ABOUT THIS CONFERENCE

The Academy for the Study of the Psychoanalytic Arts, founded in 1995, is dedicated to the advancement of psychoanalysis as a non-medical endeavor, best situated in the artistic, philosophical, and anthropic disciplines of the humanities. It is an organization committed to preserving basic freedoms essential to the exploration of personal meanings within a confidential, psychoanalytic conversation –  freedoms being steadily eroded by the placement of psychology and psychoanalysis within an increasingly regulated health care industry. 

The Academy speaks out against proliferating standards of care arising from increasingly bureaucratic federal and state regulatory practices that are rapidly extinguishing diversity and professional discretion for those engaged in psychoanalytic work.  

This conference is sponsored in an effort to explore the far-reaching implications and ramifications of an emerging and vociferous research based movement derived solely from a medically based health care model of psychotherapy. This ‘Evidence-Based Treatment’  movement threatens to foist its own particular way of thinking about science, research, and treatment on everyone, despite evidence that its basic assumptions and goals are not well suited to alternative ways of thinking about people and about psychotherapy.

If left unquestioned, and if universally accepted as “the standard”, the eventual evolution of EBT into “standards of care” may soon leave clinicians of different persuasions suddenly realizing that they are practicing in a manner viewed by regulatory agencies as “unjustifiable” … and therefore “unethical.” 

Of particular importance to our discussion will be the consideration of psychology’s rich diversity of different systems of thought both within and outside of a medical way of thinking. We will talk about how different ways of thinking bring with them very different (and sometimes opposing) philosophical assumptions, ethical responsibilities, ways of doing research, ways of determining what is valid and reliable, and even… very different meanings about that which constitutes “research” and its “evidence” and its “data”. This conference is designed to be a collaborative, exploratory and collegial experience for clinicians, academics and anyone for whom maintaining the ethos of diversity, choice and multiplicity in clinical work, matters.  

The Academy invites you to get involved in this crucial debate, the implications of which threaten the future of all psychotherapies which are not viewed by the prevailing culture and its governing bodies as being “evidence-based”. EBT narrowly defines “evidence” for effective, ethical psychotherapy as “results” from double-blind research done with randomly controlled clinical trials. This particular model of research requires manualized, standardized, and proceduralized treatment protocols for specific “disorders”, leaving no room for exploratory therapy aimed at the discovery of personal meanings.      

Is it ethical for any one system of thought to shape the standards of practice for all practitioners? 

Further questions to be considered include the following:

If psychoanalysis concerns itself with the open-ended, confidential interrogation of personal meanings rather than with the prediction and control of behavior (i.e. medically defined “symptoms”) can evidence for its effectiveness or value ever be observed, investigated, or evaluated in a research setting that assumes “evidence” to be only that which can be objectively observed, operationally defined, randomly controlled, and generalizable to others?  

SHOULD psychoanalysis be trying to develop treatment manuals for itself, developing a formatted set of predictable, replicable procedures, in an effort to “prove” its efficacy? If not, what does the future of psychoanalysis look like? Will there even be a future for psychoanalysis? What needs to be done to insure that there is?!  

Might “data” from the consulting room, derived solely from the collaborative searching and re-searching of ways in which the personal meanings of an individual’s life experiences come to colorize and contextualize all aspects of his or her feelings, behaviors and choices ALSO be understood as “evidence” upon which certain therapies are solidly based? 

Can the “Evidence-Based” therapy movement ever include space for those who subscribe to a non- medicalized, more holistic approach to psychotherapy that responds to the whole person whose difficulties are seen as part of a rich matrix of communication, and not reduced to “symptoms”?  

Please join us in considering pertinent issues that have far-reaching implications for all clinicians, psychoanalytic or otherwise, committed to maintaining freedom of choice and an ethos of diversity and multiplicity in working with individuals in psychotherapy.