The authors introduce the International Institute of Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT), an experimental psychoanalytic institute that grew out of, and remains embedded within, the International Psychotherapy Institute in the Washington Metropolitan region. They set it in its historico-political context and outline the factors that led to its formation. They trace ambivalent relationships to established professional associations. They describe its organization and functioning in national and international dimensions, notice the later approximation to its principles by traditional psychoanalytic education, and conclude by asking, where do we go from here?
The International Institute of Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT) emerged from, and remains embedded within, the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI) an alternative psychoanalytic learning community for psychotherapists and psychoanalysts.
The International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT) is similar to other established, affiliated analytic institutes in that its aim is to provide candidates with an in-depth process of analytic exploration as applied to personal growth, professional development, clinical practice, and teaching and writing so that they can provide immersive analytic
treatment, join the community of scholars, and make contributions to the field. IIPT is similar to other established, affiliated analytic institutes in that it presents the history of psychoanalysis, theory, and technique from classical and various contemporary orientations. It is similar in requiring didactic seminars, supervision and personal analysis. Our standards fall within those recommended by ACPE and ApsaA. So how is this in any way alternative or experimental?
* An open system. The institution is founded on the principle of open systems in contrast to our experience of ApsaA affiliated institutes as operating in a closed system, with no feedback, no transparency, and no mentoring. We emphasize communication, process and review.
* One among many psychoanalytic modalities. IIPT is embedded in, and communicating with, IPI, a psychoanalytic psychotherapies matrix with basic and advanced courses in analytically oriented individual, child, couple and family therapy.
* There is no training analyst system, which we regard as a kind of guild. We wanted to avoid the culture of control, elitism and exclusion that we found at the American Psychoanalytic Association (APsaA). We wanted our candidates to have options for choice of analyst and supervisors, and not be required to break off a satisfactory analysis to move to an authorized training analyst.
* Basic curriculum: No constraint by loyalty to ego psychology. The basic curriculum is an integration of Freud with Klein, Bion, Winnicott, Fairbairn, Guntrip, Sutherland and contemporary British European and Latin American object relations theorists and, more recently, Link theory by Pichon-Rivière and others from South America (D. and J. Scharff 2011).
* Advanced curriculum: Dynamic contemporary learning. The advanced curriculum changes and is built around in-depth study with leading contemporary analytic theorists.
* The Group Affective Model. The educational method includes active study and application of the processes of teaching, learning and functioning of groups. We call this the Group Affective Model.
* Access for commuting faculty and candidates on-site and online. Our intention is to include faculty and candidates who do not live near established centers of psychoanalysis. The courses are on site episodically and online continuously. Teleanalysis and telesupervision/consultation are offered for those at a geographical distance. We understand that this is still controversial and experimental and so we subject our use of technology for treatment and training to further study.
Before we describe IPI and IIPT in detail, we take a step back to examine the historico-political context out of which IPI and IIPT grew. In the Washington area at first there was one analytic training institute, the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute (WPI) with a somewhat eclectic orientation. Analysts who preferred a more purely classical Freudian ego-psychology approach moved away to the Maryland suburbs and founded the Baltimore-Washington Psychoanalytic Institute (BWPI). WPI was influenced by the work of Freda Fromm-Reichmann, Dexter Bullard and Harold Searles at Chestnut Lodge, the writings of William Alanson White, Superintendent of St. Elizabeth's Hospital and Harry Stack Sullivan, founding inspiration of the Washington School of Psychiatry, the A. K. Rice group relations training introduced to the region by Margaret Rioch and continued by Roger Shapiro, and the clinical research at the nearby National Institute of Mental Health.
