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Dear Friends and Colleagues:
It is with a sense of enormous pleasure and great expectation that I am honoured to preside at the 41st International Psychoanalytical Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association in Santiago de Chile. This Congress in Chile marks the confluence of fundamental developments in psychoanalytic science and of the closing of the twentieth century. From the viewpoint of the scientific development of psychoanalysis, the subject of this Congress, ‘Affect in theory and practice’, is magnificently developed by our Programme Committee. Chaired by Dr Theodore Shapiro and his Co-Chairs, Dr Henry Smith for North America, Dr Marcio de Freitas Giovannetti for Latin America, and Dr Daniel Widlöcher for Europe, the Programme Committee has organised this Congress around a central aspect of psychoanalytic theory and practice, affect theory. Affect theory is not only a central issue in the development of the psychoanalytic encounter, but also the crucial structure that mediates neurobiological determinants of behaviour on the one hand, and intrapsychic structure and motivation on the other. This Congress will advance a significant step in the direction of progress of psychoanalytic knowledge, linking two fundamental pillars of our understanding of the mind: neurobiology and psychoanalysis. But the confluence of the closing of the historical developments of the twentieth century also presents us with a third pillar of the understanding of the mind, the influence of the dynamic unconscious ideology and mass psychology: in short, on our social, cultural and political context.
This terrible twentieth century has witnessed the explosion and demise of two major ideological systems that, under the pretence of a rational ethical doctrine of universal valence, brought about the murder of tens of millions of individuals. The catastrophic development of Nationalist fascism and Marxist communism illustrated how, under a thin veneer of culture and civility, l