Dear Members:

The following letter serves as your 2018 Annual (Virtual) Membership Meeting. In it, you will find the yearly reports from key board members. In general, here is the State of the Society:

Overall, APS is vibrant and healthy and thriving. We have close to 100 members, 25 of whom are students, which is astonishing in and of itself, but also reflects their hunger for education into the deep meaningful work of psychodynamic/analytic psychotherapy. We are financially quite stable with more than enough funds in the bank for the future programming year. Attendance at all our programs has been steady and rewarding with mostly very positive feedback on each presentation. We work hard to incorporate your feedback when planning future events. The move to Morrison’s Auditorium at UT Hospital seems to be a good one. We are still working on tweaking the lunch situation for our one day-long conference in the Fall.

Below, you will find details about all of this from various board members. The annual retreat for planning, renewing, and/or changing our mission and directions for the next year is on June 2nd at Joyce Cartor’s house. Please contact her if you would like to add something to the agenda or comment on what you think the board should be considering:

President’s Report (Bill MacGillivray)

Probably the most significant change in how APS has been scheduling events was the decision we took last year during our Board Retreat in June to change how we thought about the Fall and Spring Conference. Over the last few years, attendance at our Spring Conference has fallen far below expectations. While a big part of our expectations has been to break even financially (or at least not lose too much), the larger concern has been that we cannot attract a decent crowd for an all-day event in the spring . . . when the weather turns bucolic, when the dogwoods bloom . . .go figure. So, the board decided to schedule only a half-day Spring Conference this year in the hope that participants will feel they still have the rest of the day to enjoy this time of year.

We also came to another momentous decision in December. As you know, APS has been the co-sponsor of an all-day event at the Tennessee Psychological Association Annual Convention for nigh onto 15 years. Over the years we have brought psychoanalytic luminaries to Nashville, from Sid Blatt to Frank Summers to Sandra Buechler. This sponsorship came at a cost, that is, APS shouldered about half the cost of bringing in the presenter while not sharing at all in any of the profits of the event. Again, however, the major concern has been declining attendance at these events. I will add that attendance at the TPA Convention has been declining. Our events have been relatively better attended, but still it has seemed unrealistic to impose upon our psychoanalytic “stars” to take a very modest stipend to present to fewer than 25 participants. Our board decided to suspend any further cooperation with TPA for the present.

These changes, we hope, will make our Spring Conference more appealing; and the money saved by discontinuing the TPA agreement can be used for other purposes.

So what did we do? The president this year was responsible for the Fall Conference with Usha Tummala-Narra, the APS-TPA seminar with Gary Grossman, the Spring Conference with Jane Tillman and, finally, the Scholars Symposium with Jeffrey Binder. All three of the completed programs were tremendously successful. Drs. Tummala-Narra and Grossman were part of a “mini-theme” on diversity that was featured in several other events this year. Dr. Tillman’s talk picked up on another sub-theme that fortuitously emerged in the last two years (including Jamie Kyne’s and Joyce Cartor’s recent SMS seminars), with a compelling and searingly honest presentation of her work with difficult-to-treat patients.

We will end this year with a special Scholars Symposium. Our presenter, Jeffrey Binder, will receive the Hans H. Strupp Award. In addition to his many years of research on and teaching about short-term dynamic psychotherapy (the theme of his talk at the symposium), Dr. Binder is also a Founding Member of APS who has recently returned to Nashville following a long career in Atlanta to resume his work teaching and supervising graduate students and consulting with psychoanalytic clinicians.

I now will slough off the mortal coil of the APS presidency to our once and future leader, Joyce Cartor.

President-Elect’s Report (Joyce Cartor)

The primary functions of the President-Elect are to plan for the following program year (fall and spring conferences, TVA conference, and Scholar’s Symposium) and to manage the election/slate process. We have all three of our own conferences lined up with very exciting and well-known speakers, but the Board decided to stop our collaboration with TPA so there will be no APS-sponsored event at the 2018 TPA Convention. This decision was made in light of the fact that these events are not very well attended and so much of the audience is made up of our members who have travelled to Nashville to support us - at quite a cost, as one day of attendance at TPA costs close approximately $200. We felt our monies and energies could be betterspent at home.

The process of filling our election slate for the 2018-2019 year was a bit tedious.

