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Our society – the International Federation of Psychoanalytic Societies (IFPS) – started in 1962 and the International Forum of Psychoanalysis (IFP) began publication 30 years later, in 1992. Jan Stensson, in his first editorial message, reflected on the difficulties involved in the realization of a journal (Stensson, 1992). He recalled that psychoanalysis is rooted in the oral tradition but that the passage from the oral to the written is not impossible. Why then the need to found a journal?
Psychoanalytic journals are an expression of the doctrinal positions of the association that founds them. They often begin with a justification, almost always of a political nature. The change from the Internationale Zeitschrift für ärztliche Psychoanalyse to the International Journal of Psychoanalysis was based above all on the strength of English-speaking institutions and not only on the predominance of the English language, as is the case today. There was also another justification of greater interest: to defend the purity of psychoanalysis. The struggles taking place within and outside the institution were transferred to the new journal. Erich Fromm – one of the founders of the IFPS – and Jacques Lacan are good examples of the exclusion of two authors who did not adapt to this doctrinal purity.
The IFP is marked by the founding spirit of the IFPS. A spirit that did not imply a defense of doctrinal purity, but one of an openness which broke with the narrow assumptions that then characterized other psychoanalytic groups. Today it would be inconceivable for us to understand the expulsion of a member of our societies because of their theoretical orientation. And, if we talk about the rejection of an article in a journal, today it has to do not so much with the theoretical proposal it puts forward, but with a lack of expository clarity or other aspects that we could call formal. Some would say that we have gone from a doctrinal-based censorship to a formal-based censorship. It is i