We chose to train at the more eclectic WPI in Washington DC and graduated in the 1980s quite satisfied with the quality of teaching and supervising we had received, but not quite fitting in. We had been trained in community psychiatry (David had been influenced by social science studies at Yale, and worked with Gerald Caplan in Boston, and Jill with Jock Sutherland in Edinburgh) and in child and family psychiatry at the Tavistock and Beth Israel's Child Service in Boston and Children Hospital in Washington DC. We had both benefited from immersion in group relations training in England and in the United States. We had done research in the processes of teaching and learning in London. We were steeped in British object relations theory at the Tavistock Centre in London taught by Kleinian and Middle Group teachers and supervisors and in Tavistock Group Relations Training organized around the study
of authority and leadership. In Washington, we appreciated learning theories of Freud, Kohut, Kernberg, and Child Development to round out our psychoanalytic identity. We appreciated supportive relationships with individual supervisors, but the institution governed by the Education Committee did not seem at all approachable. There was a veil of secrecy over the progression of candidates and promotion of faculty to teaching and training analyst status. Many graduates felt demoralized and not good enough to find full acceptance or even to warrant feedback. We were also uncomfortable about receiving almost all our teaching from medically trained analysts in contrast to the multidisciplinary collaboration that we valued in Britain and in the nearby teams at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), the Public Health Service (PHS), and the Psychiatry Departments at Bethesda Naval Hospital and Walter Reed Medical Center.
“[T]hese were people heavily invested in treatment of both the individual and the individual within his/her social context, and they were interested in training others to more effectively treat. They were open to exploring ideas from other disciplines—medicine, sociology, education, anthropology and philosophy, in an attempt to better understand the factors—both internal and external—that might cause and contribute to mental illness. Into this environment, Jill and David Scharff's unique interests could find some fertile territory” (Dennett, 2005).
Nevertheless, the development of our interests really sprang from a sense of lack: We regretted the lack of multidisciplinary collaboration in psychoanalysis, and we missed access to quality thinking in object relations. We found the American Psychoanalytic Association unwelcoming to anyone or other than a physician and to any idea that was not based in Freud and ego psychology. We did not want to work as if individual analysis was the only way recommendation. As individual analysts, our interest in pre-Oedipal development and the correspondence between individual and family dynamics created problems for us in applying for certification at the American Psychoanalytic Association. For instance, what did the term “latent content” mean? To Jill's examiners at ApsaA, it applied not to all unconscious material but only to unacknowledged Oedipal strivings that they believed were more pertinent than she and her supervisor appreciated even though they had worked with the case
for eight years to a successful termination. For David's examiners, transference was a re-edition of an earlier intrapsychic position, not an experience in the here-and-now of the patient-analyst relationship. We began to feel estranged from the analytic community, our heart still with British Object Relations Theory. So, after graduation, while immersed in psychoanalytic practice with adults and children, we also became deeply involved in teaching at the Washington School of Psychiatry (WSP), particularly in its Family Therapy Program, taught by a multidisciplinary group of analytically oriented psychotherapists as well as analysts.
To pursue our abiding interest, we banded with a group of like-minded analysts, family and group therapists to import the British Object Relations Approach for our continuing education as individual analysts and also as individual, couple and family therapists. The first year after David became Director of the Washington School of Psychiatry in 1988, he introduced a course in Object Relations Theory and Technique (ORTT) with tracks in child, family, group and individual therapy, which was found to have great appeal around the country. As Jill's supervisor, Roger Shapiro, said, “Object relations theory has the explanatory power to bridge those dimensions” (personal communication). But at that time there were few integrated analytic texts, other than British authors Pincus, Bannister and Dicks on marital relationships, and Americans Shapiro and Zinner on adolescence and family dynamics. So, we had to get to work integrating and applying the theories of Klein and Bion, Fairbairn, Winnicott and Guntrip. With few local resources beyond ourselves, we imported valued teachers from Britain. And we designed the program in immersion modules so that people with no access to these ideas could travel to find a learning community with us. (This was 1989-1994, ten years before we were communicating easily with technology). Psychotherapists and psychoanalysts came eagerly for the rare opportunity to hear Kleinians John Steiner, Elizabeth Spillius, Arthur Hyatt Williams, Isabel Menzies, Isca Wittenberg, Hannah Segal, Betty Joseph, James Fisher, and Middle group analysts Christopher Bollas, Jeremy Holmes, Nina Coltart, Jock Sutherland, Patrick Casement, Freudian Dennis Duncan, and Joyce McDougall. (It would be years before the American Psychoanalytic would invite Kleinians to lead clinical discussion workshops at the Winter Meetings.) The students (many of them trained psychotherapists and some psychoanalysts) also enjoyed
the group affective learning component and the sense of being part of a learning community organized on an open systems basis. Inspired by the guests and encouraged by use, the faculty and students wrote down their experiences of learning about the relation between self and other to arrive at an integrated understanding of individual, family, and organizational dynamics (Bagnini 2012; Poulton 2013; D. Scharff 1996; D. and J. Scharff 1987, 2006; J. Scharff , ; J. and D. Scharff , and ; J. ; ).