The open positions were Member-at-Large and President-Elect. Larry Brown had already agreed to stay on for a second term as Secretary. What I found was that the membership loves APS but most are busy, tired, and aging, and many people have already served on the board. No one emerged as a President-Elect candidate, so I agreed to stay on the board for an additional term. What this really means is that for the upcoming year I will be both President and President-Elect, and for 2019-2020 I will remain as President for a second year. Bill MacGillivray has agreed to extend his term as Past-President for an additional year.

Past-President’s Report (Heather Hirschfeld)

The Past-President was primarily responsible for the Membership Drive and a fund-raising drive for the Graduate Student Awards Fund. Our membership numbers reflect continuing interest in and commitment to the association. We have 25 graduate student members, 12 ECP members, 59 professional members, and 2 scholar members, for a total of 98.

Donations to the GSAF, both in person at events and online, have been generous and this enabled us to help 7 students attend Division 39.

Treasurer’s Report (Scott Swan)

Our current total assets are $36,776.60, up from $32,128.46 in June of 2017. Financially, we are very healthy.

We collected $4,856.30 in dues this year and had $7,624.17 in income from programming.

Our year-to-date expenses this year total $10,024.07. This will change a little bit as I calculate the expenses for our last event (Scholar’s Symposium).

The current Graduate Student Assistance Fund balance is $865.54, after giving students $1,500.00 in GSAF travel grants to attend the annual Division 39 meeting in New Orleans. Year-to-date, we have collected $2,191.74 in GSAF donations.

Education Committee Chair’s Report (Renee Repka)

The APS Education Committee is comprised of three members (at large) who are responsible for the planning and developing of the Saturday Morning Seminars (SMS). Currently, the Education Committee is comprised of myself (Renee Repka), Lettie Flores and Cathie Bird. Each Member-at-Large serves a three-year term; we are staggered, and I will be rotating off the Board this Spring. The Member-at-Large role is a great way to get your “feet wet” with APS. We work together as a group organizing and planning the SMS and we get a great deal of support from the other board members at APS.

The Education Committee plans for 5 SMS’s over the course of the APS year. Choosing topics of interests and inviting specific speakers to give presentations for the SMS come primarily from the surveys submitted at the conclusion of each program. Yes, we want to hear from the membership!!! Additionally, we try to offer seminars that will meet APA requirements for Ethics and Diversity requirements.

In the Fall of 2017, Kristie Kirby, PhD presented on neurofeedback and its implications for treatment, with a little EMDR thrown in on the side. Timothy Hulsey, PhD provided an ethics seminar: Toward a Psychoanalytic Moral Theory. This was a thought-provoking and well attended seminar that met the APA ethics requirement. A presentation in early winter on Race Bias provided by UTK Social Psychologist, Michael Olson, PhD, met the APA requirement for diversity. In February, Jamie Kyne, PhD, a psychologist from Nashville, and long-time APS member, presented clinical material on a patient he has worked intensively with for many years. His presentation provided an honest and open look at his work with a very difficult individual. Jamie also discussed his theoretical understanding of this patient’s dynamics from the perspectives of Stark, Ehrenberg, and Davoine and Gaudilliere. And this Spring, the membership enjoyed a “close reading” of Sandor Ferenczi's1933 paper: “Confusion of the Tongues between the Adults and the Child (The Language of Tenderness and of Passion)” led by Joyce Cartor and Bill MacGillivray. This was followed by a discussion of the relationship of this paper to self psychology and relational psychoanalysis. The attendees seemed to especially like how much time this format provides for discussion.

Reviews on the various SMS’s are strongly positive. The programs provide an opportunity for learning, sharing, collegiality, mentoring and growth. If you haven’t attended one, plan on that for this upcoming year.

Student Representative’s Report (Marisa Whitley & Stephanie Kors)

This year, the APS student representatives, Stephanie Kors and Marisa Whitley, have spread the word about APS events to graduate students to encourage their attendance and involvement in the organization. They have also continued APS's social media presence and worked to increase GSAF revenue by creating and selling "APS swag." Finally, the student reps initiated recruitment of APS members to lead reading groups for graduate students on topics of interest to the students. APS was able to sponsor and partially sponsor seven clinical psychology graduate student members for the Division 39 Spring Conference in New Orleans this past April. This summer, they would like to begin a docuseries project to document the great minds and histories of APS members.