Plato was the Eldest

Psychoanalytical Societies originated out of a need to build a space, a setting, in which clinical experience and theoretical ideas that develop out of them, can be gathered together and compared. Institutions established on these grounds have a holding function for their members, and together, a function of working through a shared purpose.

Psychoanalytical Institutions, similarly to Associations of Psychotherapists, are involved in transmitting knowledge to their new members who guarantee the continuity and fertility of their discipline and the Institutions themselves. In Italy, in this regard, we experienced major change when the transmission of knowledge became organized in schools regulated by state law. This has generally been seen as an opportunity and has led to the birth of numerous schools of various lines of study: even those elements of psychoanalytical societies assigned to carry out training have merged into postgraduate schools.

Over the years, bodies assigned to the transmission of knowledge have acquired an increasingly central position within organizations to the extent that they have moved beyond their training function, to become the supporting structure of the whole Institution. As a matter of fact, in Psychoanalytical Societies (as in Associations of psychotherapists) those elements involved in teaching have ended up regulating relations between members and constructing an extremely rigid internal hierarchy.

The Italian Psychoanalytical Society in particular also had to deal with changes brought about by its very size: if in the 1950s it was more or less as big as a private, traditional, elitist club that was culturally refined, today it is nationwide, with ten psychoanalytical Centres and approximately one thousand members. This has brought with it quite difficult changes for individual members and for the Institution, which have involved statutory reviews and the establishment of planning, coordinating and management bodies.

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