing of psychoanalysis. It is a way of enabling its plurality.
A healthy APsA does not prescribe a single professional direction or elevate one form of engagement over others. Rather, it creates the conditions that allow members to pursue the paths most meaningful to them - whether in clinical work with individuals, children, couples, or families; research; teaching and training; institutional leadership; community work; developing theory in new directions; or applications of psychoanalytic thinking in public life. Each of these contributions is equally valued.
This requires leadership that can tolerate difference, sustain dialogue, and maintain a shared professional home in which diverse contributions can thrive. I see the role of President-Elect not as directing the field toward a single destination, but as stewarding the internal conditions that allow psychoanalysis - in its many forms - to flourish across generations.
I offer this leadership stance for your consideration.