“David and Jill's insistence on writing—often ahead of the prevailing psycho—political culture—made the accumulation of knowledge and theory available to a wide group of clinicians. Their commitment to teaching within a multi-disciplinary mental health setting—(clinicians trained with various professional degrees working together) continued the best traditions of the Tavistock, WSP and William Alanson White.” Yet, “Using group theory to understand the splits, threats and competitions within each individual psyche and among families and groups still was not knowledge enough to avert a split … A divorce led to a re-blended family, ideas forming, breaking up, and forming again—part of the ongoing structure of life- which we experience, represent, study and work at containing in this undertaking of learning together” (Dennett, 2005).
In 1994 the Washington School program known as ORTT underwent a profound upheaval—differences and competitions among individuals that were long standing strains could no longer find room within the existing structure and—in the service of freedom to implement their ideas—David resigned as Director, and he and Jill left the WSP and took a year off from training programs. The ORTT program continued at the Washington School under new leadership but folded after a year. During the Scharffs' year off, Charles Ashbach and the Object Relations Group of Philadelphia invited David and Jill to join them in a major conference. In 1995 the Scharffs, joined by Kent Ravenscroft, Sharon Dennett, Judy Rovner, Steve Skulsky, Yolanda Varela, Carl Bagnini, Michael Stadter, Michael Kaufman, Walt Earhardt, Stan Tsigounis and Lea Setton proceeded to establish object relations training at the newly formed International Institute of Object Relations Therapy (IIORT) which Jill and David Scharff and our publisher Jason Aronson had incorporated in 1994 as a non-profit, 501 (c) 3 institution for training psychotherapists
and psychoanalysts in principles of object relations. In 2007, the name was changed to the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI).
IPI was founded as an analytic learning community for analytic psychotherapists and analysts interested in working on understanding the intrapsychic and interpersonal processes of self and other through reading object relations literature, study, research, and learning from experience. The aim of the Institute was, and is, to provide a rigorous experience in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis that brings psychoanalytic concepts to life thanks to the signature Group Affective Model (J. and D. Scharff 2000, 2017). In the Group Affective Model, the learning matrix includes ongoing small groups for integrating cognitive and affective experience to facilitate close examination, digestion, and internalization of the concepts and their application to clinical work (J. and D. Scharff 2000; 2017). This Group Affective Model modifies the problems of isolation, elitism, and omnipotence that can occur when teaching and supervising faculty members work in isolation, and when the affective component is absent or is divorced from the educational component of the training.
The design of IPI courses accommodates commuting participants, most of whom have come from the United States, Canada, and Panama RP, and a few from Korea, Hong Kong, Mainland China, Taiwan, Austria, and Germany, where they practice as psychotherapists interested in object relations theory or as analysts already trained in theory other than object relations. IPI faculty have led study groups in the United States and Panama RP—in Burlington, Charlottesville, Chevy Chase, Indianapolis, Kalamazoo, Long Island, Manhattan, New Orleans, Omaha, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Richmond, Salt Lake City, Tampa, and Panama RP, variously featuring local courses, telephone group supervision, and multipoint international videoconference seminars in real time. IPI is now teaching courses with Chinese and Russian partners in Beijing, Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Athens.
