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This anniversary finds our Federation, the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS), at a developmental stage where highly complex institutional issues are converging. I believe that we need to think back to the origins of the IFPS, that is, to the reasons and meaning behind the creation of our institution. There is a certain perspective which maintains that the foundations of a psychoanalytic institution worthy of that name must be specifically psychoanalytic so as to preserve it from external influences. Such an assertion denies the pre-eminence of other, social determinations by assuming that the dominant legality in psychoanalytic institutions (which are also social formations, after all) is that of psychoanalysis. What we observe is that in these institutions, as in any social formation, there is a tendency to reproduce certain sacred myths that have been ritually established as identity-defining elements. This type of behavior only leads to repetition, and erases the institution's foundational meaning.
As a sort of imago, the history of the psychoanalytic movement shapes psychoanalytic discourse and even the conditions for its transformation, especially since the history of every psychoanalytic institution is also a history of conflicts, competition, and discredit, marked by the effigy of its creator, Sigmund Freud. The history of institutional victors is built on a speaking silence – on the absence of the excluded and the vanquished, and of those who were unable to forge the hegemony and agreements needed to prevail over the rest. As heirs to this tradition, we are the historic outcome of the dialectic processes that determine us, and therefore run the risk of constantly reproducing the same knots that have often tied institutions to psychoanalysis. Consequently, we are forced to engage in a recurring effort to think the unthought by trying to read the new as already read and articulated.
This happens precisely because every institution faces