Thirty-four years ago, almost to the day, I had the single most memorable experience of my life. It was the day I danced with my father. My father was a most alive, passionate person. But the sheer abandon and spontaneity he displayed at that moment was something I had never seen in him before, nor in the 26 years following, through to his death in 1997 at age 97. I loved that moment fully at the time, indeed I giggled with delight all through it. But in the years since his death, I enjoy it more fully than ever.

Telling the story, even to myself, always brings tears to my eyes, tears of warmth and the bittersweetness of loss and connection and reunion. I briefly described the moment at my father’s funeral service and at my eldest son’s bar mitzvah in June 2000. I’ve portrayed the event three or four other times to friends and colleagues. It’s such a compelling snapshot of some of the best aspects of my father and of our tie to each other, our culture and our heritage.

New and broader meanings of this experience with my father were created in the period 1998-2001, during my third three-year term as Director of the Doctoral Program in Clinical Psychology at City College/CUNY, and in the context of a struggle with the American Psychological Association’s accreditation committee. Our dance, in turn, had a dramatic impact on my response to how APA was viewing our clinical program. Was our program too "old school," an antiquated, narrow, non-empirically-validated relic of an earlier era, maybe like my old school father? Or did it have an integrity, a substance that simply had to be better translated to fit APA’s notion of what good training should be?

I’d like to turn now to a description of City’s program, the substance and process of it, and then return to describe the circumstances of the dance itself. I will then link these seemingly disparate phenomena in the hope of giving you a fuller appreciation of their overlap. I hope that this personal/professional dialectic will have some interesting implications for the training of graduate students in a psychodynamically-oriented clinical and scholarly manner during a time when such an approach is often thought of, disparagingly, as old school.

The Ph.D. training program in clinical psychology at City is primarily psychodynamic in orientation. That is to say, we’re not just old school, we’re a disappearing school. In a recent (1998) survey of the Council of University Directors of Clinical Psychology, only 8% of the clinical programs listed psychodynamic/psychoanalytic/ego-analytic as their primary theoretical orientation. There are over 150 clinical programs that are members of this organization. Despite the apparent flourishing of Division 39, this remarkably small number of psychodynamic programs raises some important concerns. Should a dynamic clinical psychology be taught at all on a pre-doctoral level? Is there more to be gained by leaving such training to post-doctoral analytic institutes? To the present audience, the decline in the number of psychodynamic pre-doctoral programs would, I presume, lead to a feeling of dismay. But to a world in which over 75% of all programs deem themselves cognitive-behavioral, the question might well be, what are these eight or so irrelevant dinosaurs actually doing? I’m going to describe what we are doing. Perhaps, to an outsider this is merely an attempt to document our existence before we become better suited to a study in paleontology. I’m a believer that what we do is alive and well and should be maintained at a pre-doctoral level.

The Program began in the mid 1960s, and the first two evaluations by APA in the 1970s were striking for their almost entirely complimentary comments. Clearly, our psychodynamic emphasis matched the orientation of our reviewers and was consonant with a sizable minority of like-minded programs. The reviews of 1982, 1987 and even 1992 were quite different in nature. We were again lauded for what we did, especially the quality of our clinical training, but now there were the increasingly strong comments that although what we did was fine, as far as it went, we were too narrow in our psychodynamic focus. We did too little empirical research too late in our training, and our theory courses were overly psychoanalytic. Crucially, the “as far as it went” comment was secondary to the full approval of what we did do. We received full re-accreditation each time. In hindsight, these positive reevaluations were remarkable for their tolerance of our distinctiveness from the now overwhelmingly non-psychodynamic orientation of most Clinical Psychology Ph.D. programs. It may have also been an artifact of our site visitors’ cohort groups whereby they may have trained in an era where programs like ours were more plentiful.

This live and let live approach, as far as it went, changed dramatically by the time we applied for re-accreditation in 1997. When I reviewed changes made in our Program during the period 1992-1997, which include a second doctoral exam integrating research and practice; the broadening of our research emphasis from one fourth-year course to five courses distributed over the life of the Program; and the creation of sequences in neuropsychology and multicultural issues, we naively thought we had preserved our core emphasis on an old school depth psychology and indeed made it broader and deeper than it had been previously.

Imagine our chagrin when we received word that a decision on our re-accreditation status was deferred not once but twice until finally, in 1999, we were placed on probation by the APA! There are many ways to understand APA’s decision. For the purpose of this paper and its provocative title, I’d like to address the impact of this decision via my father and his dance with me 31 years ago. (Talk about old school narcissism and self-absorption!)

The first feeling I had upon hearing of our probationary status was one of paranoid confirmation. “Ah ha!” I dejectedly cried, I knew they (the oppressors, the insiders) would want to convert or oppress us outsiders! Immediately, my father’s history came to sit on my shoulder. Born to abject poverty and malnourishment in Lithuania, my father grew up knowing of his father’s 20 years in Siberia for failing to renounce his Judaism as required by an edict from Czar Nicholas I in the 1860s. At age 14, on 24 hours notice, my father and his parents were told of a new edict by Nicholas II that all Jews in the region must evacuate their homes near the coast or else face the Cossacks (the ultimate group of insiders). My grandfather had a stroke and died in the wagon pulling their meager belongings away from their shtetl, leaving my teenage father and his mother to fend for themselves.