Prior to the founding of IPI, when we were still at the Washington School of Psychiatry, David as Director of WSP and Jill as Chair of ORTT, gathered with WSP colleagues Ann Silver, Fonya Helm, Nancy Goodman, Joe Lichtenberg, Mauricio Cortina, and Bob Winer in the early 1990s to
create an innovative, alternative analytic training program inclusive of all points of view. That exciting WSP initiative was seen as unfair competition by the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute, many of whose analysts taught at WSP. Washington Psychoanalytic Institute (WPI) sent emissaries Roger Shapiro (a respected member of the WSP Family Therapy Program) and John Kafka (of the WSP adult psychotherapy training program) to make an appeal on behalf of WPI to get the WSP Board to halt the development of a competing analytic institute.. The WSP Board felt threatened and put a stop to the plans. WSP's maximally collaborative initiative was quashed, and fragmentation into three new local analytic programs was the result. Fonya and Nancy went on to form the New York Freudian Washington Branch, Joe the institute for Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Jill and David to found IIORT (later called IPI) and in 2004 IIPT as well. Bob established the New Directions Writing Program at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. All the initiatives flourished, but the opportunity for immersion in the plurality of contemporary analytic thinking was lost.
Ten years later, out of IPI's base in applied psychoanalysis, the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT) emerged in response to students who, having trained in object relations psychotherapy at IPI, wanted to train as analysts. We remembered our days as analytic psychotherapists, losing our most committed patients because we felt that we had to refer them for analysis. Then as analysts, we had referred a number of these IPI students to local analytic institutes in the previous five years, and lost their affiliation to IPI. It was time to offer extended training in the work of the analytic dyad ourselves.
In July of 2004, the International Psychotherapy Institute inaugurated The International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT), a center of excellence for rigorous training in psychoanalysis emphasizing the object relations perspective but not to the exclusion of classical and contemporary approaches. IIPT operates under the non-profit umbrella of IPI, with a lay Board with fiduciary responsibility. IIPT has autonomy as an analytic institute, selecting applicants and faculty, promoting faculty and choosing committee leadership, and designing curriculum. IIPT trains candidates in a candidate-only group, and yet those candidates also participate in lectures and case conferences open to the whole IPI membership. In this way, IIPT operates within, and augments, the
existing learning matrix at the International Psychotherapy Institute. In this setting, the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training makes psychoanalysis accessible to the psychotherapy community and relevant to the practice of group, child, couple and family therapies—and is informed by them. This is a crucial point. It is a value dearly held that the analytic institute (IIPT) be embedded in, and in communication with, a broad range of analytic therapy training programs, and that the whole operate in an open system with ease of communication between students and faculty across all programs and among disparate ideas.
We did not agree with the IPA and APsaA training analyst system. We thought that psychoanalysis was suffering from the lack of group dynamic expertise in managing the organization of analytic institutes and associations. We did not like the constraint on a candidate's choice of analyst. We wanted our candidates to have some choice of supervisor for their third case. To reach candidates from disadvantaged areas, we needed to use teleanalysis which was not acceptable to the International or American psychoanalytic associations. We had no problem with the Eitingon model, but we found most analytic curricula to be slavishly attached to one ideology, for example ego psychological or relational or Kohutian, and not open to the panoply of emerging ideas. We wanted a dynamic curriculum reflecting the latest thinking. We reacted against the rigidity and elitism of the medically-dominated APsaA and wanted to continue our tradition of a participatory, open-system organization with respect for all disciplines, for analysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists.
The orientation is object relational and broadly inclusive of contemporary analytic thinking. The curriculum is organized as basic and advanced, offered in a balanced mix of periodic on-site and continuous online courses.
A basic analytic curriculum of theory and technique is presented on-site at week-long summer institutes and online in weekly seminars and clinical case conferences.
A renewing leading-edge curriculum in psychoanalytic theory and
technique is presented on-site at weekend modules and week-long special topic institutes, and online at elective weekly and monthly courses currently offered by the International Psychotherapy Institute (IPI). Since 2004, the leading-edge guest speakers on site have included Otto Kernberg, Christopher Bollas, Ted Jacobs, Stefano Bolognini, Jorge Canestri, Giuseppe Civitarese, Antonino Ferro, Caroline Garland, Rosine Perelberg, Frank Lachmann, Beatrice Beebe, Anthony Bass, Alan Schore, Ricardo Lombardi, Claudio Eizerik, Anne Alvarez, Alessandra Lemma, and many more online.
There are approximately 600 credit hours of instruction over 4 years of formal lectures, reading seminars on theory and technique, clinical case conference, videotape case presentation, infant observation, evaluation and review, and writing requirements, and affective learning groups.
