Report On The First Official Meeting Of Treasurers Of The Component Societies Of The IPA held during the 39th International Congress in San Francisco

As Chair of this meeting, and author of this report, I would like to thank Dr Horacio Etchegoyen for his opening remarks and thank also the President-Elect of the IPA, Dr Otto Kernberg, for his active participation. Other participants at the meeting were the outgoing Treasurer, Prof. Peter Fonagy, and the Treasurer-Elect, Dr Stephen Firestein. I should like to thank also Susan Rogers for her translation.

The meeting was held on Sunday, July 30th, and lasted for four hours. It began with a brief description of the background of the meeting, which was a result of a meeting of Treasurers held during the Congress in Amsterdam, when colleagues of the Argentine Psychoanalytic Association took the initiative of writing to other colleagues in the same position in other organisations of the IPA. At that time, the objective was to meet informally in order to exchange ideas as to how we could improve our performance in the post to which we had been elected. On that occasion eighteen Treasurers attended, indicating the considerable interest the idea inspired. However, because little time had been reserved for that meeting, many points of concern remained to be discussed. Shortly afterwards the new President, Dr Horacio Etchegoyen, having learned of the value of the meeting, suggested that Dr Chab Tarab organise a further meeting of this kind, but a formal one, with the administrative support of Valerie Tufnell, head of the office at ‘Broomhills’.

Following the introduction, the discussion began, and special emphasis was placed on the objective of informing the Officers of the IPA of the ideas resulting from the meeting. The Provisional Agenda was distributed, although it was made clear that everyone was free to bring up any subject not included in the Agenda.

I will omit the names of the participants and will sacrifice chronological order for the sake of a general overview of the important proposals made and their discussion.

There was considerable insistence on the serious difficu