This story of ethnic oppression, so endemic to humanity and its history, left its paranoid, traumatized core in my father: you must always assume that a pogrom will rear its malignant head eventually. The trick became how to live in enough denial to (a) avoid its malignancy (b) appreciate each day of freedom that miraculously occurs and (c) advance yourself and your family through education to develop an illusion that you can be exempt from the persecution when it, inevitably, reoccurs.

APA probation quickly became the inevitable pogrom for me. I have a passionate love and respect for the Clinical Program at City. I think its courses attempt to do justice to the complexity of the human spirit. I think its courses grab at the phenomenology of our actual experience and all the non-linear ways it doesn’t add up. It asks tough, impossible questions about our impossible profession. And, most importantly, its students honor the best and most humane aspects of our goals and objectives. Thus, my love for the program easily converted to my horror at the unjustified attack by its latest czar.

An important aside. It concerns one of the very blessings of a belief in a psychodynamic depth psychology. The heuristic value of the belief in the interplay of conscious and unconscious processes is easily a blessing when we use it to try and understand intrapsychic, interpersonal and/or cultural phenomena. The heralding of development as an inherently reciprocal, increasingly differentiating process of establishing self vis-à-vis others is equally compelling in its phenomenological eloquence. Yet it leaves us easily cursed by our smugness that it is not just the royal road, but the only road to being of use to another.

Thus, my horror at APA’s pogrom was quickly matched by my demeaning and dehumanizing of my oppressor. It reminded me of the way my father could denigrate his oppressors by the epithet of “goyim” (gentiles) or “goyische kup” (gentile, read as inferior, mind). In reality, the APA’s wish to have the program create highly specific and hence more measurable goals and objectives is both utterly benign and absolutely necessary. Indeed their desire for specificity speaks directly to the age-old criticism of psychodynamic theory and practice that our work may be brilliantly presented anecdotally or idiographically, but it doesn’t sufficiently document a methodology or results that can be empirically validated.

I’d now like to tell you about my father’s dance. It took place on April 15th, 1971. We had recently moved on up to the projects in Coney Island. The house where we had lived "down the side street" from the projects (in my memory, it was the only house still standing on the block after nearly a decade of arson) had been condemned to build a public school. For the first time in the six years since my father’s retirement in 1965, both my parents were not home when I came home from school that day. They had gone to downtown Brooklyn to sign the official papers turning over their house to the City. April 15th was also the day I heard from the colleges I had applied to and, much to my astonishment and pleasure, I had received a scholarship to an Ivy League school! Knowing the almost mythical importance my parents placed on education and knowing the fantasy my father held of how an Ivy League education was both simultaneously impossible and yet could (hopefully!) provide ample cover during the next pogrom, I knew he’d be delighted at my achievement. Being given the money to attend such a school, moreover, was simply beyond his or my capacity to believe in the oppressors' generosity.

So while I waited impatiently for their return home, I expected shock or even wary disbelief to be his first response. When he and my mom came in the door, I rushed to them with my news of both the acceptance and of the scholarship that accompanied it. Instantly, my father took my hand with one hand and my mother’s hand with his other hand. Singing an unrecognized chant in Yiddish, he literally bounded around and around the room for what seemed like hours but was probably only a brief minute or two. The whimsical, excited look on his face, the way the room looked, the delight in my mother’s eyes... well, it doesn’t get any better than that!

So in the midst of my horror, my indignation, even my shame at the probationary response from APA, I remembered this dance. Where, where did my father find this seemingly newly born capacity for delight? How had this never-before-seen paroxysm of joy been protected, preserved despite pogroms, malnutrition, violence and other forms of trauma? Was it a kernel of “good enough” mothering that endured untainted, waiting for the proper, even if once in a lifetime, moment to be expressed? Was it created far later from the hopes and dreams we harbor for and in our children despite or even because of our defects and limitations? Certainly as a father now, I can see that in ways I could never have imagined when I was a participant in that dance.

Suffice it to say, this delight of my father’s has warmed me many times over. The gift that just keeps on giving! In connection with APA, however, it made me treasure the value and integrity of City’s program more than ever. For his delight could only begin to be understood by me as a validation of how complex is the human personality. How it defies linear predictability. How we are capable of flights of lightness and airiness when there should be no way for us to get off the ground. Just as we are capable of profoundly sadistic, demeaning and all-too-human cruelty that can exist glibly and side by side with our light and truth.

In the years following City's probation, we eventually were wonderfully successful in reversing APA’s decision. We provided clear, measurable goals and objectives with measurable outcomes that documented the great achievements of our students and graduates. We received the longest possible re-accreditation, 7 years, by APA. My father’s dance helped sustain me through that process. In fact, I just knew we would succeed while simultaneously being convinced we were doomed. (Some things never change, I guess!)

I am forever indebted to my father for showing me this part of himself, this joyful oasis in a painful desert. I hope that this presentation of him to this very worldly audience would give him delight as well.