We developed the Group Affective Model to counter the dogmatic presentation of theory. We wanted students to chew over what they were presented with, work with their affective and interpersonal responses to the material, object to it, refine it, and generally put it to the test in active group learning. We believe that is the best way to internalize knowledge and skill. As the candidates meet in discussion groups using the Group Affective Model (GAM), individual problems in understanding the material and relating it to clinical application are projected outside the individual self into the shared space of the group. The group perspective transforms individual problems into shared issues which individuals can now contemplate because they are outside the self. Individuals learn from their impact on others and how others view and deal with their ways of thinking. As they work to learn, sub-groups unconsciously devoted to seeking gratification get in the way of learning (Bion 1961). When these unconscious basic assumption groups obtrude on the work group, they subvert the task if they are ignored (which is what happened repeatedly in the institute where we trained in the late 1970s and 1980s). But when group interpretation enables the group to recognize and understand these forces, “intellectual activity of a high order is possible” (Bion 1961, p. 175.)
The Group Affective Model (GAM) draws from theories of affect regulation, educational processes of teaching and learning, projective and introjective processes, group dynamics and group relations, and open systems theory. The GAM group has similarities to group therapy in terms of the use of affect, countertransference, and interpretation of unconscious processes in the group, but the educational context and contract establishes the difference. The GAM group can expect tact and discretion but not confidentiality: The GAM group is for teaching and learning concepts, not for healing, which remains a matter for individual analytic treatment (J. Scharff and D. Scharff 2000; 2017). The GAM group offers a broader perspective on the learning of theory and clinical skill, and more opportunity for reality testing, than is possible in the relative isolation of personal analysis and individual supervision.
Accepted to the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training, candidates join a community of learners and scholars as equal partners. In addition to the usual annual and final case reports, candidates write 2-page reflections on readings or clinical material each term, and present them to the candidate group for discussion. The intention is to build writing in to the learning process as a routine process, not an onerous obligation, and to develop their confidence as teachers and scholars (Scharff and Sehon 2020; Scharff and Hedegard 2020). We believe that critical thinking is best developed in writing subjected to open review in shared discussion.
In 2004, we founded IIPT as an unaffiliated institute partly because we could not agree to the required training analyst system, which to us smacked of restraint of trade masquerading as quality control. At IIPT candidates have the right to choose their own analyst in any state or country, provided the analyst has five years' immersion in psychoanalytic practice since graduation from a recognized institute such as one affiliated with the IPA or APsaA, supports IIPT methodology, and is acceptable to the Training Committee. We are gratified to note that the American Psychoanalytic Association now gives its affiliated institutes the freedom to appoint training analysts or not, which brings IIPT closer to the prevailing mind-set for the organization of psychoanalytic education than when we set out.
IIPT provides a choice of supervisor from among graduates with five years' immersion and participation in an intensive course on supervision competencies. Of the three required supervisors, one may be from the pool of adjuncts who are approved by other institutes, and who are generally in sympathy with our educational approach and institutional aims. This option is designed to give candidates access to a variety of approaches and cultures and to dilute the pressure to conform to IIPT's ideology.
IIPT offers a collegial, collaborative atmosphere in which candidates have input into their training through written evaluation, feedback in plenaries, and representation on faculty committees. Like IPI, IIPT has a culture of process and review, evaluation and feedback through written evaluations, plenary review, and faculty discussion. If candidates are dissatisfied with their experience, they are encouraged to discuss it in the IPI plenary and can also do so in the IIPT plenary held during the summer institutes and at each weekend of the leading-edge curriculum. There is an ethics committee and a grievance procedure for hearing complaints or serious concerns.
Our need for technology to bring analysis to colleagues in areas remote from training centers was another major reason for IIPT remaining unaffiliated. We wanted to reach candidates who cannot find an object relations-oriented analyst (or indeed any trained analyst at all) in their city, or who have personal relationships with local faculty that preclude an analytic relationship. These candidates are permitted to have technology-mediated analysis at the four times a week level. In-office sessions at intervals are required, but the length and frequency are to be determined by the candidate and analyst. Teleanalysis may be conducted using landline telephone or secure Voice over Internet Protocol with or without use of web camera, when offered by a reputable technology company with a Business Associate Agreement. For use in training analysis, the choice of technology company, responsibility to ensure security,
confidentiality, and adherence to State and licensure regulations, and decision about spacing of supplementary in-office visits rests with the analyst. Candidates must treat their first two supervised training cases in the office, but may be considered for permission to offer analysis mediated by technology for their third case.
