"The Psychoanalytic Virtual Bulletin Board is a project of the Research Division of the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis,
Charles Jaffe, M.D., Director
Robert M. Galatzer-Levy, M.D., SYSOP
The Psychoanalytic Virtual Bulletin Board is open only to psychoanalysts and candidates at psychoanalytic institutes. Please treat the material presented here with the descretion with which you would treat communications at workshops of professional meetings."
The virtual BBS has now moved to a majordomo at the American Psychoanalytic Association site. Enquiries about joining the Bulletin Board should be directed to Robert Galatzer-Levy owner-bbs@apsa.org
The traffic on the BBS seems to have fallen considerably since the transfer to the majordomo from the moderated, digested list operated virtually manually from Dr. Galatzer-Levy's Compuserve account. The list can be received automatically digested (bunched together) as with all majordomo (and listserv, but not mailbase!) lists so I suppose if a change in use is related to the transition it might be to a sense of loss of the human moderator doing the bunching (as I understand it, the list is not moderated now though it is a closed list, i.e. you have to prove who you are and that you meet the list criteria to join). I suspect that a sense of the level of human intervention in a list can be a very powerful determinant of how a list is used but this could be my own pathological, or at best, idiosyncratic projection.
The transition only occurred around the beginning of January (1996) so it is early days to judge. I shall watch with interest, particularly as, feeling uneasy about saying this off the list itself, I have just posted something to this effect to the list.
Apart from my pondering, the traffic has covered a wide variety of topics including exchanges of information about trainings, notices of conferences (U.S. and U.K. only I think so far) and theoretical thoughts on a number of topics. The prevalent theoretical topic since the change in the practicalities of the list has been "reality" which now intrigues me!
I would very strongly recommend membership to anyone qualified to join as I think this should become the main closed psychoanalysis list. I'd like to feel it had a greater traffic from outside the U.S. but maybe that will come with time.