When IIPT was found in 2004, technology-assisted psychoanalysis was not regarded as psychoanalysis at all, and certainly not acceptable to the IPA or to ApsaA. Later the IPA allowed teleanalysis in training provided the first 100 hours were conducted “in person.” The stress on candidates having to relocate for a couple of months per year, and the pain for their patents and their families (which has been documented for instance by Hutto) made no sense to us, and the imposition of an arbitrary 100 hours in the analyst's office was not acceptable. These recommendations were made without any research backing or input from analytic pairs. Referring to online analysis as if it were not “in-person” also rankled, when analyst and candidate reported an intense connection with unconscious communication, often at a somatic level. Then attitudes at ApsaA, now inclusive of other disciplines, began to change. Several ApsaA institutes got waivers for candidates who had moved to continue their analysis remotely. More recently, ApsaA has accepted many Chinese and various other overseas candidates. They cannot travel easily to the United States, and so some of them they have never met their analysts except online.
Incidentally, as of this writing in March 2020, the World Health Organization has just pronounced the novel corona virus (COVID-19) outbreak a pandemic. The Maryland State Department of Health where IIPT is located today sent out a notice with recommendations to physicians including the following: “To the extent possible, providers should use telemedicine or telephonic communications to evaluate patients and avoid unnecessary visits to healthcare facilities.” Our investment in teleanalysis and teletherapy proves advantageous in responding not only to those in remote areas, but also to those whose access to teleanalysis is blocked by unforeseen local and global conditions.
IIPT uses a medical grade technology for remote teaching, each faculty teacher having access to a Zoom room and a Business Associate
agreement to ensure HIPAA compliance. Having been in the vanguard for the use of technology in analytic treatment and training since 2004, IIPT has made a study of the clinical effectiveness of technology mediated treatment and training. Janine Wanlass is the Principal Investigator of an IPA funded study of the prevalence of the use of technology for treatment in Europe and the Americas (Wanlass 2019). Jill Scharff founded a monthly International Working Group on teleanalysis with local and Argentine analysts, now under chairmanship of Lea Setton of the Panama IPA Provisional Society, and works with a wider group of analysts at IPA pre-congress workshops that have been well attended every two years since 2009. We study the impact of technology mediated analysis on the training process and teach those papers that we have found in, or contributed to, the analytic literature (Sehon and J. Scharff 2017; Varela 2015; Wanlass 2015). The group shares its findings widely in publications (J. Scharff 2013a, b and c, 2015, 2017, and 2018). Recently members of that group have been included in the APsaA Task Force and Discussion Groups on Distance Analysis and Education.
The International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training is a learning community of scholars dedicated to the study of the theory and technique of psychoanalysis in the psychoanalytic dyad, to the examination of self and other in the psychoanalytic setting, to research into intrapsychic and interpersonal processes, and to the application of psychoanalysis to other therapies. Courses integrate past and present, theory and technique, object relations with classical and other contemporary approaches, and processes of teaching and learning in a collaborative approach, all in the service of clinical application. Analytic concepts presented in the analytic theory class are illustrated in the clinical case conference. Analytic concepts presented at the leading-edge curriculum are illustrated in personal reflections in the affective learning group where candidates then see the concepts reflected in the group process as well. This is the essence of the Group Affective Model in psychoanalytic training, through which the main integrative work of learning happens inside the candidate in that learning environment (J. and D. Scharff 2000, 2017).
In 2020, IIPT has been training candidates for 15 years. The IIPT faculty
has been working for 25 years at IPI, building a learning community there. We deliberately chose to establish IIPT as an analytic institute within the IPI culture to maintain our culture of respect for the multi-disciplinary approach to analytic psychotherapy of which we see psychoanalysis as one specialization in the family of analytic therapies. This decision protects analytic institute faculty against isolation and elitism, which is further helped by not appointing training analysts. In class we engage freely in discussion with a “no first response is wrong” policy. Working in the small affective learning group candidates can share their personal responses and opinions about theory and practice openly—verbally and in writing—short papers—and subject them to process and review. In plenaries they can address programmatic issues openly and make suggestions for change. We regard our candidates as our most valuable consultants. So, we are committed to responding openly and seriously to their criticisms and suggestions, and we are proud of the degree to which we have achieved this objective.
In addition to the analytic institute, IPI has individual, child, couple and family psychotherapy training programs, infant observation, consultation, supervision, and group affective group leader training in which candidates can apply their analytic expertise and in which they can eventually teach. The existing IPI institution enables IIPT to keep psychoanalysis relevant by its articulation with these other forms of therapy and wider bodies of knowledge, and with areas of health service delivery. For instance, IPI-Panama pioneered psychological services for children and families undergoing repair of cleft palate by Operation Smile plastic surgeons. In 2020, along with local, immigrant, and regional Latin colleagues, Panamanian analysts who trained at IIPT and retrained at ILAP, became IPA training analysts, and the Panama Study Group became a provisional society of the International Psychoanalytical Association.
IPI, the host psychotherapy institution is sufficiently identified with IIPT, that the analytic training mission is supported. Nevertheless, IPI is sympathetic to the object relations point of view, to studying the process of teaching and learning, to using the group to enhance the knowledge of the individual, and to the concept of modifications to support a distance learning program to serve outlying areas. Like IPI, IIPT is also unique in having an international scope in terms of visiting lecturers and candidates. It must be admitted, however, that the intensity of effort required
to provide a four-year analytic training has led to competition for teaching resources which has drawn away from other faculties within IPI, and has led to mutually rivalrous exchanges at times, but those tensions are managed by being constantly under process and review.
Responding to our candidates and graduates' wish to communicate with the wider analytic community, beyond simply attending national meetings, it occurred to us that the International Psychoanalytic Association (IPA) might welcome IIPT. The IPA had long had an interest in international collaboration, an ideal we shared. The IPA had supported IIPT's teleanalysis research and collaboration with an international working group to study the effectiveness of teleanalysis. But the IPA required candidates to have 100 hours of treatment in bodily co-presence with the analyst per year if their teleanalysis were to count. This policy engages analysts or more usually candidates, in enormous travel expense and disruption of family and patient schedules. It goes against the goal of fostering a global knowledge community for psychoanalysis. In the end of the day, the IPA could not move far enough past its reluctance to trust in distance analysis to extend a connection for IIPT. On the other hand—oddly at a time of nationalism in the United States—the American Psychoanalytic Association (ApsaA) is offering analytic training to distance candidates from China and the Middle East, and is undergoing a huge wave of democratic reform in governance and in openness to distance learning. ApsaA is revising membership criteria and developing combined curricula to welcome psychoanalytic psychotherapists alongside analysts. This has meant that IIPT principles and ApsaA affiliation are no longer mutually exclusive. On February 13, 2020, the ApsaA Board of Directors unanimously voted to accept the International Institute for Psychoanalytic Training (IIPT) as the 33rd ApsaA Approved Institute. Caroline Sehon, current Director of IPI and past Chair of IIPT, wrote on behalf of IPI, the Society that houses IIPT—to gratefully accept ApsaA's warm welcome.
IIPT continues focusing on disadvantaged areas of the United States while also looking out to China and Russia. We will continue to bring psychoanalytic concepts to international psychotherapy students that we reach currently through training programs in China, Russia and the
Middle East and provide analytic training for those who want to work intensively. We will invest in faculty development, providing graduates with innovative training courses in teaching technique and supervision competencies. As advances in technology continue to amaze, we will continue to study the impact of technology on development, the effectiveness of teleanalysis, and best practices for the effective use of technology in treatment and teaching, as we work for psychoanalysis to remain relevant to the digital-native generation. IIPT faculty is open to experimentation and innovation in teaching methodology in order to bring psychoanalysis to people who otherwise could not train at all – and from whose experience and fellowship we learn and benefit. We look forward to change that this diversity will bring to psychoanalytic thinking and practice.